IAN ASTBURY

SPIRIT\LIGHT\SPEED

Back on Earth
High Time Amplifer
Devil's Mouth
Tonight(Illuminated)
Metaphysical Pistol
The Witch (Slt.return)
It's Over
El Che Wild Like A Horse
Tyger
Shambala

IAN ASTBURY QUOTES

SPIRIT LIGHT SPEED
"I'm obsessed with the movement of culture, the X factor that pushes it forward. Seeing it, being there, being a part of that vitality and trying to define the time you're in, that's what it's all about to me. And that's what I tried to do with the solo album, though it's two years old now. The studio held onto it for a while, demanding more money, then The Cult reformed, then we had to find a licensee, and then Beggars decided to put it out themselves - it all took time. Maybe now's the best time for it though, because there's a lot of heat around The Cult at the moment.
"I found it very liberating. I got to sing - no one sings anymore so, by default, I'm one of the last singers on the planet - but I also got involved in the music. With The Cult I brought songs to the band, but Billy always wanted to add his own personality and he was mostly in charge of it musically. Besides, my ability to play and arrange was quite poor. My role was more to do with aesthetics. I'd bring things to the band that I thought might be appropriate. I'd change my wardrobe overnight and drag them along with me. I did it for Love, Electric, Sonic Temple, the short hair for the last LP.
"Around the time we split, I did truly believe rock was finished, and electronica sustained me through that. I remember seeing Witchman with The Orb at Brixton Academy and being really blown away. So my idea was to mix electronica with rock. I discussed it with Gary from Future Sound Of London back in '95, when I did a track with them that sadly never came out. I said the song must come first, but he disagreed - he said the loop or the drum pattern must come first. Eventually I discovered that we were both right and both wrong, it could be either. In fact, ANYTHING could come first.
"So my concept for the solo album was that it should mix rock and electronica, be a cross between The Chemical Brothers and The Plastic Ono Band, when John and Yoko were really being soulful and experimental. That was how it started, but then the old acoustic guitar came out and I began to write as usual - revolution delayed. There's still a lot of exciting stuff on there though.
"The album was made at a time of complete vulnerability for me. I'd split with my wife and I think I only saw my kids twice during the whole session. I'd lost The Cult too, I felt totally alone. On top of this we were out in the desert, in Palm Springs. What's socially important, the cut of your jeans or whatever, didn't matter there. People just care about getting water and getting out of the heat. The landscape made it feel apocalyptic, like the end of an age, and the animals - the snakes and coyotes and wildcats - were truly dangerous. We were there in a breeze block studio in an industrial area. It had a kidney-shaped pool, of all things, because they used to film porn movies there. I very slowly unwound into the notion that this was not a record being made for any market, there was no contrivance. It was great.
"If there were themes - major influences - they were the movies of Kenneth Anger which were constantly playing on studio monitors. They encapsulated a flavour of what we were trying to create.

 
 

CD SINGLE
High Time Amplifer
Tyger (demo version)
High Time Amplifer (witchman mix)

PROMO 12"
High Time Amplifer (witchman mix)
High Time Amplifer (album version)
High Time Amplifer (mental defectives league mix)
High Time Amplifer (one true Parker mix)

 

STAY ON THE PATH!
"In 1989 I spent some time with this Native American kid in Rapid City, North Dakota. He told me he was going to college because he wanted to get educated and trained so he could purify his tribe's water supply. Then he asked me what I was doing for MY community. I could only answer 'Fuck all' and that came as a bad shock to me because I suddenly realised that I'd left it all behind. My roots were in Punk, in Crass, we began as a Positive Punk band and, with all the pressure to be commercial we'd become disconnected. We were lost. Immediately, I began to plan the Gathering Of The Tribes which was definitely the inspiration for Lollapalooza. That was good, but we stayed lost and eventually I cracked, walked away."

