She Sells Sanctuary

The Zoo Crew has got The Cult cranked up on the board right now, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any stretch of time you already know the riff before the vocal even walks in. She Sells Sanctuary, off the 1985 album Love, is one of those records that still feels like somebody left a door open between a London studio and a desert highway. Billy Duffy’s guitar comes in sideways, all chorus and delay and a little bow-on-the-strings mischief, and Ian Astbury rides it like he has been waiting his whole life for a place to put that voice. Over at THE ZOO we spin it the long way when the request line lights up, because the short edit never quite tells the whole story.

The song almost did not get made the way we know it. The band had been knocking around a demo on the Dreamtime tour in late 1984, lifting the bass figure straight out of Spiritwalker and wrapping a vaguely psychedelic guitar melody around it. Their publishers, looking for a sure single, floated the idea of covering Iggy Pop’s China Girl. Duffy and Astbury took one look at that and figured if Iggy could not get a hit with it, they were not going to either. They offered Sanctuary instead, and thank the rock gods they did. Duffy has said more than once that it was the song that changed everything for them, and that without it they might never have broken out of the club circuit.

Then came the studio mix-up that still gets told like a bar story. The Cult wanted Steve Lillywhite, the man behind U2 and Peter Gabriel, and a meeting was set at Beggars Banquet. The fellow who walked in was Steve Brown, the producer who had just come off Wham! and was hungry to work with a guitar band. Astbury has told it plain: they sat down, figured out it was the wrong Steve, and kept talking anyway. Brown had already lifted a demo off their agent’s desk, cut his own edit, and played it back. That kind of nerve tends to win a room. Five days at Olympic Studios in Barnes, March 11 through 15, 1985, did the rest. Olympic was holy ground for these guys, the same rooms where the Stones, The Who, Hendrix and Led Zeppelin had cut records, and Duffy has never been shy about saying the room mattered.

The intro that Zoo Freaks can hum in their sleep was an accident with a violin bow. Duffy found one lying around the studio, the same trick Jimmy Page used to pull, and started sawing at the strings just to crack Astbury up in the control room. He stomped every pedal on the board to make it weirder, then dropped into the middle section of the song with a pick. Brown stopped the tape and said hold it. They built the record around that sound. Brown also talked Duffy into an acoustic hook at the last minute, when the guitar was already packed, one chord that may even have been sampled. On the drums, Nigel Preston was deep in the bottle and overplaying, so the rest of the band started taking pieces of the kit away until he was left with a snare, a kick, some hats and a cymbal. The part got leaner and better. Preston was gone not long after. He missed the video shoot after getting picked up in a car that was not his, and Big Country’s Mark Brzezicki stood in for the clip. Les Warner ended up on most of Love.

The title never actually shows up in the lyric. Around the band they just call it Sanctuary. Astbury has given a few answers over the years, and they do not all sit in the same chair. He once shrugged and said it was about sex, plain and simple. In a later sit-down he talked about refuge in a woman’s arms, matriarchal energy, Joseph Campbell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and the idea of the cosmos as a female force rather than a male one. However you read it, the single landed on May 13, 1985, climbed to number 15 on the UK chart that summer, and hung around long enough to make Love feel like an event before the album was even out. It went top 20 in Canada, brushed the American dance charts, and years later picked up platinum plaques. In 1993 they cut a remix, Sanctuary MCMXCIII, and it matched the original UK peak. Astbury has said you write a song like that once, where everything lines up past what you expected, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to write another one as good.

Love itself split the room. Some of the old Death Cult crowd wanted the band to stay in the shadows. What they got was Duffy’s Gretsch pushed to the front, Astbury singing like a man who had been reading too much mythology and listening to too much Zeppelin, and a set of songs that could fill a hall. Rain followed Sanctuary up the chart. The album went to number 4 in Britain. From there the road ran through Electric with Rick Rubin, Sonic Temple, and a long argument between the gothic kids and the hard-rock kids about which Cult was the real one. Both of them were. The through-line was always those two writers.

Astbury and Duffy did not grow up in the same town, and they did not start as The Cult. Ian Astbury was born in Heswall on Merseyside in May 1962. The family moved to Hamilton, Ontario, when he was about eleven, and he spent five years there hanging with other immigrant kids, including Iroquois brothers off the Six Nations. That stretch put Native American history and ceremony in his head for good. A trip back to England in 1977 put the Sex Pistols in his ears. His mother bought him Never Mind the Bollocks. He landed in Bradford, walked into a punk band called Violation that needed a singer, and renamed them Southern Death Cult after a phrase he had pulled from an anthropology book about tribes in Mississippi. They rehearsed above a reggae shop called Roots Records. First audience was a room of Rastafarians and a stoned cat named Rizla. The single Moya came out at the end of 1982. By March 1983 the band was finished. Astbury was tired of being cast as the spokesman for something called positive punk.

Billy Duffy, born in Hulme, Manchester, in May 1961, had already done time in the Nosebleeds alongside a young Morrissey, and then in Theatre of Hate. He first clocked Astbury on February 23, 1982, in the grounds of Keele University, where Theatre of Hate were playing. Astbury came through the bushes in buckskin chaps he had made himself, a blanket loincloth, and moccasins with bells on. Duffy thought he looked like Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, except he jingled when he walked. In the spring of 1983 Astbury showed up at Duffy’s flat in Brixton in a top hat with a carrier bag of clothes and asked if he wanted to start a band. Duffy said yes before the question finished. They called it Death Cult, pulled Jamie Stewart on bass and, after a short run with Ray Mondo, Nigel Preston on drums, and put out a four-track EP in July 1983. By January 1984 the Death had been dropped. The gothic tag was a box they did not want. Dreamtime arrived that September, Spiritwalker topped the indie chart, and then Sanctuary opened the door that Love walked through.

The two of them are still the spine of the band. They have broken up, come back, played football in Los Angeles with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Pistols, and spent the last few years celebrating both The Cult and the old Death Cult songs on the road. If you want the records, the tour notes, and the merch from the source, the official site is The Cult. The verified pages worth following are Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the long-haul fans who keep the old pressings and the bootleg talk alive, the unofficial archive at The Cult Music still carries the history through Love and past it, and the Cult Family group is where the Love-album arguments never quite end. Drop a request if you want Rain next. The Crew will find it.