“Rick put me on the spot. He said, ‘So, this is a Les Paul.’ I was like, ‘I know.’ Then he went, ‘Okay, and this is a Marshall…’”: Why The Cult scrapped an entire album and re-recorded it with Rick Rubin

The Cult.

It was a huge gamble. In 1986, British rock band The Cult had spent months recording an album at a cost of £250,000 – only to dump the whole thing and start again from scratch.

The result was a tough-sounding, riff-driven hard rock album produced by Rick Rubin and named Electric. It was a radical departure from the band’s early post-punk and gothic rock styles.