Crazy About You - The Cult's Love Songs

--- Crazy about you - The Cult's Love Songs ---

 Wildflower 

These are three Cult songs I really love, Wildflower, She Sells Sanctuary and Fire Woman. I had a friend back in the nineties who adored Ian Astbury - I mean she was obsessed with him. I didnt see it. But these days Im always discovering bands that Ive overlooked, never really knew about or even understood. And there you go, The Cult stepped up. Wildflower - from the album Electric (1987). This song is sublime. The lyrics are delicious. Ian Astbury comes across in interviews as sweet, affable and interested in whats going on around him. Basically a teddy bear. But watch him rock out on stage, he's a born performer. He was brought up in Liverpool (Birkenhead) Canada and Glasgow, with his time in Canada developing his love for Native American lore and traditions. (Also influenced by Jim Morrison - who he stood in for in the 2000s with The Twenty First Century Doors). He has said about Wildflower that he was adopting his rock star alter ego of Wolfchild - his persona of when he's stepped over the sensible line. (songfacts.com) The song is about the singer's love of a free spirited woman, the euphoria of love, which makes you act strange and intoxicated. (songmeanings.com) But I think it's a sexy song of adoration, pure and simple. Who was it written for, I wonder?

Fire Woman 

Fire Woman (Sonic Temple 1987) according to The Cult lead singer is a song inspired by a photograph of a Native American woman by Edward S. Curtis. The woman's fierce, proud expression inspired him to write the song. "It's a passionate ode to the power of desire and the all -consuming nature of love" (old-timemusic.com) I defy anyone to tell me that Ian Astbury is not a work of art in the above video. And he actually smiles once (blink and you'll miss it). The Southern Death Cult which was a mish mash of electro - punk, nothing special and was the embryo band started by Astbury and Billy Duffy in the early eighties, featured a crazier version of indie star Ian Astbury, a visual Mental Mickey, but by Dreamtime (1984) a more coherent lead character had emerged, ripe for stardom. And by Sonic Temple this band was steaming hot. 

She Sells Sanctuary 

 'Oh, the heads that turn, make my back burn, make my back burn' From the album Love (1985) She Sells Sanctuary was the band's first hit. I was having a bad time and this song kept coming up on You Tube in the last few months. Ok, I was meant to hear it, I believe. 'It isnt just The Cult's best song - it's a pivotal one.' (avclub.com) Ian Astbury introduced this song as - ' The best fucking song ever written by anyone' from a stage one night. It's a big claim. "It's the power of finding solitude in a woman's arms and the matriarchal energy, whether it's an actual person or in a spiritual sense…the cosmos, female energy as opposed to male energy" - Ian Astbury N.B. "Sanctuary" is what Quasimodo calls for in The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo I'm all for embracing Mother Nature to cure a bruised heart. 

Check out Joneys Jukebox (Steve Jones of Sex Pistols radio show on You Tube) where the two main members of The Cult appear from time to time. Billy Duffy, Ian Astbury, Steve Jones and banter. It's great. On a January 31st three years, when Paul Cook also appeared on the show broadcast from The Viper Room, the foursome sang the show out with Happy Birthday to John Lydon. Billy Duffy, Jamie Stewart, Ian Astbury (mid eighties Cult) --- 

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