Guitarist Billy Duffy remembers only one detail about the moment when he first presented singer Ian Astbury with the riff for what would become their band’s greatest song. As he recalls to MusicRadar with a dry laugh: “Ian wasn’t initially very impressed when I played it in rehearsals.”
Back in 1984, The Cult were looking for that all-important breakthrough hit, and from Duffy’s riff they created She Sells Sanctuary – a powerful anthem that would reach the UK top 20 and establish The Cult as major force in ’80s rock.
The song was performed live in late 1984 as the band toured in support of their debut album Dreamtime, but was eventually recorded for the sophomore record, Love.
“We were constantly moving,” Duffy says. “We were living it every day. We were quite prolific at the time.”
As The Cult’s songwriting team, Duffy and Astbury were perfectly in sync.
Duffy says of Astbury’s lyrics for She Sells Sanctuary: “I just get a great feeling of optimism about the healing qualities of love and safe harbour. The words give hope, which I think marries very well with the uplifting nature of the music.”
The bulk of the Love album was recorded at Jacobs Studios in Farnham, Surrey, but She Sells Sanctuary was recorded earlier at Olympic in London, which Duffy and Astbury had coveted for its association with Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and other bands they loved.
“Oh, yeah,” Duffy nods. “We recorded it at Olympic, which is gone now. Man, what a beautiful experience!
“The engineer there would tell us stories about Jimmy Page recording there. They told us that he actually didn’t use a Marshall, but a Vox AC30. We were like, ‘Oh?’ And the engineer was like, ‘Yeah… I was here.’ We loved it because that’s the shit we were into.”
One of the key features of She Sells Sanctuary is Duffy’s signature guitar intro and outro. This was loosely inspired by Jimmy Page’s use of a violin bow.
Duffy explains: “The violin bow was just something that was laying on the floor of the studio. Just to be class clown, I picked it up and tried to emulate Jimmy Page from [Led Zeppelin concert movie] The Song Remains The Same.
“From memory, I just turned all my effects and delays on to try and enhance the effect. At some point, I must have played the middle of Sanctuary.
“Initially, the song didn’t have the intro. It was just the middle section. But we were exploring studio effects and things and I guess with the help of the producer Steve Brown we decided to make that bizarre intro, which I think also features an Emulator Two, which was the new studio toy in 1985.
“And just to clarify - I didn’t actually use a violin bow on Sanctuary. That’s just what led me to getting the sound. It’s obviously picked.:
He adds: “Top tip: pick near the bridge – it has more of a chime!”
As for the gear he used in that session, Duffy says: “I’d always use a Marshall and a Roland JC-120 together. That was effectively the sound.
“And I used my Gretsch [White Falcon]. But there were some bits of Les Paul in there. And I remember I had a Telecaster, which I used occasionally on the Love album, but not on She Sells Sanctuary.
“I would say Sanctuary is 95 percent Gretsch White Falcon. And a bunch of different amps. I even had a Fender Twin, and a Yamaha copy that was like a Fender. Don’t ask!”
The mixing of She Sells Sanctuary took place at a far more modern spot than Olympic.
“It was done at a place called Good Earth in Soho in London,” Duffy says. “It was Tony Visconti’s studio.”
This song also turned out to be the last that The Cult recorded with drummer Nigel Preston.
“Nigel unfortunately was struggling with addiction issues,” Duffy says. “He was becoming a little bit of a liability and we had to accommodate this in the session by simplifying how he laid his drum tracks down, which in a weird way must've worked!”
Duffy is full of praise for the dynamic drum fill that Preston delivered near the end of the song.
“His fill is amazing,” he says. “It’s kind of like a drop moment, which a lot of songs since then have! Ian and I still miss Nigel a great deal.”
Preston died of a drug overdose in 1992. The Love album was completed with Big Country drummer Mark Brzezicki alongside Duffy, Astbury and bassist Jamie Stewart. For the subsequent tour, a new drummer, Les Warner, joined the band.
Looking back on She Sells Sanctuary, and the breakthrough success it afforded The Cult, Duffy, while appreciative, doesn’t think too deeply into it.
“Honestly,” he says, “the truth of it is me and Ian just wanted The Cult to be a rock band. We wanted to be creative and make music. It was always guitar-oriented, but we wanted the freedom to make our music our own. We wanted to carve our own path and not be constrained to being a goth band or a post-punk band.”
He concludes: “We just wanted to be left alone. Luckily, we had a label that allowed us to do that in Beggars Banquet. They allowed us to just be artists first. They let us get on with it, and so Sanctuary, and the Love album, is what happened.”
