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Saturday 12 March 2022

Ian Astbury, singer


On the 26th of March, 2010, I did a telephone interview with Ian Astbury, the singer of the legendary rock band The Cult. He was in the USA (New York). I was in Tokyo, probably late in the evening, He was very happy to talk, and the interview could easily have been extended well beyond the one hour that it lasted. Also check out the actual recording now up on YouTube.

Astbury: Hello

Liddell: Hello is that Ian Astbury? Hi, this is Colin Liddell. I’m phoning from Japan on behalf of the International Herald Tribune Asahi Shimbun. I’m going to talk to you about your forthcoming stop in Japan.

Astbury: OK.

Liddell: Right, so, right now, you’re doing the, the Love Album Tour.

Astbury: Yes.

Liddell: How far into that are you? How long have you been doing it, and how long is it going to continue?

Astbury: It started last… Let's see, we did UK in the Fall, North America in the late summer, we're doing dates in New Zealand, Australia, and one in Tokyo, which will probably wind it up actually. I don’t think we’ll…We might take it to South America. We'll see. We're looking at dates in South America right now, so it will go on for a little while longer. But we're not actively… Actually we came off the road and went back in the studio again, so we done one show this year so far. This is the beginning of our touring season.

Liddell: Yeh, so you've done maybe about twenty or so shows?

Astbury:  No. we've done probably more than that, more like fifty.

Liddell: Fifty, so how does it feel doing the same kind of set list like that again and again every night? How do you keep it fresh?

Astbury: Well, every night's different. Every venue's different. Every audience is different, everyday's different. You get up differently everyday, I mean… It’s interesting coz… you don’t really think about performance all day. When we're actually in the performance, you're kind of very present and I think that’s how you keep it fresh – is not to carry it around all day long, y'know.

Liddell: Yeh.

Astbury: There's something about music. I mean one of the things that y’know we never see when we see written… I mean a lot of what we know of music is, y'know, communicated by language or in the written word, and people read a lot of reviews and these are communicated verbally, but the real thing is it's an intuitive form, so It's really more about the emotive quality and that's something that you really can't explain with language, so a lot of the work is done… once you step on that stage you enter a sort of place of a... it becomes more of an emotive process and it’s more about being in the right emotional place to form songs, and the songs are really a framework that you hang your emotions on, and that's I think that's how you keep it fresh, is being in tune with the emotive aspects of what it is you’re conveying. I mean to me as a singer I can access that whenever I need to.

Liddell: Yeh.

Astbury: And that’s… I've been at it so long.

Liddell: So, it sounds like, then, that the show, each show, depends on how you feel that particular day and what's going on around you.

Astbury: Yeh absolutely the environment's key. The environment's actually the key.

Liddell: OK, well, sort of zooming in on that point then, well, you’ve been to Tokyo before and so what sort of stimulus do you think playing Tokyo will give you?

Astbury: Well, for me, personally, I mean I think about Tokyo a lot… I have friends in Tokyo, so for the past ten years I've been going, I was going at one point several times a year, three, four, five times a year so I’ve been to Tokyo, and what to do with like art and fashion, as opposed to music, although recently I've become friends with the band Boøwy, who are a Tokyo band whom I admire greatly. But we played two shows in 1985. In Tokyo we played… Sorry, we played Osaka and we played Tokyo. Forget the venues. But… so had a long love affair with Japan, since 1985, I mean that's, what, 25 years?

Liddell: Yeh.

Astbury: Y'know, growing up in the North of Britain, Scotland and England, and I think Japan was the most exotic, otherworldly – especially Tokyo – place that we'd ever been to.

Liddell: That's one of the reasons I ended up here, I guess, but, yeh, keep going.

Astbury: It's like science fiction instantly, y'know. So everything we’ve seen about the East, was kind of… I mean, I wasn't prepared for I mean everything, oh my god, the architecture, the language, food, hospitality, the level of intelligence. I just became obsessed with Japanese culture, and…

Liddell: What sort of things in particular about Japanese culture intrigue you the most? I mean, is it the Shintoism, the different mindset, the technological aspects?

Astbury: I think it's, like, this idea that there’s no separateness from nature. I mean the Japanese do culture that really is in harmony with its environment. I know that there’s a lot of problems with modern Japan in terms of stress and everything, but…

Liddell: Hopefully you’re not talking about bonsai trees.

Astbury: No. What’s that… What’s that reclusive…

Liddell: Reclusive people?

Astbury: Yeh. The ‘hikkikomori’ who stay in their rooms cut off from society, yeh. Yeh, yeh, and that’s a kind of interesting element, but, I don't know. Certainly from an outsider's perspective, I mean, like, going to Kyoto and seeing the temples and the parks and... Japan feels just so much more integrated. I was blown away by the fact that I never saw people eating on the street. You don't see people, even the transients, the area's completely orderly. I mean I saw these two kids walking down the street – I remember very distinctly how one guy threw a cigarette butt on the ground and his friend hit him in the shoulder. It was like "yeh, of course."

