Interviews are not exactly something The Cult's Billy Duffy enjoys doing. This is something the iconic guitarist reiterates several times in different ways during the course of our 40-minute conversation. However, after remaining mostly silent during his band's recent Love Live Tour - celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Love album which carried the seminal single "She Sells Sanctuary" - Duffy is biting the proverbial bullet to promote new material.
Working outside of the label system and embracing new technology, The Cult have released two self-styled "capsules" - which are essentially mini downloadable mixed-media packages. The latest, Capsule 2: New Blood Deep Cuts, offers two new tracks, "Embers" and "Until The Light Takes Us," alongside live versions of classic songs, and an exclusive video performance of "Black Angel."
We caught up with Duffy while he was in Detroit on the penultimate stop of a 19-date US Tour to find out more.
NP: How's the tour been going for you?
BD: Oh, it's been going. It's been a life enriching experience as always.
NP:[laughs] A life enriching experience is a very layered response - do tell.
BD: Yes it is. All my responses are very layered, very ambiguous.
NP: It's very ambiguous, what's that about?
BD: You know, it's very difficult, when you're in the middle of a tour. I mean it is what it is. It's great and it's horrible and it's a bunch of different stuff. I'm certainly used to it. There's a degree of institutionalization to it, and there's sort of a rigid flexibility to it.
NP: And a rhythm to it.
BD: Yeah, to a degree. [It's] a lot like prison life. Or like maybe being in the army, a lot of hurry up and wait.
NP: Have you ever been to prison or in the army?
BD: No. How actually the majority of people experience rock & roll tours is from books and videos and stuff. I have my same experiences of the army and the prison. So that's how I view it coming from an outsiders point of view, but I could still see some sort of connection.
NP: You have this capsule release coming out. Explain a little bit about that. It's kind of confusing, but kind of cool at the same time.
BD: It's not really confusing. Tell me what confuses you about it and maybe I can respond to that.
NP: Well once I went on the website it all made sense, but, before that, I was like, a capsule? Are you selling some kind of time capsule that you have to bury in the ground?
BD: It's the word see. You're very attached to the word. It's just a word. Break it down, I mean why is a table called a table? Why isn't a table called a chair? I mean, we all just decided a table was called a table, and we all agree in every language in the world a table is a table. The capsule could be anything. But it's just simply a collection of different songs. But, it's funny if you break it down. I'm getting a little philosophical because I've been in a tour bus for about 2 days.
NP: Have you been answering the big questions about life, the universe, and everything on the tour bus then?
BD: No. No, that's Ian [Astbury]'s job.
NP: Has he come up with any answers?
BD: Ian, he's still looking. I think he's actually out looking right now.
NP: Which is why you're on the phone doing the interview.
BD: No, he's doing some. He does many more interviews than us. We just decided to embrace doing interviews. Last time we went out on the road we did that Love Tour. The general consensus was that we didn't want to do any interviews because it was sort of a nostalgic thing. It was good nostalgia. I used to say nostalgia with a lower case "n." It's something that we wanted to do, it's not something we had to do. But, by the same token, we didn't want to overtly publicize it. We didn't do any interviews. We had no photographers at the gates. We wanted to keep it kind of for the fans.
NP: Right.
BD: It was a fan driven thing, and it was really successful. We did great attendances with no record company, no nothing. We weren't really selling anything. It was just kind of a really great celebration of a band. But this time around, with some new music out there, we thought we'd spread the good word.
NP: I was just at the El Rey for Gary Newman's Pleasure Principle Tour. He toured his Pleasure Principle album in the same way that you did with Love, and had similar reservations. It was something that he had been resisting, but then he actually found that he quite enjoyed it.
BD: Well, you hold on to a lot of beliefs. We all hold on to a lot of beliefs about rights and wrongs, and what's the right thing to do. I think as time passes generally in life as a person, let alone as a musician or creative person, you sometimes maybe allow yourself to let go of some of those rigidly held beliefs just to see what's it like, and sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised. I think that's what happened with The Cult and The Love Tour.
It was something that I proposed to Ian when he was singing with The Doors. I ran into him in LA and I actually just said we should play the Love album at the Albert Hall. That's all I said. Everything started with that really. It was one of the best things I've done this decade really - apart from having a kid. I really enjoyed the whole thing of doing the Albert Hall. It meant a lot to me, and it was kind of fun.
