Gig review: The Cult at Manchester Apollo

Live review: The Cult at Manchester Apollo, Friday, October 25 2024

By STEVE MASCORD

IT’S one thing to give a band a lukewarm-to-poor review. It’s quite another for people to agree with you for diametrically opposed reasons.

This is the dichotomy in which The Cult finds itself in 2024. One fan on a Facebook group said he agreed with my uncomplimentary post about this show because “Love  is one of the greatest albums of all-time. Then they turned into a cross between AC/DC and a hair metal band”.

But another said “Loved Sonic Temple … After? Meh”.

Yet, as I’m sure most HM readers would be aware, The Cult started as a jangly indie band, released an AC/DC-infused straight ahead rock record in 1987 called Electric – breaking them in North America and Australasia – got their Zep on with Sonic Temple in 1989 and then experimented with Indigenous American mysticism for a while before trying to find a balance between those first two extremes.

For, like, three decades.

The current tour, which will soon descend on Australia, celebrates their 40th anniversary and inevitably they must attempt to combine both their core elements. Tonight we’re in Manchester, home of hanky-hanging-out-yer-pocket shoe-gazing so you’d expect the early stuff to receive a good reception.

Firstly: the positives.

Ian Astbury looks and sounds wonderful. He has this loose-fitting, tailored stage garb which seems like it’s designed for riding camels across the Sahara. He’s a whirling dervish himself, full throated and agile and covering lots of ground. All in all a far cry from the man I once saw split his pants on stage and abuse audience members as “failed musicians, all of you”.

If you want to see a rough simulacrum of what Ian Astbury was like live in his prime, this is the tour to see.

But the negative for readers of this here hard rock and heavy metal publication is that this is only sporadically a hard rock and heavy metal show. The acoustics at the Manchester Apollo don’t help. As was the case with Jane’s Addiction (RIP) show here earlier I the year, it sounds like the band are putting on a show for themselves and we are outside an aquarium tank peering in.

But the songs which should rip your head off – like opener “In The Clouds”, to name the earliest example – don’t. They are watered down with too much Indie jingle jangle and too little blue collar muscle.

“Edie (Ciao Baby)” is performed acoustically and that is the highlight of the entire evening. This segues into “Sweet Soul Sister” which sounds like The Smiths trying to play Nazareth. Again, the acoustics might be a factor but it just doesn’t fly.

Later in the show I climb up to the balcony – before being moved on by a steward – and look down upon one of my favourite Cult songs, “Fire Woman”. Half the audience has been waiting for it all night, the other half regards it the way a fine dining connoisseur might regard Dominos pizza.

It’s not the song I remember. It’s trying real hard to be. But it’s an indie version of itself, thin and underwhelming.

I hope the Aussie shows are, well, more ROCKING! But the Cult are like two different bands with two distinct sets of fans. Pleasing them all in one concert seems impossible.