Liddell: The thing that gets me is the red lights, when there's a red light, there's no car in sight, they all stand there waiting for the red lights to change.

Astbury: I just love that in their culture, but, getting deeply into it, I mean, I’m a major fan of Japanese fashion, especially street fashion and, companies like Neighbourhood, WTAPS, and Undercover, and Mystery Bathing Ape, and those guys, and I’ve known those guys for probably ten years, and the way they observe the culture, the work ethic, their production values, what they actually create, they're just so immersed in the world of creativity and I just think they have an incredible work ethic and a real appreciation for craft, craftsmanship a real incredible aesthetic, just incredibly gifted at putting things together I just think, wonderful way they put things together.

Liddell: But how about their music, cos I always think one of the areas where Japan lags behind a bit is musically, and they're very reliant upon the West for a lot of their models?

Astbury: I mean I love Ryuichi Sakamoto, certainly it’s a name I grew up with especially being like a huge Bowie fan. I know that Bowie was like a major Japanophile. Like I said, I love Boøwy, the band Boøwy, I think they're excellent. Acid Mothers Temple I admire greatly. But yeh, I mean I can definitely see the influence in, y’know, Japanese take Western music…

Liddell: When you arrived in Japan, originally, there must have been like a real reaction to you, coz this was like such great music coming from the UK, and so people must have been jumping on that.

Astbury: Well it’s that first wave. I mean I think it was like the first wave of bands coming over to Japan. It was just beginning, in the mid 80s, and, like, we were definitely one of the first bands to come over. It was so much more orderly. I remember there was like a red rope, much like the velvet rope, in front of the stage.

Liddell: Yeh.

Astbury: And ushers, white-gloved ushers standing in front of that rope, and the kids wouldn’t jump around at all. And after every song, they’d be this pause of probably about five, six seconds, and then they'd burst into applause, then the applause would die down, and we'd start again. I'm "Shit! Like what!?" It's just amazing how orderly the audiences were, and all the kids were immaculately dressed. I mean you could definitely tell who their role models were from the West that they'd studied, and their costumes, the clothes they were wearing were pristine, and incredibly well researched, and you’d see kids dressed head-to-toe in Vivian Westwood. Immaculate! Incredible! I mean you would never see kids like that in London. You might see the one or two, but not the way the Japanese kids put it together. I was blown away by how those kids looked.

Liddell: Well the good thing about Japan is, is that you don’t get beat up walking down the street for wearing funny fashions, so there’s a lot more tolerant environment about fashion compared to the UK, y'know what I mean, because dressing in certain way is asking for a fight in a lot of towns.

Astbury: I think that's one of the things, y'know, you come out of the UK, I mean, like, we came out of pretty much, y'know, for want of a better label, working class environments. We did, we came out of the industrial North West and Scotland, and we had a very humble view of the world, y'know. All the **** we learnt it came from either radio, TV, or newspapers, and word of mouth. Somebody had been to London and came back with that incredible pair of shoes shoes or that album that we didn't get. There'd always be somebody coming back from London, especially in the punk rock days, and so walk through the streets of like Liverpool or Glasgow dressed as a punk rocker in1978 or 79 going to see the Clash perform, you were taking your life in your hands.

Liddell: Yeh.

Astbury: It was just so incredibly violent, and going to Tokyo, I don't know if you... how we looked in 85, but I had short white hair, I was wearing... I was really, really into, like, Brian Jones and psychedelic rock. I loved Jimi Hendrix, I was into Morrison and the Doors, so the look that I kind of affected was like y’know straight from like 68. Y'know I used to go to a club in London called Alice in Wonderland and that was the look I affected, so, when I arrived in Tokyo, I was just it was amazing, because kids would come up to me and talk to me about my clothes. They were so into my haircut and my clothes, and they were like, just the way how fascinated they were…

Liddell: So, around that time you were, like, wearing sort of frilly shirts and bandanas, or what sort of look did you have?

Astbury: More kinda like… I mean I used to seek out, kind of y'know… I mean I used to have, like, Granny Takes a Trip original velvet hipsters with that, y'know, 28 waist I’d sought out. I mean this is stuff that people didn't want in England, like an old Salvation Army jacket from the late 1800s. I mean I really studied kinda like what kids were into in 67, 68, 69. That look was just amazing to me and it seemed sort of Dandyism. It was kind of Romantic, going back against the kind of Symbolist poets, such as Byron and Shelley, that kind of Romanticism.

Liddell: Well, it's sort of invoking a lot of stuff, wasn't it? And that probably fed into the music as well, I’m sure.