I mean, I saw Gary do that. I saw him do his show. It was pretty cool. I saw him do that in Glasgow maybe, a couple years back. He was doing some tour, playing an album for sure. He was great. A guy like him, people go and see it and they say, "Oh yeah, Nine Inch Nails, Gary Numan - yes, there is a connection."
NP: Gary was also talking about how, as time passes, he has come to be more proud of his work then he was at the time it was actually released.
BD: That's the classic creative person's dilemma, and also a British thing where you down play your own worth. You have very low actual feelings of your own worth.
NP: But also, you can only Monday morning quarterback after the fact. For example, I was driving around town three days ago and I was listening to Jack FM, and they played "She Sells Sanctuary" back to back with "Sweet Child O' Mine." I'm like, fuck, those songs sound so similar, and I was reading your bio and I realized why; because a relatively unknown Guns N' Roses actually toured with you guys. But only in retrospect do you get a sense of the progression of music.
BD: Except that they'd probably written it before they toured with us. But I'm sure they heard "She Sells Sanctuary." They were all pretty turned on guys. But when they toured with us, they'd already released Appetite for Destruction, and it had only sold 50,000 copies. It subsequently went on to sell a hundred and something million. But at the time they toured with us, it was in '87, we were promoting Electric.
I mean there's an element of truth and there's an element of cross-pollination there, which is natural and organic between musicians and has always happened. You're obviously bright and have read rock history; Rock & roll, R & B, country, blue grass - it all blends, and ideas get borrowed, stolen, developed and moved on. And similarly, we came to make what for us was quite a departure from "She Sells Sanctuary." We were promoting the Electric album, which was a completely different sound. We were produced by Rick Rubin. It was really stripped down, kind of AC/DC-ish. It was a complete departure. And those guys had arrived where they were at doing Appetite for Destruction. I mean that album was done, "Welcome to the Jungle" was released.
NP: But I think "She Sells Sanctuary" came out in '85 and Appetite for Destruction was released in '87.
BD: Yeah. But it was recorded in '86. We'd never met them. They had a buzz on them. Ian tried to get me to go see them in London. They did two nights at the Marquee Club. They were sold out and I actually couldn't get in. They just wouldn't let me in, the typical London thing. I remember, it was like a real buzz on them, and that was before they toured with us.
Ian was the guy that found them. Ian uses the phrase cultural savant. We could sense a return to blues/organic rock. Suddenly people were whispering Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and finally the vacuum created by punk, enough time had passed that people were daring to mention the unmentionable, and that kind of blew up a little bit. Rock got massive again for about 5 or 6 years until grunge really. I mean, Guns N' Roses got bigger than The Stones almost.
NP: What were you borrowing from to develop your sound?
BD: I would cite early '70s blues, rock and glam: Thin Lizzy, Sweet, Slade, that type of music. I liked Free and Bad Company, and all sorts of stuff. Even Aerosmith I liked, very early Aerosmith, the '70s shit. I liked all that stuff and then punk happened...
When punk happened, that really caught my attention. I had to leave high school when punk happened, so situationally I was plonked right in the middle of unemployment and punk gigs. I grew up in Manchester, and I was going to concerts between '75 and '79 in Manchester, so that had a profound influence on me in terms of being a wannabe high school guitarist. Suddenly that put me in a situation where I thought I could actually really do this.
NP: I understand Morrissey was in one of your early bands.
BD: It was like a fledgling thing. Me and Morrissey were introduced through a little network of music fans in Manchester who were inclined towards American style music: The New York Dolls, Iggy and The Stooges, the MC5, Patty Smith, Television, Talking Heads, The Ramones...There was a lot of us that really related to that kind of musical scene, and we kind of met through that.
You can imagine it wasn't a massive scene in Manchester in those days. It really was just coincidence that I aspired to be a guitar tech for a band called The Nosebleeds, who were from my local area in South Manchester. It was basically the same council estate, and two bands came out of there. One was Slaughter and The Dogs, and one was Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds.
I was hustling to get a gig as a roadie. As a 15 year old, I was an obsessive on music. Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds split up and they were just left with a bass player and a drummer. The singer, Eddie, fucked off. I don't know what he did. The guitar player was Vini Reilly, who [went on to form] The Durutti Column. Tony Wilson, he found this guy. He'd put him on at The Factory and nobody would show up. Because he was like a long-haired hippy guy who wanted to be Steve Hillage, but he found himself in a punk band. He was the guitar player that I replaced.