  THE NEW MUSIC
"I've always tried to stay on top of new music. That was the reason we got Rick Rubin in to produce Electric. I'd heard The Beastie Boys' Cookie Puss, with its When the Levee Breaks loops, Zep-style music and, on top of it all, rapping. And I thought 'That's it, there's no turning back. Music will never be the same'.
 

THE CULT SPLIT
"It ended in '95 under duress, and we never talked about it. I just left, walked out during a tour of South America. I'd had enough of rock, I was fed up with rock music, I thought it was dead, and I hated the travelling. I felt we were creatively compromised too. I was never a fan of big US rock. I did like Led Zeppelin but my favourites were Primal Scream, NOT the kind of big arena rock I think we'd become. There was a lot of pressure to succeed commercially after Sonic Temple."

THE CULT REBORN
"We got back together in March '99, I guess because it felt like unfinished business. It's incredible. We haven't written together for six years and I've found that I really missed that. I missed the chemistry, and I found I missed rock music too. Actually, we hadn't really written together for a long, long time. Ceremony was not a shared vision, that was Billy's and he led me along. And then The Cult album was mine, with me leading him. That was really what led to my solo album.
"It's great to have it back because, to me, The Cult were the best they ever were in the last five months before the split. I didn't care any longer about being accepted by the media, about being an important artist. I was only interested in the audience reaction, and the ritual of talking to the kids after every show. The adulation freaked me out a bit but I really felt like we rediscovered the reality that was always so important to us."

 

FREEDOM FOR TIBET
"When we reformed, I really thought we ought to play the Freedom For Tibet concert, it was exactly what this band has always been about, the kind of thing we'd always been involved in. But we felt the organisers didn't want us, they seemed to just want this bill of alternative types. I told them they'd widen the audience if we played, but it didn't seem to matter to them.
"I was really pissed off but had always been obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism, so I took off for Tibet on my own. It was incredible, and really quite dangerous. There was no transport, of course, so we had to trek for 8 kilometres through a storm. There was an avalanche, we were wading through drifts maybe four or five feet high, we even got attacked by a yak. We all got hypothermia and altitude sickness, which is really like being stoned. When we finally got to safety one woman was so sick she had to be airlifted out of there. Amazing.
"So when I got back there was this taxi drivers strike in New York and I had to get the subway, which I never do ordinarily. And incredibly Adam Yauch was in the same carriage as me. He said 'What have you been up to?' and I said 'Oh, just got back from Tibet'. Just as I said it the doors opened and I got off. His jaw hit the floor. So we got to play the concert - it was great."

 

GONE IN 60 SECONDS
"We're on the soundtrack to this big Hollywood movie starring Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie, and we're doing a cover. It's a Dianne Warren song called Painted On My Heart and when the idea was first mooted I thought 'No, no, run as far as you can, and as fast as you can'. But I held my tongue, decided to show the record company guy some respect and I quite got into the idea of it as an acting job. So, thinking that it would get us out in the public eye before the album's release in September, we went for it. We went in to the studio with Michael Bienhorn and got this slow, dark, gothic loop.
"It's kind of psychedelic, kind of beautiful, like a cross between Led Zep and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It's going to get a big blast when the film comes out. ItŐs going to be huge! I call it 'The Trojan Horse' because it's going to sneak us back in there before we hit them with our own album which, by the way, we've been ordered to finish by the end of August".

THE WITCH & HARD ROCK
"I've returned to The Witch on the solo album. I wrote it back in 1989 and it was originally called Northern Man, in homage to Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, that cultural movement that was gritty and real and is such a part of me. It was that cultural thing that made The Cult go so far into hard rock in the first place. Whenever people would talk about music in terms of high art we'd always go 'No, no, it's visceral, it's sensual, it's sexual. It's not about discussion, it's about ACTION'."

Another Interview with Ian Astbury by Juliette Owens from the information service

Link to the CULT pages

Link to HOLY BARBARIANS

Link to CHRIS GOSS - co-producer of the album

There are Cult and Holy Barbarians' VIDEOS in the VIDEO LIBRARY
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