Astbury: Yeh, absolutely, I mean it was escapism if you go back to that period, y'know, being young and growing up in that period, I mean basically Year Zero. It's like punk rock had finished the major rock stars, the Stones and the Beatles, and all those guys either as individuals or groups, become unobtainable. They no longer spoke to individuals in the street really, except through their music from when they were younger. But we didn't really have that music for ourselves. It's like the fans had picked up, the fans had become the musicians. I mean... the fans of the Pistols and the Clash had become actual musicians so, y'know, most of our heroes had kinda disbanded and we were almost abandoned in some ways, I mean I think Ian Curtis would have been very important had he stayed alive, but… And since I was in a band at 19, so maybe I had a different perspective, y'know, maybe, I'm… thinking out maybe for an audience, cos I still have Bowie. I still love Bowie immensely, and Iggy and Bowie and I still have those guys and they're still making. I mean I love "Serious Moonlight." I mean I love that record, it's amazing. I mean I love "Scary Monsters" I think they were incredible records, but for me I went back to, like, I was just discovering music from late 60s and early 70s, I mean going deep into things like psychedelic rock, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Chocolate Watch Band, Music Machine, all that kind of stuff, and then like early Floyd, Syd Barrett Floyd, and then stuff like, y'know, Krautrock and Neu, Amon Düül II y'know, just…

Liddell: So this is all stuff that’s really made it into the "Love" album, then, in one form or another?

Astbury: Yeh, I mean **** “Love” is like a car crash between, y'know, late-60s sort of Pysc-influenced rock, I mean the amateurism, I guess the kind of, like, the dilettante aspect of being like y'know punk rock kids who knew three chords and very limited language to express ourselves. You know what's funny y’know, it always been amaze me, when critics go, "Well, the lyrics are always very waspish." Absolutely, y'know, where do you think we went to school? I didn't go to Eton. I didn’t go to Eton, y'know. I was, like, my father worked in a refrigeration factory, my mum was a nurse. I grew up, like, blue collar kid. I didn’t have the benefits of that kind of education. I mean, what I’ve learnt over the years, I taught myself, I mean, pretty much, but my vocabulary was quite poor. I wasn’t well educated I would say, but I mean…

Liddell: That can be an advantage because if you’re overeducated, y’know that can get in the way, and, when you’ve got less words, you sort of make them count for more.

Astbury: Well, I think again, y'know, it’s like on paper you can pull things apart but, again, it seems to me what makes a great performance, a great piece of music, even a great piece of acting, whatever is the emotive quality, that truth, that kind of, like, authenticity in the performer. That’s what I really respond to. I don't care how flowery or prosaic or whatever the words are, or, y’know, well thought out. Unless there's that kind of emotive quality… That's what I really connect with. I think the language is so limited anyway. And I think it’s really harsh right now, I mean you've got such… Some of the critiques I’ve seen of bands now, you're going like "really unbelievable." It’s almost like you're taking and dropping a nuclear bomb on something that should be treated more with kid gloves, and really harsh critiques of, y'know, college and university educated 'experts'…

Liddell: Well, it’s all ego-driven sneering, a lot of it, isn’t it? A lot of music criticism, I have to say.

Astbury: Fear and jealousy y'know, and the sad thing is there's so much space out there. There's room for everybody, and there's plenty for everyone to go round, and this idea of coveting something like it's yours, y'know, this intellectual bourgeoisie kind of coveting this… What? Coveting like the language, coveting, I don’t know, intelligentsia, fashionistas, all that kind of stuff. I hate that kind of snobbery, and that, in a lot of ways, has killed the arts to a great degree and that’s why we have a…

Liddell: Well I’d say it's something that's very typical of Britain, especially. I mean British culture's very geared that way. Probably it’s a bit different as you travel round the world though, I should imagine.

Astbury: Well, I don’t live there. You're living where now? I live in New York. Aha, and Duffy's in Los Angeles. Is that right? Yeh, he’s in Los Angeles, yeh.

Liddell: Doesn't that make it a bit hard to sort of work together sometimes?

Astbury: Well, we just came out the studio, and we just did four songs with Chris Goss, and I would say that it's our most together, harmonious work that we've done for… I couldn’t even put a time-line on it. The thing was we went in with the intention of like creating… of letting the songs dictate... We have no agenda in terms of career. We have no agenda in terms of fulfilling record company contracts, fulfilling expectations. All that stuff, it's become irrelevant for us. So we went in and made a record that, y’know, essentially is Cult 2010, 2011, and I'm really, I'm really excited about...

Liddell: Is it a full album?

Astbury: No, I mean this is one thing that I personally have kind of looked at and I've thought, if you have a whole album worth of work in you, I mean, I can only speak for myself, I feel that if I have an album in me and I wanna go and record that, I'll do it. But right now I don’t. I mean I could put an album together out of all the material that I've got, but the Cult don't. But what I think the Cult do have is we write great songs on the spot. So, instead of, like, you write two or three great songs and then put another seven songs around it and dress it up as an album, why not put those two or three great songs out? Y’know, and then go away and have experience and have some other things come into your life, so you fill up again, and then when you've got something to say, release it again. And that’s the whole idea of working with the idea of what I call a capsule now. Not an EP, a capsule. The idea of it is a capsule collection, which I borrowed from fashion, which is when they usually do a collaboration, y'know, two companies like, say Jun Watanabe and Comme des Garcons'll do a collaboration together, and do, like, four or five pieces and a pair of shoes and maybe a perfume, and call it a capsule collection. I thought that was brilliant. So I came up with the idea of like two new songs, a re-recorded version of an older song, maybe mixed differently or sang with different lyrics or carved differently or arranged differently, then a cinematic version of a song, a song that's mixed with all the vocals out of it, maybe putting strings and piano, whatever, make it sound more like a film soundtrack, and then, along with that, a short film. Not a video. This is film, it’s an actual film. Y'know, I mean the songs’ll be used as a, partly, soundtrack, but the film is, by it’s own integrity of the film, is a piece of film…

Liddell: This is very reminiscent of the kind of cinematic ideas behind some of the Doors music as well.