The audition was in the bass player's mom's council house in Wittenshaw...They said, "Right, you got the job. Do you know any singers?" I was kind of shocked, because I really wanted to be their roadie. I got the gig, and I just said, I know this guy I've been going to gigs with. We used to watch Wayne County & The Electric Chairs, pretty much any band that was not like long-haired horrible progressive rock we'd go and see. But, anyways, it was Morrissey - Steven, as he was called in those days. He was wanting to be a singer.
We did a couple of gigs, and nothing came of it really. We didn't get a deal. Six months passed and we did this thing and it just wasn't quite right. I ended up getting an offer to join another band and go to London. There was actually wages involved, and being the careerist little fucker that I was, I jumped on that and moved to London. And Morrissey ended up meeting up with a bunch of other guys - Johnny Marr, who I knew from my high school band. He was kind of around. Andy Rourke went to my high school, and The Smiths came a couple of years after that...That's kind of how the connection with Morrissey was. Johnny Marr's still a good friend of mine.
NP: It's interesting that the two of you have that connection, because obviously you and Johnny Marr are probably two of the most iconic guitarists of the last 20 or 30 years.
BD: Yeah, it's funny that we came from a very, very small gene pool. We're kind of like little guitar heroes to different sections to the musical community. But I guess that's what everybody wanted to be in those days...
I remember Johnny coming with Andy Rourke, and it might have been the drummer. They came to Sheffield to watch a band I was in called Theatre of Hate. That was who I was in before The Cult. I remember Johnny came over and said that he was doing a band with Morrissey, which was cool. It worked out well for them.
NP: Well The Cult didn't work out so bad for you either.
BD: Exactly. I think they'd call that a win-win in America wouldn't they?
NP: I think they would...
For so long, part of the band experience was that you wanted to get signed, you wanted to have a major deal. But now, since artists are able to sell directly to their fans via their websites and social networks, having a record label is not necessarily something that's required anymore. Have you found it liberating to be free of the label system?
BD: It's definitely experimental. I wouldn't say that we completely disabused of the idea that there's some benefits to having a global structure in place that can help promote your stuff...We just didn't find the right kind of record deal because basically the music business is sort of trying to save itself before it eats itself...We made a decision not to engage in a record deal, of which there was several offered. None of them really spoke to us. Also, I don't necessarily know whether we as a band, or as individuals, were willing, at that point, to engage in the amount of publicity and promotion required once you sign on the dotted line.
NP: You've self-released two capsules to date, are there more planned?
BD: We are going to get back to LA and do some new music. We've got a couple of new songs. We've got a lot of new ideas. But we've got a couple of new songs that have gone from like the ideas to the actual almost a Cult song. They're coming down the factory production line...
We'll have to see. It really depends on what's being offered to us, and real boring, horrible stuff like what we're willing to spend to record them, and who with and when. Maybe we won't do Capsule 3. Maybe we'll go back to doing a concept album. I don't know. You've got to keep ducking and weaving, you know what I mean?
NP: You're going to be ducking and weaving in Europe next aren't you?
BD: We're doing the UK, and a couple of gigs in Belgium and Holland. It's really a British tour with a couple of Euro dates thrown on the arse end of it.
NP: Well have fun in Blighty.
BD: I can't wait. January in Britain.
NP: Yeah, you did pick the best time of year to go - not. You're in Detroit in winter and you're going to be in Leeds in January.
BD: Yes. Leeds. It will be fun. We'll have a good time. I don't have a problem with that. I'm kind of joking. We went into it with our eyes open. It's a cool tour. We've got Masters of Reality for those people that like that kind of stuff, and then we've got a young band that Ian's found called Romance, who are opening. So we've got a nice bill. It'll be all right. As long as we've got tea and biscuits in the hotel room, I'll be happy.
NP: I should let you go, but thanks so much for spending time on the phone.
BD: I enjoyed it. Actually a very enjoyable chat...I understand the functionality of doing interviews, you know, with WXPZ The Rock and [puts on exaggerated radio voice] "you're talking to Bear and we're going to put some Cult on after we play Leonard Skynard and a little bit of Sound Garden."
NP: You can't knock "Sweet Home Alabama."
BD: Well, you can try knocking it. It won't do you any good.
NP: It's kind of awesome, there's no denying it.
BD: Yeah. It's one of them riffs you can whistle and that's what I do, you know.
