IE : You ’ ve actually never penned a song lyric ? BILLY DUFFY : Oh , no , no . Nothing . Ever . I might ’ ve come up with the Love album title for The Cult , just to annoy journalists in England who were still hung up on punk . I thought , “ How can we make this

know about Theatre of Hate and know how good they were for that era , that postpunk , early- ‘ 80s era . Because that ’ s where Coloursound comes from , the same as where The Cult and The Alarm came from . We were all punk fans who didn ’ t want to be in punk bands ourselves , really , because we realized that that really wasn ’ t what punk was about . Being a bad version of The Sex Pistols is not what you wanna aspire to , so you try and find your own way forward . And clearly , with The Alarm and Mike , they kind of hit that folk-rock , Neil Young , Dylan , Woody Guthrie thing . And we all hit the hairspray . And The Cult kind of went back to my roots , which was more like classic British rock . Well , not all British , but classic rock in the sense of AC / DC , Thin Lizzy , Free , Aerosmith ,

Coloursound

album really irritating to ‘ em ? Alright — we ’ ll call it ‘ Love ’!” But I ’ ve never been able to write lyrics — I always just try and express myself through the music , and that ’ s more like a general feeling rather than specifics . And that ’ s why I ’ ve been fortunate enough to work with very interesting singers in my life , like Mike Peters and Ian Astbury . And I had a good time backing Morrissey when we were only children , and then there was Kirk Brandon , a pretty underrated English singer from Theatre of Hate who was really great and helped me a lot when I was starting off . I can always tell people that know their music when they actually

Zeppelin . In the end — and I ’ m cutting out about six years of development there — but I ’ m just saying that it occurred to me that that era was very pivotal , and that ’ s in the DNA of a lot of bands . And you know , alot of guys in the States really only got turned onto The Cult with the Electric album and didn ’ t know anything about us prior to that , which is fine . But if that ’ s your ground zero with The Cult , then it ’ s a very different sort of mindset to the band than if you knew us in the four years prior to that .

IE : As long as we ’ re drifting back a little bit , I always wondered — What ’ s your

take on the scrapped Steve Brown version of Electric ? It ’ s good , right ? And Brown kind of defined your sound . BD : Well , it ’ s good . And we can ’ t go back . But I don ’ t believe that if we ’ d released that , we would have made the leap forward as a band that was necessary . I think

we would have not gained a massive amount of new fans , and there was kind of a careerist thing going on with The Cult ; like , what ’ s the next step ? And I was a little bit unashamedly careerist because I was fearful of going back to being unemployed . You know , I ’ d been in a band ,