Astbury: Absolutely and that's something that's really… Honestly how can I be with Ray and Robbie for, for, y’know, nearly four years of my life and then not be influenced by it, y'know… I mean, one of the most profound moments when I was a kid was going to see "Apocalypse Now." Went and seen it in Glasgow, and a bottle of wine, into it, y'know, about halfway… I mean when "The End" came on, with the destruction of Kurtz's camp at the end, that was a religious experience for me.

Liddell: Just for the record, was that a bottle of Buckfast wine?

Astbury: Was it Buckfast?

Liddell: Yes.

Astbury: Oh, God, no! Buckie, no, not Buckie. No stay away from that. No, it was probably something like, probably something like really crap, like Olde England Sherry, Stagecoach, or something like that. Some real 99p, y’know, three cans of larger job. That's what it was, y'know, the carry out, in the plastic bag. It was actually stuck in a schoolbag, stuck it in the schoolbag, Sauchiehall Street, ABC, or whatever it was. That was a religious experience, seeing that. I came out of there and I was like "What was that?" I mean I was just so transformed after that moment. I never saw the Sex Pistols but I saw "Apocalypse Now" when it was put on general release in the UK.

Liddell: Was that the first time you heard a Doors song, though?

Astbury: No, I mean, see I grew up in North America as well, I grew up in Canada. I spent 5 years in Canada, and thing was when I came to Canada, they had the FM radio. So, FM radio's this incredible... You get like this beautiful stereo mix… I remember this station in Toronto called Q107 maybe, and on the weekends they would play the entire album, entire album. They'd go, "And that was the first side of 'Dark Side of the Moon' and now I’m going to play the other side." No commercials, completely uninterrupted. They'd play Roxy Music, and I remember hearing entire Bowie albums, Roxy Music albums T. Rex, Floyd, Zeppelin I mean, just the whole record! I mean it was just unbelievable to sit there as a kid with the radio and just sit in the house. We were drawn into that, really like reclusive, in my bedroom, very isolated. **** I just wanted to do was go home, wanted to go back to Britain. I missed it so desperately. My parents decided to emigrate, so the music really kept me… Y'know, I had a passion for that as a kid. Film and music, strangely enough, I mean since I was very young, very very young.

Liddell: About your time in Canada, how old were you at that time?

Astbury: I moved to Canada when I was about 11 and a half and I left when I was 16.

Liddell: And it was like somewhere in the middle of nowhere or one of the big cities or what?

Astbury: It was Hamilton Ontario, which is just South of Toronto, and it's probably known best for its steelworks, Dofasco and Stelco, and all the steel that they used to make there used to go down the Great Lakes to Detroit to the automotive industry, and that’s where my father worked in that kind of industrial area, and both my mother and father contracted cancer in that city and both subsequently died of their cancers. Y'know, you can talk about sort of industrial communities, and I mean I’ve experienced that, y'know, first hand, my family was decimated by the industrial society and consumerist society, so, at that age it was all grooming me to become, I guess, a voice, to express myself in that way. I mean I had a lot of pain because of what we went through. We all seemed to be just above the breadline. I mean. Sure we had a roof over our heads and everything, and we had a car that worked but... Y'know, we had the basics, the bare minimum to keep us going and... Not a Dickensian sob story by any stretch of the imagination...

Liddell: Yeh, I'm just thinking a lot of the things you’re talking about there, a lot of people of the same generation were obviously going through that too, and a lot of that kind of fed into what happened in the 80s, really, musically. There was a bit of escapism, there was a lot of grit, there was a lot of interesting things in the 80s, wasn’t there? I mean I think personally I think it was a very under-estimated or under-regarded musical decade.

Astbury: Yeh, true, I mean I think a lot of those kids, those kids, those bands, those post-punk bands. I mean, starting off with Joy Division, probably Durutti Column and bands like that, certainly what Factory were doing and Tony Wilson and then going to things like Public Image... Y’know, we were like refugees from… I mean, I was born 17 years after World War 2 and we were still in this kinda like refugee Britain and still, y'know, they had the Summer of Love, but that had all fallen away and the Pistols had just kind of total total dystopia And it was basically people saying there’s nothing down for you. There’s no work. There's no future. It's Year Zero, 1984, George Orwell, Thatcher, there it is. Bang! You’re going nowhere, you're nothing, don’t even think about being anything colourful. But what did we have, like, the Socialist Workers Party and the NF? All those people on the streets being active and violent and really dire. It was horrible.