NP: A riff you can whistle. That's all you can ask for.
BD: Well, you can ask for a lot of things, but when it's The Cult, that's one of the things you'll get.
Working outside of the label system and embracing new technology, The Cult have released two self-styled "capsules" - which are essentially mini downloadable mixed-media packages. The latest, Capsule 2: New Blood Deep Cuts, offers two new tracks, "Embers" and "Until The Light Takes Us," alongside live versions of classic songs, and an exclusive video performance of "Black Angel."
We caught up with Duffy while he was in Detroit on the penultimate stop of a 19-date US Tour to find out more.
NP: How's the tour been going for you?
BD: Oh, it's been going. It's been a life enriching experience as always.
NP:[laughs] A life enriching experience is a very layered response - do tell.
BD: Yes it is. All my responses are very layered, very ambiguous.
NP: It's very ambiguous, what's that about?
BD: You know, it's very difficult, when you're in the middle of a tour. I mean it is what it is. It's great and it's horrible and it's a bunch of different stuff. I'm certainly used to it. There's a degree of institutionalization to it, and there's sort of a rigid flexibility to it.
NP: And a rhythm to it.
BD: Yeah, to a degree. [It's] a lot like prison life. Or like maybe being in the army, a lot of hurry up and wait.
NP: Have you ever been to prison or in the army?
BD: No. How actually the majority of people experience rock & roll tours is from books and videos and stuff. I have my same experiences of the army and the prison. So that's how I view it coming from an outsiders point of view, but I could still see some sort of connection.
NP: You have this capsule release coming out. Explain a little bit about that. It's kind of confusing, but kind of cool at the same time.
BD: It's not really confusing. Tell me what confuses you about it and maybe I can respond to that.
NP: Well once I went on the website it all made sense, but, before that, I was like, a capsule? Are you selling some kind of time capsule that you have to bury in the ground?
BD: It's the word see. You're very attached to the word. It's just a word. Break it down, I mean why is a table called a table? Why isn't a table called a chair? I mean, we all just decided a table was called a table, and we all agree in every language in the world a table is a table. The capsule could be anything. But it's just simply a collection of different songs. But, it's funny if you break it down. I'm getting a little philosophical because I've been in a tour bus for about 2 days.
NP: Have you been answering the big questions about life, the universe, and everything on the tour bus then?
BD: No. No, that's Ian [Astbury]'s job.
NP: Has he come up with any answers?
BD: Ian, he's still looking. I think he's actually out looking right now.
NP: Which is why you're on the phone doing the interview.
BD: No, he's doing some. He does many more interviews than us. We just decided to embrace doing interviews. Last time we went out on the road we did that Love Tour. The general consensus was that we didn't want to do any interviews because it was sort of a nostalgic thing. It was good nostalgia. I used to say nostalgia with a lower case "n." It's something that we wanted to do, it's not something we had to do. But, by the same token, we didn't want to overtly publicize it. We didn't do any interviews. We had no photographers at the gates. We wanted to keep it kind of for the fans.
NP: Right.
BD: It was a fan driven thing, and it was really successful. We did great attendances with no record company, no nothing. We weren't really selling anything. It was just kind of a really great celebration of a band. But this time around, with some new music out there, we thought we'd spread the good word.
NP: I was just at the El Rey for Gary Newman's Pleasure Principle Tour. He toured his Pleasure Principle album in the same way that you did with Love, and had similar reservations. It was something that he had been resisting, but then he actually found that he quite enjoyed it.
BD: Well, you hold on to a lot of beliefs. We all hold on to a lot of beliefs about rights and wrongs, and what's the right thing to do. I think as time passes generally in life as a person, let alone as a musician or creative person, you sometimes maybe allow yourself to let go of some of those rigidly held beliefs just to see what's it like, and sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised. I think that's what happened with The Cult and The Love Tour.
It was something that I proposed to Ian when he was singing with The Doors. I ran into him in LA and I actually just said we should play the Love album at the Albert Hall. That's all I said. Everything started with that really. It was one of the best things I've done this decade really - apart from having a kid. I really enjoyed the whole thing of doing the Albert Hall. It meant a lot to me, and it was kind of fun.
I mean, I saw Gary do that. I saw him do his show. It was pretty cool. I saw him do that in Glasgow maybe, a couple years back. He was doing some tour, playing an album for sure. He was great. A guy like him, people go and see it and they say, "Oh yeah, Nine Inch Nails, Gary Numan - yes, there is a connection."
