The story of the The Cult‘s She Sells Sanctuary recording is, at its core, a story about a series of accidents that somehow all went right. The wrong producer showed up to a meeting. A demo was lifted from an agent’s desk. Five days in a London studio produced one of the most recognisable guitar riffs in post-punk history. Forty years on, it still sounds like nothing else.
How the wrong Steve changed everything
By late 1984, The Cult, guitarist Billy Duffy, singer Ian Astbury, bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Nigel Preston, had already written what would become She Sells Sanctuary. They debuted it in October 1984 on the Dreamtime tour, and it immediately locked itself into the set. The band knew it was the centrepiece of whatever came next. What they didn’t know was who would help them record it.
They wanted Steve Lillywhite. What they got was Steve Brown. The mix-up happened at the offices of their label, Beggar’s Banquet. ‘This guy turns up and says, “Hey, I’m Steve,”‘ Astbury told The Telegraph in 2023. ‘We sat down and we started to work out that it wasn’t Steve Lillywhite, it was Steve Brown. But he was cool. We said “What have you produced?” and he said “Wham!”. I’m like “Wham!?” We just went with it.’
Brown, a schoolfriend of Lillywhite’s, had a different approach to the pair’s post-punk instincts. He was, as Duffy put it to Classic Rock, ‘very focused on pop and wanted to bring out the commerciality in the band’. The label suggested a trial run. ‘Our record company said, “Look, this is a gamble. Why don’t you go in, do one song with him and see how it goes?”‘ Duffy recalled. ‘That turned out to be Sanctuary.’
According to Songfacts, Brown had already made his move before the studio session was even booked. He reportedly ‘nicked’ a demo of the song from the desk of The Cult’s agent, John Giddings, made his own edit, and played it back to him. It was the kind of audacious, instinctive move that suggested Brown and The Cult were going to get along just fine.
Five days at Olympic: the She Sells Sanctuary recording sessions
The Cult and Brown entered Olympic Studio in London in March 1985. MusicRadar reports the recording ran from 11 to 15 March 1985, with the final mix completed at Good Earth, also in London. Five days to remake themselves.
The song’s architecture was already in place. Astbury had lifted the bassline from the band’s 1984 single Spiritwalker. Duffy built the melody and the pair worked out a psychedelic guitar sound to wrap around it. What Brown did was strip away the remaining post-punk caution and push the colour up. ‘I like to produce songs that you want to turn up,’ he said in 1985. The band bought into that philosophy completely.
Duffy’s contribution to the song’s opening instrumental passage came from a violin bow he found lying around in the studio, if it was good enough for Jimmy Page, it was good enough for him. The finished track pulled together 60s psychedelia, hard rock mythology and goth-club energy, then wrapped it in a pop gloss that made it eminently danceable. Astbury’s wolverine howl on the chorus, ‘The fire in your eyes/Keeps me alive’, made the song feel both enormous and strangely intimate. What was it all about? ‘Sex,’ the singer said, ‘plain and simple.’
She Sells Sanctuary was released in the UK in May 1985. It climbed to No.15 in the singles chart and got the band on Top Of The Pops for the first time. Not everyone was happy. The NME sniffily dismissed it as ‘gimmicky’. A kid punched Astbury in the face at a concert. Nigel Preston, who played on the track, was fired after failing to show up to the video shoot. Preston died of a heroin overdose in 1992.
But the song’s reach kept extending. College radio in the US picked it up. The band played it on Saturday Night Live in December 1985. It became a big hit on Seattle radio, where Layne Staley and Andrew Wood were among those paying close attention. Jerry Cantrell later told Duffy that Staley ‘was really into us, the gothic stuff’. A line runs from She Sells Sanctuary‘s psychedelic swirl through Jane’s Addiction and into grunge’s DNA.
Brown went on to produce the band’s second album, Love. His relationship with The Cult lasted well beyond those five days at Olympic. When he died in 2021, the band issued a statement that captured exactly what he meant to them: ‘He was hugely influential in The Cult’s evolution and shall forever be entwined in our DNA.’ As accidental collaborations go, it’s hard to think of one that left a deeper mark.