Liddell: In some ways it’s almost like, for lots of parts of Britain, the 80s was like a delayed 1960s coz the 1960s kind of only happened in certain select neighbourhoods, and then it didn’t really reach a lot of parts of the country until later.

Astbury: Absolutely. That's well said actually That's a very good observation. Yeah, the 60s didn't happen... Probably the pop aspects did, but that kind of like incredible free love and y’know… That scenes all happening in Notting Hill gate, isn't it? Sure, a little bit happened up North, a little bit, but everybody seems to come to London. London is the real epicentre of what was going on. But definitely acid house kicked in. That took over the whole country. That was something completely different. But at that point we had already gone. At that point, we were like road weary. We had already been on the road for 6-7 years. We were like old road. We were like old veterans, old soldiers, who had been through many campaigns, and we were, like, y’know, watching our friends die. I mean, people were committing suicide and dying, and ODing at an incredible rate at that time the late 80s. A lot of musicians, rock musicians, friends of mine, were dying of all kinds of things -- AIDS, y’know, drug-related stuff, suicide, I mean. And the way that we were kind of wrung through by the way the industry was. You would tour for a over year, and then you would go straight back into the studio. So we were working for "the man," y’know, and we definitely felt it. So, by the time the early 90s came, I was just ready to bail out. I wanted out, I wanted out the whole thing, I wanted out more than anything. It was just that I was literally exhausted.

Liddell: Yeh, well after the “Love” album, and that kind of opened things up a lot for you, and then I think you were targeted much more in America, and you went for a heavier sound, and even showed in the way you were presented, you know what I mean, so… And obviously that would have meant a much harder workload as well, because America's one of those places where you've got to go everywhere to actually break it, y’know what I mean. It's not like the UK.

Astbury: Yeh and especially in the day because, y’know, America could take years to break. You'd have to keep going back and keep touring, and keep going back and doing interviews and touring, and having a presence. I mean, MTV helped immensely but we still were going out and doing 180, 200 day tour, through the sort of like 86, 87 through 90, 93, y’know, 94 even. We'd be doing these incredibly long tours, and, great, then the Internet comes along. We don't have to do that much... 

Liddell: But that's why somebody like Lady Gaga can happen so quickly. It's all Internet driven. I was just reading she had like... She's the first person to have -- what is it? -- one billion views on the Internet.

Astbury: Guy Debord hit the nail on the head: "society is a spectacle." People go on about about Warhol “famous for 15 minutes,” I think it's more of a Situationist... They saw it coming, they called it. Y'know society is a spectacle. It's amazing. I saw this great keynote speech from Malcolm McLaren recently who said "We celebrate stupidity. We celebrate shallowness. We celebrate veneer. We celebrate the surface but we do not celebrate real craft, real guts, real toil and work and craft, and that tends to get pushed to the side. What's ever y’know, directly in front of us, this sweet stuff that we can just instantly get an instant reaction from, that's what we celebrate. But, I'm not some kind of big reactionist against the way things are. I'm not a big nostalgist. I don't go, 'Oh, it used to be that you'd have to lift your own body weight.' No, I mean it is what it is. So, well, I ain't gonna stop the iPad. No way. Just embrace it. You have to embrace it, or you're gonna get lost by it.

Liddell: Well, the way you're making music now, is it's a lot more suited to the technology, and it's not so tied to the old traditional album format which was basically dictated by the constraints of vinyl and the size of a record player, y’know what I mean? So you've kind of embraced the technology in that way.

Astbury: Yeah, the formatting.... There's a wonderful.... You know those little "33 and a Third" books? A series of books on albums. I think Mojo put them out. They’re called "33 and a Third." There's one on Radiohead. There's one on “OK Computer.” There's a brilliant dissertation in there by, I think, some Oxford professor, and he says how formats have driven music. When the format’s driven music. When the 7-inch single came out people started writing pop songs that were two minutes three minutes long. It drove the whole industry so the artist was focused on that format. And then basically y’know vinyl gave more dimension to the album, and then the CD became... Then you started seeing people put 16 tracks on a CD and the music got really poor. Now it's like, I think what's really set the format is the attention span of the audience is very short. So my idea is, like, give them higher quality, less off it, but higher quality. I'd much rather have one or two songs from an artist who I absolutely worship, admire. Like if David Bowie dropped a song, one song, even now, I'd y’know be really excited. But I'll take one good song over an album of mediocre material any day of the week.

Liddell: But this is all very, horrendously ironic because you are coming over here to play a whole album from end to end really, aren't you, and...

