She Sells Sanctuary

And the world, the world turns around

SONG: She Sells Sanctuary

ARTIST: The Cult

ALBUM: Love

YEAR: 1985

“I found a violin bow, and I started to play the guitar with the bow like Jimmy Page. I did it to amuse Astbury, who was in the control room, and in order to make it sound weirder, I just hit every pedal I had on the pedal board. Then once I stopped banging the strings and doing all that, I played the middle section of the song, which was kind of a pick thing with all the BOSS pedals on, and that sound just leaped out. The producer went, ‘Hold it, hold it, that’s great!’ And we decided to start the song with that mystical sound. If I hadn’t found that violin bow laying around, we wouldn’t have gone there.”

- Billy Duffy

And that, my Gen X brothers and sisters, is how one of the most recognizable intros in music came to be—an ethereal buildup that transports us to another dimension, a spiritual realm, before kicking into a driving beat that keeps you alive, keeps a-you alive.

She Sells Sanctuary was the first single off The Cult’s second album, ‘Love’. It was released in May of 1985 and peaked at #15 on the UK Singles Chart. The song also reached #36 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Disco Club Play Chart, though shockingly never cracked Billboard’s Hot 100.

The song is simple in composition, but still packs a punch nearly forty years later. Astbury’s vocals soar into the stratosphere, while Duffy’s guitar alternates between killer riffs, shimmering strings, and propulsive rhythms that contemporaries like Echo & the Bunnymen and The Cure were also playing around with at the time.

I remember first hearing She Sells Sanctuary at a high school dance. The memory is a vivid one, as I happened to be in the arms of a girl I’d been crushing on for over a year. She had a soothing voice and smelled like cinnamon and looked a little bit like Sade. “The sparkle in your eyes,” she sang. I kissed her before she could finish the lyric, then we found our own sanctuary later on that night.

“What’s the song about? Sex. Plain and simple, it’s about sex. I’ve had sex and I’m very proud of that fact.”  

- Ian Astbury

While there’s clearly a sexual component to the song, She Sells Sanctuary speaks to loftier pleasures, to finding solace not only in the fiery embrace of a lover, but in the embrace of life itself.

At least that’s how I feel whenever I hear it.

The song is so catchy, so visceral and immediate, that it lifts me into a different state, a parallel universe, where I once again feel a bloodrush of energy, and find shelter in the endless arms of the cosmos, arms that insist on keeping me alive no matter how often the world drags me down.

So if you’re feeling low today, reignite your inner flame by hitting PLAY and feeling the burn as the world and the world and the world and the world, yeah, the world turns around.