June 8, 1986. The Cult are playing to a bumper audience of 40,000 at Finland’s Provinssirock, the second-largest festival in the Nordics after Roskilde. They’ve been touring the world for the best part of nine months and the end is in sight. It’s late, although night has yet to fall as the band play a set-list dominated by songs from their recent breakthrough album, Love.
“The stage had real flowers in front of it and we were playing in daylight,” recalls frontman Ian Astbury. “Afterwards, around four o’clock in the morning, I was walking around, hanging out, and the sun was still up. It was this anomalous moment in the northern hemisphere where the sun never goes below the horizon. I was looking around at this incredible halcyon scene, with people making out, drinking, conversing. It was just one of those special moments. You never forget the feeling, like a lived experience.”
Fast forward to 2020 and Astbury is at home in LA during the global lockdown. He began sifting through some of The Cult’s archive, including Provinssirock ’86, shot for Scandinavian TV. “Rewatching the footage just brought it all back,” he says. “It was right in the middle of the pandemic and I’m in East Los Angeles – police cars are being burned, there’s gunshots, rioting, chaos and pandemonium, fireworks every night. So everyone’s on edge. And I’m remembering this beautiful moment while being in this polarised moment in time that we were