Astbury: We are, we are. I mean, that's the calling card I mean that gets us in the door, but we're actually... What we're doing is, as the Cult touring entity, is to go out on the road you have to have some kind of marquee, something that's going to go on the marquee that's going to draw the audience in, and for us it was like... one of the ideas was reintroducing an audience to an album that we felt was probably our most earnest, purest record that we've made, and a lot of those influences still influences that we have today. But we basically perform the “Love” album. Then we take a break. Like two separate sets distinguished by y’know just different looks to the set. But then the actual set, we would play whatever we want to play that night. It's not really an encore or anything like that. It's just two halves of the show. Yeah, so we play like, y’know, we play the album with the... It's not like we play it note for note perfect. Absolutely not. Play it differently every night but...

Liddell: So, the first half of the show is the same every night, the second half varies a lot, yeah?

Astbury: Yeh, it really depends on how we feel, I mean we chop and change songs, we chop and change songs in the second half of the set. It works, it's working very very well because when we come out for the second half of the set, the audience are like "there's gonna be more?" we're like "yeah." In fact the “Love” thing is like yeh that’s, that's like, we're here, we've done that, now it's time to stand up in your seats and kind of get involved and... So it’s worked out really, really well, and I was really happy because I kind of conceived the idea of doing two separate sets, and everybody's like “oh we can't do” that, y'know... I'm like “why not?” Do whatever you fucking want. Why not? It's 2010, do... Please, I mean come on!

Liddell: You're old enough, y'know,

Astbury: Yes, you're old enough. You do whatever we want and I think there's a kind of format that I want to see when I go to a show. I mean who's, who's got the biggest ego to think an audience is going to want bludgeoning for, like, 2 hours 3 hours whatever? Y'know. It's like if you're wrong about that show, then it's over 3 hours long. In the day I mean a great show, maybe see a Doors show, some of them are like... I spoke to Ray and Robbie they play half an hour they'd leave the stage, sometimes they’d play for 3 hours. But now with the venue constrictions and blah-blah blah blah, and contract restrictions. I've got a contract that says you must perform for 35 minutes, 120 minutes, 95 minutes, whatever it is, y'know, and if you go over there's union charges or if you go over it's like, y'know, some kind of building insurance charges, something crazy. But a lot of these formats are driven by the venues, companies like Live Nation, whatever, y’know the actual venues have policies of security and theft.

Liddell: When you mention Live Nation it just reminds me of Starbucks for some reason, this kind of globalisation and everything having to be in the same format and fit the same size, y'know, one size fits all, that kind of mentality.

Astbury: One size fits all absolutely and one thing we're seeing kind of a healthy reaction to that in the sense that some people are walking away from... that kind of experience and creating their own reality… There’s a whole kind of, like, psychedelic, organic, hippie folk through kind of like darker more pagan-esque music scene now in the United States which is fascinating. People are going playing unestablished venues. I've some got friends who have a band called SUNN O))). They're from Seattle and... they basically don't have a drummer they play drone it's almost like a black mass, heavily influenced by Indian raga. They just play these tonalities and this incredible ritual they play in... They would never play a black... They would never play a Live Nations venue. They play places like this place called the Brookdale Lodge, where where affluent actors and businessmen would take their molls in the 1930s. It's an old 1930s lodge up at south of San Francisco. It's an amazing place! They play these old houses and masonic lodges and the idea of like, y'know… You see that a lot in New York, like, people going for, y’know, picking up your old warehouses and.. I love that. I mean that's amazing. So I'm down for doing a bit of that I mean we've been talking about the Cult playing Indian reservations in the United states, going out and just performing purely on reservations. And the reason why Indian Reservations is because they have completely different laws on the reservations in terms of y’know noise restriction and what time you can perform at. The idea is that you go on-stage at midnight, and we perform all the way through to the dawn, y’know, till the sun comes up. Yeah coming out of these urban areas. Mean playing like next to sort of Phoenix, and you have to drive like 80 miles out into the desert and you're on Indian land and then its like, it begins at midnight and everybody comes and is part of the spirit of that...

Liddell: You see, once you start doing that a lot of people end up being late for their job at the office the next morning.

Astbury: Good!

Liddell: Which is probably what they need.

Astbury: I think that's what we all need, is a bit more of that right now. I mean it's overwhelming, the information age is "shoo!" We're getting lost in it and, y’know, I'm a huge fan of Terence McKenna, brilliant, brilliant man visionary, shaman. Wrote a book called “Archaic Revival,” one of the most eloquent spokesmen for expanded consciousness and... connectedness to the Earth. In fact, it’s amazing that if you look at “Avatar,” and “Avatar” is the biggest film of all time and a lot of Terence McKenna’s kind of ideas and observations are expressed in “Avatar” y’know, like a species of humanoids that are more highly evolved, more sensitive, more connected to their environment, directly in harmony with the natural world, and the natural order of things, and that being something to aspire to instead of something to destroy, and that's kind of like more what I would advocate in that way, is something more along those lines. And technology is amazing but human technology's amazing as well, human sensitivity is amazing, and I think that the real, I guess, journey we're on right now to discover more about our awareness, the inward journey, y'know, this inward journey and discovering God or whatever that is within ourselves and sharing that... I mean really we're still fighting these mediaeval wars over religion. Unbelievable! Really? 21st century! Oh my god!