NP: Gary was also talking about how, as time passes, he has come to be more proud of his work then he was at the time it was actually released.
BD: That's the classic creative person's dilemma, and also a British thing where you down play your own worth. You have very low actual feelings of your own worth.
NP: But also, you can only Monday morning quarterback after the fact. For example, I was driving around town three days ago and I was listening to Jack FM, and they played "She Sells Sanctuary" back to back with "Sweet Child O' Mine." I'm like, fuck, those songs sound so similar, and I was reading your bio and I realized why; because a relatively unknown Guns N' Roses actually toured with you guys. But only in retrospect do you get a sense of the progression of music.
BD: Except that they'd probably written it before they toured with us. But I'm sure they heard "She Sells Sanctuary." They were all pretty turned on guys. But when they toured with us, they'd already released Appetite for Destruction, and it had only sold 50,000 copies. It subsequently went on to sell a hundred and something million. But at the time they toured with us, it was in '87, we were promoting Electric.
I mean there's an element of truth and there's an element of cross-pollination there, which is natural and organic between musicians and has always happened. You're obviously bright and have read rock history; Rock & roll, R & B, country, blue grass - it all blends, and ideas get borrowed, stolen, developed and moved on. And similarly, we came to make what for us was quite a departure from "She Sells Sanctuary." We were promoting the Electric album, which was a completely different sound. We were produced by Rick Rubin. It was really stripped down, kind of AC/DC-ish. It was a complete departure. And those guys had arrived where they were at doing Appetite for Destruction. I mean that album was done, "Welcome to the Jungle" was released.
NP: But I think "She Sells Sanctuary" came out in '85 and Appetite for Destruction was released in '87.
BD: Yeah. But it was recorded in '86. We'd never met them. They had a buzz on them. Ian tried to get me to go see them in London. They did two nights at the Marquee Club. They were sold out and I actually couldn't get in. They just wouldn't let me in, the typical London thing. I remember, it was like a real buzz on them, and that was before they toured with us.
Ian was the guy that found them. Ian uses the phrase cultural savant. We could sense a return to blues/organic rock. Suddenly people were whispering Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, and finally the vacuum created by punk, enough time had passed that people were daring to mention the unmentionable, and that kind of blew up a little bit. Rock got massive again for about 5 or 6 years until grunge really. I mean, Guns N' Roses got bigger than The Stones almost.
NP: What were you borrowing from to develop your sound?
BD: I would cite early '70s blues, rock and glam: Thin Lizzy, Sweet, Slade, that type of music. I liked Free and Bad Company, and all sorts of stuff. Even Aerosmith I liked, very early Aerosmith, the '70s shit. I liked all that stuff and then punk happened...
When punk happened, that really caught my attention. I had to leave high school when punk happened, so situationally I was plonked right in the middle of unemployment and punk gigs. I grew up in Manchester, and I was going to concerts between '75 and '79 in Manchester, so that had a profound influence on me in terms of being a wannabe high school guitarist. Suddenly that put me in a situation where I thought I could actually really do this.
NP: I understand Morrissey was in one of your early bands.
BD: It was like a fledgling thing. Me and Morrissey were introduced through a little network of music fans in Manchester who were inclined towards American style music: The New York Dolls, Iggy and The Stooges, the MC5, Patty Smith, Television, Talking Heads, The Ramones...There was a lot of us that really related to that kind of musical scene, and we kind of met through that.
You can imagine it wasn't a massive scene in Manchester in those days. It really was just coincidence that I aspired to be a guitar tech for a band called The Nosebleeds, who were from my local area in South Manchester. It was basically the same council estate, and two bands came out of there. One was Slaughter and The Dogs, and one was Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds.
I was hustling to get a gig as a roadie. As a 15 year old, I was an obsessive on music. Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds split up and they were just left with a bass player and a drummer. The singer, Eddie, fucked off. I don't know what he did. The guitar player was Vini Reilly, who [went on to form] The Durutti Column. Tony Wilson, he found this guy. He'd put him on at The Factory and nobody would show up. Because he was like a long-haired hippy guy who wanted to be Steve Hillage, but he found himself in a punk band. He was the guitar player that I replaced.
