What it meant to me Part 1, Electric by The Cult

Release date 6th April 1987
Produced by Rick Rubin

Label- Beggars Banquet 

Line up (almost certainly the first band line up I could name every member of!)

Vocals - Ian Asbury

Guitar - Billy Duffy 

Base - Jamie Stewart 

Drums - Les Warner

 It's hard to imagine my life without this Band and especially this album. 1987, I'm 14 working on a Saturday in a factory tucked away behind the high street of Witham in Essex, I should imagine it is the summer by now. Over my lunch hour I walked into the shopping centre to grab a sandwich or probably a sausage roll from the bakery and then head into.. so at this point I remembered surprisingly a large amount of this episode, however my memory has always been very poor so here's the really fuzzy bit...Now I know it wasn't a music shop so I'm going to say it was either a Woolworths or WH smiths. Although you could buy CDs by this time, I didn't have a player so it was either Lps or cassettes for me and it was here, wherever here was, that I picked up the cassette of Electric by The Cult. Like the shop, the whys and wherefores for picking that specific album up are lost in the very murky mists of time but nonetheless it was purchased and I went back to work for the afternoon. 

 As I have mentioned before I have always had very bad memory recall, there are a few moments I really remember, waiting at the window for the arrival of my younger brother from the hospital aged five, the odd fragments of holidays and school life, the very first time I saw my wife, very little else but I do remember my first play of this album. Wildflower, the first track on the album started and it blew me away, I had listened to pop music for years but this was so much more to me, I jumped around the room and on my bed, I do remember this, that electric feeling (pardon the expression) but it truly was. This was the start if the path that really leads right up to this day. Following that album I went to to collect all of their back catalogue, all the Lps, Dreamtime, and Love and the following Sonic Temple with every 12" associated with those albums. Now if we're to ask me my favourite album I would have to say Dreamtime it's just is, but where it all began, Electric. The latter albums, Ceremony through to Hidden City, I have dipped into, my musical path led me in other directions, even so The Cult are still my first love. In the late 80s those paths took two distinct directions, the Goth route on one hand and the Metal route the other, both massive influences, both for later discussions.



 Back to the question of what it meant to me. This is the place where it all started, following on, I got heavily into music, my love now reaches far beyond Rock, I bought a guitar, played in a band, had the best time. I have friends from early on who will be life long, I can even trace a path to meeting my wife, all of this and much more can really be owed to that Album. Ian, Billy, Jamie and Les have a lot to answer for, most of it good. What it means to me, in short...Life Changing.

Steve x