FEATURE > BILLY DUFFY
Your classic-rock rhythms and
single-note, Ennio Morricone-
ish stylings are always great,
but you’re probably best known
for those droning D-string
pedal tones, like on “She Sells
Sanctuary” and “Rain.” Where
does that come from?
If you go back to the song
“Horse Nation,” from 1983 or
’ 84, that droning lick is already
my thing, and then, yeah, it got
typified by “She Sells Sanctuary.”
What’s interesting is that you
could play those notes in several
places on the neck, obviously,
and you could even pick them
all out of a standard D chord
shape. But I got into this habit
because there was only one
guitar player in the band, and
it just helped filled the sound
out. I also started adding a little
echo, which filled the sound
out even more, but partly gets
eaten up by the band, so it’s not
so obvious. If you heard it on
it’s own, you’d probably think
the guitar was a bit too echo-
y and busy, and you’d think,
“Oh, that’s a bit odd.” But once
you’ve got bass and vocals and
tom-tom-heavy drums, a lot of
that echo would kind of van-
ish, and the guitar simply gets
“placed” in a nice way.
Photo by Dara Blumenhein
That drone style is sort of
similar to what Peter Hook
was doing on bass at the same
time in Joy Division—another
Manchester band.
Sure, that’s all in the DNA of
The Cult. It’s all part of where
we came from. See, back in
the late ’70s, we were all into
the New York Dolls and Iggy
& The Stooges, the MC5, and
Bowie, and then punk hap-
pened and we all sort of moved
towards that. But after punk,
bands like us wanted to find
our own voice. How do you fol-
low that? I didn’t want to have a
safety pin through my nose and
a stupid mohawk. So, you’re
not reaching for Les Pauls and
Marshall amps anymore—you’re
looking for something different,
which is how I arrived at the
sort of spaghetti-Western sound
and the Gretsch guitars. There’s
a song called “The Hop” from
my pre-Cult band, Theater of
Hate—which is still a great
band today—that people can
find that’s really the first song I
played on that way. That band
had a saxophone player who
electronically treated his sax,
so it sounded more like Roxy
Music. The drums were very
tribal. After all, it was post-
punk, so the drums were very
tom-tom oriented. They weren’t
straight rock beats. The bass
used to do a lot of riffs, kind
of like, yeah, Joy Division. So I
had to find some way to make
my guitar fit into that.
To be honest, I have difficulties with
coordination when it comes to the wah.
Although a lot of people think
of you mainly as a riff mae-
stro, you play a lot of great
solos, often with the wah-wah
pedal in a parked position.
That’s right, I don’t get funky
with them. To be honest, I have
difficulties with coordination
when it comes to the wah. I’m
right-handed, so I play guitar
right-handed and write right-
handed, but I throw with my
left hand and I’m left-footed in
soccer. If I were throwing a rock
at you, it’d be a lefty! So, some
element of the wiring of my
brain gives me a little trouble
getting the wah-wah to behave
simultaneously with my hands.
But I always preferred how
Mick Ronson and some other
guitarists would set the wah as
a tone control, to give a certain
EQ voice to things on record.
Ronson was like a god to me. So
was Mick Ralphs, obviously with
Bad Company, but also with
all those Mott the Hoople hits
he played on. Of course, I love
legends like Hendrix, but I never
talk about Jimi Hendrix, simply
because I think he’s beyond
my commenting—what can I
say about Hendrix that’ll have
any relevance? I talk about the
guys who, for me, were a little
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