Rain

The Zoo Crew has got The Cult's "Rain" spinning right now for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have ever stood in a room when that opening drone hits, you already know why the needle stays down. It comes off Love, the 1985 album that turned a couple of northern English rock and roll longhairs into a band the rest of the world had to deal with. Billy Duffy's guitar sits on a low D that barely moves, Ian Astbury comes in hot and half-possessed, and the whole thing feels like a summer storm that has been waiting on the horizon all afternoon. Around here we play it loud, the way a freeform rock station ought to, and then we tell the story that goes with the record.

Love landed on Beggars Banquet on October 18, 1985, and "Rain" had already been out as a single since September 27. It climbed to number 17 on the UK chart, the second hit off an album that reached number four and hung around for 22 weeks. She Sells Sanctuary had come first, in May, before the band had even finished the record. Producer Steve Brown, who had pop ears from his work with Wham!, heard that single take off and told Astbury and Duffy to write another one in the same neighborhood. Duffy has been honest about how that went. Sanctuary, he says, was a gift that just happened. Rain was perspiration. He has said he is actually prouder of Rain because it had some guts to it and because the band was trying to heavy up the sound on purpose. That is a guitar player's compliment, and it tracks with what you hear: the same hypnotic drone, but a little more muscle under the hood.

Astbury has called the song purely about sex, and the words do not argue with him. Hot sticky scenes, a desert sun that burns the skin, waiting so long, open the sky and let her come down, here she comes again. It is weather used as a come-on, the old rock and roll trick of talking about the sky when you mean the body. The Cult were deep into 1960s psychedelia and the big British blues-rock bands at the same time, and Love is where those two appetites stopped fighting. Duffy has said he wanted the record to work the way Bad Company, Free, Bowie, and Roxy Music worked for him: pop enough to get on the radio, with deeper cuts sitting behind the singles. Rain and Revolution carried the hits. Nirvana and Phoenix were the long rides. Backing vocals on Rain came from the Soultanas, Mae McKenna, Lorenza Johnson, and Jackie Challenor, which is why the chorus lifts the way it does.

There is a famous bit of stage talk that still makes fans grin. At Wembley Arena in November 1989, after the band finished Rain, Astbury asked the room if they liked that one. They roared. He answered that personally he did not, but there you are. The song has been a set-list regular on almost every Cult tour since 1985 anyway. A longer mix titled (Here Comes The) Rain showed up on the out-of-print Love Mixes and later in the Rare Cult box, and that remix also turned up in the 1986 Italian horror picture Demoni 2. The 7-inch paired Rain with Little Face. The 12-inch added the extended mix. Mark Brzezicki, on loan from Big Country, played drums on most of Love after Nigel Preston's exit, so the pocket on Rain is tighter than the gothic shuffle of the earliest Cult singles. Astbury later said the songs on Love still deal with the same stuff: life, death, sex, materialism, spiritualism. Rain sits right in the middle of that list and does not apologize.

None of that happens without the long road that got Astbury and Duffy into the same room. Ian Astbury was born in Heswall, Cheshire, on May 14, 1962. The family moved around Merseyside and Scotland, then to Canada when he was about eleven. He has talked about those years as the place he first ran with other immigrant kids and with Iroquois boys, and that time on and around the Six Nations left a mark on the imagery he would carry for decades. Back in England he landed in Bradford, found a band rehearsing in a basement, and in 1981 put together Southern Death Cult. The name pointed at the old Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, not at horror-movie theatrics. They cut the double A-side Moya / Fatman in December 1982, supported Bauhaus, and folded by March 1983. Astbury was already tired of being cast as a spokesman for whatever the press was calling positive punk.

Billy Duffy, born in Hulme, Manchester, on May 12, 1961, had come up through Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, where a young Morrissey had passed through, and then Theatre of Hate, the band that nicked the UK Top 40 with Do You Believe in the Westworld. By early 1983 Duffy was broke in a Brixton flat, couch-surfing, and still in love with a white Gretsch. Astbury came down, said he was leaving Southern Death Cult, and asked if Duffy wanted to start something. Duffy has said he thought about it for half a second and answered yes. They pulled in Jamie Stewart on bass and, for a short stretch, Ray Mondo on drums, then Nigel Preston. They could not think of a better name than Death Cult. Duffy has joked that The Brown Shoes might have been genius, given what The Smiths were about to do. Death Cult debuted in July 1983 with a four-track 12-inch. Within a year they shortened it to The Cult, partly to step out of the gothic pigeonhole that bands like Specimen and Skeletal Family were stuck in. Dreamtime arrived in 1984. Love arrived the next year, and the life of the band split into before Sanctuary and after.

That is the crew behind the record you are hearing. If you want the band's own front porch, the official site is The Cult. Their verified pages are Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing scratched copies of Love and arguing set lists gather in The Cult Family group. And if this cut is hitting the spot, the rest of the freeform rock and roll lives over at THE ZOO, where the Zoo Crew keeps the deep tracks moving for the Zoo Freaks. Rain is still the one Duffy had to sweat for, still the one Astbury once shrugged off at Wembley, and still the one that sounds like the sky finally opening. Turn it up.