I Love Lorraine

… which is exactly what I thought Ian Astbury was singing when I first heard this song, hundreds of years ago – okay, circa 1986; ‘what a great love song’, I thought, ‘I bet Lorraine’s pleased with it’.  The Cult Rain is one of my favourite three 80’s British hard rock singles I can think of, off the top of my head.  In fact the top 3 would read:

1. Prime Mover – Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction
2. She Sells Sanctuary  – The Cult
3. Rain – The Cult

In Carmarthen’s single ‘Nite Spot’ the Riviera Club on Thursday’s student night (think Star Wars bar, but with more cider) Rain and ‘She sells..’ * would always go down an absolute storm and I also observed an interesting phenomenon, girls seemed to like them too.  As with all songs I truly like, I quickly developed an interesting and expressive dance routine that owed little to the beat or melody of the song concerned, or indeed the available space.  I’m not a fan of any of the Cult’s LPs, although I do own Electric, but for a while I think they were a mean singles band^.  Just like ‘She sells ..’ this track is a perfectly paced tune, with a killer hook, great vocal performance and a killer guitar sound; not to mention lyrics that sound brilliant but don’t bear closer scrutiny:

Hot sticky scenes, you know what I mean
Like a desert sun that burns my skin
I’ve been waiting for her for so long
Open the sky and let her come down

Here comes the rain
Here comes the rain
Here she comes again
Here comes the rain

Why do I like / own so many songs about rain, maybe because I’m from a particularly soggy part of the country and maybe it’s because rain is deeply embedded in the British psyche.  Whatever, this is a great tune and I defy anyone with warm blood flowing through their veins to dislike it.

Needless to say out of the three songs on this 12″, only the single version of ‘Rain’ is worth the trouble of listening to.  There is a big 80’s extended version of ‘Rain’ called ‘(Here Comes the) Rain’, which true to 1537’s law takes the focus and brevity of a great tune and adds pointless drum and keyboardy bits, to no good effect.  The other B-side is an earnest indie-rocker called ‘Little Face’, which wasn’t worth the time it took to listen to.

Incidentally, I feel a bit uneasy writing about this record as it doesn’t have a little sticker on it telling me when I bought it – its okay I didn’t steal this one too, it belongs to Mrs 1537.  About 10 years ago (after 8 years of marriage) I reluctantly merged our record collections, an act of intimacy that didn’t come easy, even bearing in mind the fact we’d had our children by that point.  Not, I hasten to add, that Mrs 1537 isn’t cool – she is, just well, it was my record collection and I didn’t want it diluted with hers**.  For God sake we even have 2 copies of ‘Permanent Vacation’ now and I’m not selling mine!  For a while I kept hers ghettoized in the corner, next to the classical ones and the seriously uncool ones inherited from my grandparents.  As Ian puts it so well and I think we can all agree, ‘Hot sticky scenes, you know what I mean’.

113 Down.

*which I only bought on 7″, failing to grasp the implications this would have 27 years later for my blog.

^Before they convinced themselves they were Native American Warriors – why? Cult, why?

**all 12, or so: Mrs 1537 having been persuaded by an evil ex-boyfriend to sell her record collection years before I came on the scene – otherwise I’d have a complete collection of Whitesnake LPs, damn!