Lil’ Devil

Turn it up. This is Lil’ Devil, The Cult, off the 1987 album Electric, and it still hits like a switchblade in a leather jacket. Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy wrote it, Rick Rubin cut it at Electric Ladyland in New York in November and December of 1986, and Beggars Banquet sent it out as a single on April 20, 1987, catalogue BEG 188. The flip side was Zap City. The 12-inch piled on live She Sells Sanctuary and Bone Bag. The CD single went further and threw in a live Phoenix plus Love Removal Machine. It was the second single off Electric, right behind Love Removal Machine, and it did the job. Official Charts has it peaking at number 11 in the UK, seven weeks on the list, first charting May 2, 1987. Over here it reached number 34 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart. Ireland took it to 13, Canada to 25, the Netherlands to 90. Not a fluke. A riff with a warrant.

Electric itself landed on April 6, 1987, on Beggars Banquet and Sire, and it is the record that dragged The Cult out of the incense and into the arena. The follow-up to Love was supposed to be something else. The band had already spent a quarter of a million pounds cutting twelve tracks with producer Steve Brown at the Manor in Oxfordshire, working title Peace. Astbury later called those sessions a free-for-all, a residential studio, plenty of alcohol, nobody watching the door. The tapes did not work. On the Love tour they had heard what Rubin was doing with the Beastie Boys, AC/DC riffs under a beat, and they went to New York hoping he would remix a track. He would not leave it there. He asked, in so many words, whether they wanted to make English music or whether they wanted to rock. They wanted to rock. The label thought they were recutting one song. They ended up rebuilding the album.

Rubin’s rules were blunt. Duffy has told the story more than once. Off came the Gretsch, the chorus, the echoes. On went a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall. No pedals except wah. Rubin was not a player. Duffy has said as much, and he has also said Rubin was smart enough to bring engineer Andy Wallace and to keep George Drakoulias in the room. They set up in the main room at Electric Ladyland, rented the gear because they had flown in for what was supposed to be a mix, and cut old-school takes. Duffy has called the gear change traumatic. The result was not. Electric peaked at number 4 in the UK and stayed on the chart 27 weeks, the longest run of any Cult album, matching Love’s peak and outlasting it. Love Removal Machine, Wild Flower, Lil’ Devil, Outlaw, a lean 38 minutes and change of hard rock. Four Peace-era songs got dropped. Lil’ Devil, King Contrary Man and Memphis Hip Shake came in. The wolf was off the leash.

Lil’ Devil is the blues end of that new attack. Duffy’s riff is a strut, not a sermon. Astbury rides it like a carnival barker who has already decided you are coming with him. The lyric is pure Cult: temptation, a little devil in the doorway, the kind of trouble you do not argue with once the groove locks. Jamie Stewart on bass, Les Warner on drums, the whole thing recorded dry and loud the way Rubin wanted it. No gothic fog. No cathedral reverb. Just a band that had spent the early eighties in the post-punk trenches and had decided the next move was the riff. Play it next to She Sells Sanctuary and you can hear the door slam. Same writers. Different religion.

The band behind it started in Bradford in 1983. Astbury had fronted Southern Death Cult. Duffy had been the guitarist in Theatre of Hate. They met, formed Death Cult, then dropped the Death in January 1984 and became The Cult. Dreamtime arrived that year. Love in 1985 made them famous, She Sells Sanctuary and Rain still the calling cards of the psychedelic years. Electric was the argument that they were a rock band first. Sonic Temple in 1989, with Fire Woman, proved the argument to American radio. Lineups have shifted ever since. Stewart, Warner, and later players including Matt Sorum, John Tempesta and others have passed through. Astbury and Duffy have been the constant. They have sold millions, broken up, come back, and in recent years have even revived the Death Cult name on stage, including a Manchester show at Albert Hall that became the Paradise Live album. The wolf never really left the building.

Astbury has always sung like a man who read too much and lived too hard, Native American imagery, apocalypse, romance, a baritone that can go from chant to howl in a bar. Duffy is the riff architect, Manchester-born, the player who can quote the Stones and Zeppelin without impersonating them. On Electric he was under orders, and the orders suited the song. Lil’ Devil does not need a solo that wanders off. It needs the groove, the handclaps in the pocket, and Astbury leaning into the mic like the deal is already done. VH1-era hard-rock lists and classic-rock playlists have kept the single in circulation for a reason. It is short, mean, and built for a transmitter.

If you are digging through the singles, start with the 7-inch and then the 12-inch. Zap City is the right B-side, a Peace leftover that shows what they were walking away from and what they kept. The live Sanctuary on the 12-inch is the bridge, the old spell played by the new band. Electric is the album to own, not a compilation cut. Put Lil’ Devil between Love Removal Machine and Wild Flower and you get the whole 1987 argument in three songs. The Cult were done being a secret. They wanted the Marshall, the Les Paul, and the room at Electric Ladyland.

You are hearing it on THE ZOO, listener-supported, commercial-free, the station that still believes a riff can carry a whole stretch of radio. More of this lives at thezoorocks.com. The band’s own door is thecult.us. Find them on Facebook, Instagram and X. Billy Duffy’s site, with his own notes on this single, is billyduffy.com. Lil’ Devil. The Cult. Electric. Do not bargain with it.