Liddell: Yeh, but could I just like put you on the spot and ask what do you actually believe in? Because some people are Christians and Buddhists and some people in, y'know, they're atheists and agnostics. What do you actually... If someone puts the question to you, what would you say is your believe system?

Astbury: Well, I wouldn't pin myself down with one belief system, with philosophical system I think they all basically are jump off points to the same conclusion that the ego is only an aspect of... of self, and ego is almost like a grounding, a self identification thing but the sum, we are we, it is made up of something far more profound than that, and I just believe in expanded consciousness. I love the idea that time is curved, y’know, if you travel in quantum physics, the idea that time is curved. If you journey out far enough you'll come back to the beginning again. And you're wrapping your head around... And that's what scientists... These are the conclusions that are coming back. This is the intelligence that's coming back from the scientific community. But they’re also coming back with the fact, y’know, talk about the Boson Particle They found that they've identified the smallest quantum particle and it disappears, and they don't know where it goes. Science can't explain it, so, I think we get out of the realm of language and symbolism and y’know labelling of philosophy and language and culture and all that kind of thing, and then it becomes an intuitive thing, and it's an answer that I couldn't give verbally, and that ****** you...  If we look at each other, we'd understand each other. I wouldn't have to label it or say anything about it. You know those moments, you've been with someone you're very close to, and you look at each other at the same time and you just go... You don't say anything, you just know. I mean I couldn't put a label on that. I could not put a label on that, but I know it's Terence McKenna, right now he's my most important guru, shall we say. For me, I'm deeply, deeply, deeply into his archeozoic fire, completely endorse his perspective…

Liddell: A lot of people would peg you as some kind of pagan.

Astbury: Well, fine. Good. Fine, I'll take that, pagan's fine. So occasionally I go like, people go “what are you?” I go like I'm a pagan, y'know, Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan, naturalist, Libertarian whatever, y'know. I mean there is expanded consciousness. There's wisdom in there, and that's what interests me more than the Society of the Spectacle. I mean, y’know, yes, kitten flying an aeroplane on YouTube 50 million hits. Great! Fantastic! Keep going. There's technology for you. The biggest things with technology are pornography and, y’know, YouTube. You know when you see those, images of, like, patients in a mental hospital like Bedlam that are slobbering on themselves? That's kind of like what we must look like, looking at that shit.

Liddell: I think there's maybe too much inter-connectedness these days. I mean that's the other side of the technology. Everybody can see everything all the time and so it creates a kind of shallowing of experience. Before, y’know, like cultures and societies were separated more by real distance and so they developed much more unique character that way.

Astbury: Yes the globalisation process is definitely taking over. I mean it's sad to see that... I heard Gabriel Byrne on the radio today talking about the fact that the Gaelic language only really disappeared from Ireland in about 1855. 1860 or something like that, and then he said, y’know, “Within a hundred years we produced Joyce, Beckett, Oscar Wilde, y’know we basically took the English language and just completely took it to another level in theatre, in poetry, and literature.” And he's speaking in Gaelic, and it's amazing that when he's speaking in Gaelic, all of a sudden I personally felt deep movement within myself. It was like connecting to something far more profound, a language that sounded like it came from nature. And to share that connexion to that language, and it was being very rich and that, very rich. And my language, I don't know, the English language it just feels so inadequate. And with the Japanese, when I'm with my Japanese friends, and the way that they’re explaining in incredible detail about something so small, y’know, something like, really, like, the way a napkin is folded or something and why that's folded that way and why is important and why... I'm just fascinated by that, and, y’know, I go back to Britain and it's just chav central! It’s shockingly poor.

Liddell: Well, it seems to be the difference between a very rooted culture and a kind of rootless culture. I mean, because we are part of the English speaking world, English speaking culture is very rootless now, it's become globalised. I mean it’s the first one to be globalised, and Japanese is still clinging on to its own locale, its own identity, its own idiosyncratic way of doing things, because of the language, and you can probably say the same thing about Gaelic, where it is still spoken, a culture which is still rooted in the one place, which is still resisting globalisation.

Astbury: One thing that we're seeing in North America is we're seeing native indigenous Native Americans, now with the advancements in technology, going... More and more communities are going, y’know, really all out to try and capture whatever elements of their culture they have and get it recorded and get it digitally available to the communities and make it accessible so that they can be like language, ritual, all those elements that make a culture, they're basically trying to encourage their language and their rituals being spoken in the 21st century.~

[Line cuts]

Astbury: Hello

Liddell: Yeh, hi, I got cut off. The card ran out. I guess we were rambling too much.

Astbury: Get me going and that's it, I mean I get going on this. I'm like... I mean, don't get me going, I can't stop.

Liddell: Yeah, but anyway I think I've got plenty of material for the article, which is a good thing, and so I'll probably just leave it there and maybe hope to see you when you come over.