The audition was in the bass player's mom's council house in Wittenshaw...They said, "Right, you got the job. Do you know any singers?" I was kind of shocked, because I really wanted to be their roadie. I got the gig, and I just said, I know this guy I've been going to gigs with. We used to watch Wayne County & The Electric Chairs, pretty much any band that was not like long-haired horrible progressive rock we'd go and see. But, anyways, it was Morrissey - Steven, as he was called in those days. He was wanting to be a singer.
We did a couple of gigs, and nothing came of it really. We didn't get a deal. Six months passed and we did this thing and it just wasn't quite right. I ended up getting an offer to join another band and go to London. There was actually wages involved, and being the careerist little fucker that I was, I jumped on that and moved to London. And Morrissey ended up meeting up with a bunch of other guys - Johnny Marr, who I knew from my high school band. He was kind of around. Andy Rourke went to my high school, and The Smiths came a couple of years after that...That's kind of how the connection with Morrissey was. Johnny Marr's still a good friend of mine.
NP: It's interesting that the two of you have that connection, because obviously you and Johnny Marr are probably two of the most iconic guitarists of the last 20 or 30 years.
BD: Yeah, it's funny that we came from a very, very small gene pool. We're kind of like little guitar heroes to different sections to the musical community. But I guess that's what everybody wanted to be in those days...
I remember Johnny coming with Andy Rourke, and it might have been the drummer. They came to Sheffield to watch a band I was in called Theatre of Hate. That was who I was in before The Cult. I remember Johnny came over and said that he was doing a band with Morrissey, which was cool. It worked out well for them.
NP: Well The Cult didn't work out so bad for you either.
BD: Exactly. I think they'd call that a win-win in America wouldn't they?
NP: I think they would...
For so long, part of the band experience was that you wanted to get signed, you wanted to have a major deal. But now, since artists are able to sell directly to their fans via their websites and social networks, having a record label is not necessarily something that's required anymore. Have you found it liberating to be free of the label system?
BD: It's definitely experimental. I wouldn't say that we completely disabused of the idea that there's some benefits to having a global structure in place that can help promote your stuff...We just didn't find the right kind of record deal because basically the music business is sort of trying to save itself before it eats itself...We made a decision not to engage in a record deal, of which there was several offered. None of them really spoke to us. Also, I don't necessarily know whether we as a band, or as individuals, were willing, at that point, to engage in the amount of publicity and promotion required once you sign on the dotted line.
NP: You've self-released two capsules to date, are there more planned?
BD: We are going to get back to LA and do some new music. We've got a couple of new songs. We've got a lot of new ideas. But we've got a couple of new songs that have gone from like the ideas to the actual almost a Cult song. They're coming down the factory production line...
We'll have to see. It really depends on what's being offered to us, and real boring, horrible stuff like what we're willing to spend to record them, and who with and when. Maybe we won't do Capsule 3. Maybe we'll go back to doing a concept album. I don't know. You've got to keep ducking and weaving, you know what I mean?
NP: You're going to be ducking and weaving in Europe next aren't you?
BD: We're doing the UK, and a couple of gigs in Belgium and Holland. It's really a British tour with a couple of Euro dates thrown on the arse end of it.
NP: Well have fun in Blighty.
BD: I can't wait. January in Britain.
NP: Yeah, you did pick the best time of year to go - not. You're in Detroit in winter and you're going to be in Leeds in January.
BD: Yes. Leeds. It will be fun. We'll have a good time. I don't have a problem with that. I'm kind of joking. We went into it with our eyes open. It's a cool tour. We've got Masters of Reality for those people that like that kind of stuff, and then we've got a young band that Ian's found called Romance, who are opening. So we've got a nice bill. It'll be all right. As long as we've got tea and biscuits in the hotel room, I'll be happy.
NP: I should let you go, but thanks so much for spending time on the phone.
BD: I enjoyed it. Actually a very enjoyable chat...I understand the functionality of doing interviews, you know, with WXPZ The Rock and [puts on exaggerated radio voice] "you're talking to Bear and we're going to put some Cult on after we play Leonard Skynard and a little bit of Sound Garden."
NP: You can't knock "Sweet Home Alabama."
BD: Well, you can try knocking it. It won't do you any good.
NP: It's kind of awesome, there's no denying it.
BD: Yeah. It's one of them riffs you can whistle and that's what I do, you know.
NP: A riff you can whistle. That's all you can ask for.
BD: Well, you can ask for a lot of things, but when it's The Cult, that's one of the things you'll get.