The Bruce Mason Centre was never going to be the right venue for The Cult. Last time they visited Auckland, they played The Powerstation, an entirely more appropriate place for the band’s Gothic heavy metal and for the crowd that showed up for that show. But Bruce Mason is even smaller than The Powerstation, it’s all seated, and, well, it’s a little too nice for the kind of music The Cult play.
So last night’s show was switched to Spark Arena after tickets for Bruce Mason sold out faster than, clearly, anyone had entirely expected, and Spark made much more sense. A big stage for a very big sound worked so much better.
And it was a very big sound. The band have toyed with a number of genres over the years, but last night they stayed true to style that sits at the core of their work. Billy Duffy’s guitar lines were as heavy as they needed to be; Ian Astbury’s yelp sliced through the clear, sharp mix. And John Tempesta’s drumming was inescapable, his snare drum high enough in the mix to make one wonder if he’d slipped the sound desk a bob or two.
The set list took in the usual suspects, opening with Rise from 2001’s Beyond Good And Evil. Astbury introduced Mirror as “one from Under The Midnight Sun—you’re the hard-core if you know this one.” This is their most recent record, so clearly Astbury isn’t convinced that it’s getting quite the traction he’d have liked, but then perhaps that’s why the show cleaved more closely to the classics. Love and Sonic Temple got three songs apiece, while Electric, the 1987 album that largely redefined their sound, got a decent look-in with Wild Flower and a quite, well, electric reading of Love Removal Machine.
It’s not entirely clear what’s happened to Ian Astbury’s voice. The Cult singer’s been in Los Angeles a long time, and his northern vowels—he was born in Cheshire; the Cult were born in Bradford—have given way to something entirely more bizarre, something between mid-Atlantic and mid-American, and when he talked to the audience, placing his accent was all but impossible. To be fair, so was much of what he had to say. “What is time?” he asked the audience. “Time,” he explained, “is a construct.” This last point was so important that he said it twice. I’m sure it meant a lot to him.
And it wasn’t entirely clear what the audience made of not just this but the entire show. They weren’t the youngest crowd I’ve seen at a concert; as my mate Dave said, they were mostly the dads who’d dropped their kids off last night to see Hozier. It’s fair enough—I remember buying a copy of Electric on vinyl as a student longer ago than I’m entirely comfortable thinking about. And they were, at least for the majority of the 16-song set, surprisingly inert. “This is a rock an’ roll show!” Astbury reminded them; they did seem to need a little reminding.
But while living in Southern California might have messed with Astbury’s speaking voice, when he sang he sounded like it was still 1987, not a feat many singers can manage. Billy Duffy struck the same poses, his guitar all but vertical as he cranked out riff after riff, that we’ve seen him hit for decades. The audience were considerably less animated than the band on stage; it’s been a long time, but, as Ian Astbury said, time’s only a construct. The Cult did manage to rock like it was still the 1980s, and this was a very, very good thing.
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