Astbury: That would be amazing. I mean one thing you will not get with the Cult is a jock rock experience This is something I explained to a friend of mine. What the fuck happened to American music? I said what happened to American music was that the kids who used to play sports picked up guitars, and all those kids that were like really kind of introspective and, y’know, androgynous and slightly damaged, those poetry kids…They just kind of turned into really, really, really anaemic... They've become very very weak, very weak in the poetry department, and those wonderful romantics that we used to have. It is completely, outrageous like Lady Gaga, which isn't really that outrageous, I mean, for fucks sake, come on. Y’know, Elton and Mick and y’know, Iggy, and David, they were way more outrageous than Lady Gaga...

Liddell: So, you're saying that the kind of more introspective, introverted, creative types tend to be pushed down a lot more and forgotten?

Astbury: Yeah, yeah I think so, and, y'know, and also there's this kind of like this kind of like piousness that's come into this... The kind of like the REMs and the Sonic Youths of the world have become overseers of what is considered to be y’know artistically valid, and...

Liddell: Sort of like artistic political correctness?

Astbury: YPrecisely, and that's become like an institution, and that institution isn't acceptable to everyone, because not everyone comes from educated backgrounds or has that base, yknow.

Liddell: Well, it's a kind of puritanism isn't it. Those kind of attitudes which underlie that way of looking at things.

Astbury: Thank you, it is very puritanical and, y’know, that's one of the reasons why people say why do Cult play rock music? Why don't you guys evolve into more kind of like... You had The Smiths coming out, you had REM coming out, more textural, kind of pastorial kind of music. And I always, like, because I just found that to be really... I used to despise that whole looking down your nose at someone, yknow, being lofty and...

Liddell: You're going for something more visceral, aren't you? Because when you play rock music you're connecting and if you're, y'know keeping it very very polite...

Astbury: Yeh, well the music... I think the best, Robert Plant described it. It's like it has to happen from the waist down and the neck up, y'know. I don't want to go to a concert where I'm like... if I want to be intellectually stimulated I'll read a book, maybe I'll watch a film. But when I go to a concert performance - there's an exception to every rule - when I go to a performance I want to be emotively moved, I want to have catharsis, I want to have an emotive experience.

Liddell: Would you say it's a middle class working class kind of dichotomy there?

Astbury: I think it's just that whole thing of like intellect versus, y'know, brains versus sexuality, that kind of, like you're saying, that kind of really  puritanical fear of letting go. What happens if I let go? My god, what's going happen? What happens if I release the bodette? And it's interesting, like, all these kind of pseudo intellectuals now are embracing things like y’know, Sabbath and Zeppelin and, like it's...

Liddell: Oh, but they're doing it ironically I think.

Astbury: Yeah, they're doing a bit tongue in cheek, but they're actually really getting into what it is though. The reason why Led Zeppelin are still... kids are still picking up... You've seen, you must have seen “It Might Get Loud” with Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge.

Liddell: Oh yeh, yeh.

Astbury: When he's played the riff, y’know “It's a Whole Lotta Love,” they're both sitting there with their mouths hanging open. They can't believe... And he's the only one that talks about the music being orgasmic, it being rude. He talks about it like its a fucking...

Liddell: You can't beat a big, dirty, old riff can you?

Astbury: No... And he's talking about it in a very sexual context.  He's talking about it in a really emotive context, and y’know got Edge with all his “la-la-la” different sound effects, and then Jack White, y’know, kinda like whacked pastiche ****** That's not what the Blues was about. It wasn't Tim Burton, dude. Tim Burton wasn't the guy who created the Blues. Y’know, like, if Tim Burton was Robert Johnson, you would have ended up with Jack White. But... I quite like the Dead Weather. I quite like... I mean, I like them. I like him, I like that, but put him against Jimmy Page, he's like a domestic house pet.

Liddell: Yeah, you like him but in a different way.

Astbury: Yeah, it's like cats looking at a panther.

Liddell: Well, y’know, sounds like it's going to be a great show, so, y’know, I'll definitely be there, and hope to hook up with you.

Astbury: Yeah, absolutely, come by, come by whenever you want. Come by for a sound check or…

Liddell: OK, I'll ask the promotion people about that, so, yeah, should be possible. Well, have a good time in the meantime, and I'll see you when you get to Tokyo.

Astbury: Alright, take care.

Liddell: Okay, cheers!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Post the other part of the interview!!!

Anonymous said...

I dunno when this was posted but I enjoyed the transcript. Thanks for posting!

Luiz Carlos Betenheuser Jr said...

Hi Liddell, good afternoon! I'm a fan of The Cult and here in Brazil they are very cult by a faithful legion of music lovers. I thank you immensely for your interview, which came out of the usual "four chords" of talking about the same topics as always. Very interesting the relationship that Mr. IA has with fashion. Thanks for the info, I'll do some research on it. Be alright! Peace.

Colin Liddell said...

Thanks for the great feedback. Made my day!

Anonymous said...

Amazing interview! I LOVE the cult!!!

Osvaldo de Castro said...

Amazing interview! I LOVE the cult!!!

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