Three years ago The Cult toured their 1985 album ‘Love’, playing its collection of theatrical post-punk bravado from start to finish.

The tour went well enough that they’ll be repeating the trick, only this time with their 1987 album, ‘Electric’. Thing is, ‘Electric’ was a very different album to ‘Love’, and deliberately so. For their first attempt at recording a follow-up they went to a manor house in Oxfordshire owned by Richard Branson, but the 12 songs they came up with in that genteel setting weren’t what they were looking for.

Instead, the British band flew to New York to start over. For lead singer Ian Astbury, an Englishman who’d grown up in Canada, New York at the time was a fascinatingly dangerous environment, and that helped redefine their sound.

“I mean, I walked around the corner one night after there’d been a mob hit in the street on 6th Avenue,” he says. “I didn’t know until I got in the studio. Someone said, ‘A guy’s been shot around the corner’. The place where we used to get ice cream got held up; Billy Idol got arrested when we tried to cop dope in Washington Square Park. There were muggings. It was winter, it was filthy.”

As well as spending time with Billy Idol they got to work with producer Rick Rubin for the first time, who had recently become an associate of the Def Jam label. Rubin was hanging out with the Beastie Boys, steering them away from their punk roots and into hip hop.

“Being in New York making the record had an incredible impact on the record,” says Astbury. “Being around the whole Def Jam family, hanging out with people like LL Cool J and Run-D.M.C. and Slayer and Beasties. They were omnipresent, they always used to come over and hang out in the studio so it was like a different scene in the studio every day. Strangely enough, they used to always come by when it was dinnertime,” he says with a laugh.

“Pizza boxes would be open and beers knocking around, everyone would get stuck in and then disappear. But they knew where Rick was and everybody wanted to find Rick. Rick was in the studio 24/7. He was in the studio every day with us, which I think is a bit of a rarity now.”

Rubin obviously didn’t want to push The Cult in the same direction as the Beastie Boys, but he did have an influence on their shift from the post-punk sound that had seen them labelled ‘goth rock’ (Astbury bristles at the words even today), and into hard rock and heavy metal revivalism. Astbury was already a fan of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and especially The Doors, but it was Rubin showing them American metal pioneers Blue Cheer that had the biggest impact.

“He wasn’t ‘Rick Rubin’ then,” Astbury says of the superstar producer who now works with Kanye West and Jay-Z. “He was in his dorm room when we met him. He basically showed us a Blue Cheer video, said, ‘Do you want to do this or do you want to do fluffy English alternative music?’”

New songs like ‘Love Removal Machine’ were a million miles away from “fluffy English alternative music”. Their hard-edged new sound helped them break America, and ‘Electric’ eventually outsold ‘Love’ and was certified gold. Being big in America wasn’t just important to Astbury because of the sales, but because when he’d been a kid in Canada, American culture was unavoidable.

“A lot of the TV shows I was watching were broadcast from New York,” he says, “its sports teams were very dominant, the local channel was from Buffalo, New York. I mean we had 48 channels of TV and most of it was from the States. I kind of grew up with a real strong North American influence on me, which is great. When I went back to England everybody goes, ‘Why are you talking in an American accent?’ It’s because I’ve grown up in North America!”

During that time in Canada Astbury’s family moved around a lot, and he attended “11 or 12 schools”. One of them he describes like something straight out of the Victorian era, a school where they still taught Latin and came down hard on anybody who was different.

“I got thrown out of school when I was like 11 for having blue food colouring in my hair,” he says. “Trying to emulate, being a glam kid. It was just food colouring, it wasn’t permanent, but I got thrown out of the class immediately. And that definitely sets a boundary right there, you know? That becomes a division. I love Bowie, I get thrown out of school because I love Bowie’s music and I want to affect his look so obviously I’m going to side with Bowie as opposed to side with school.”

Being a recent immigrant to the country as well as a troublemaker, the young Astbury had trouble fitting in at first, but love of music gave him a way of escaping, as well as helping to form bonds with kids who would otherwise not have had much in common.

“The environment was constantly shifting but what wasn’t shifting was my taste in music. The first thing I ever bought was David Bowie, ‘Life On Mars’, when I was like ten or something. And I’ve probably bought everything he’s ever released since, so that was a constant. The bedroom and record player was a refuge, and also a point of reference for the kids. You meet kids and say, ‘What do you listen to?’ ‘I listen to the Sex Pistols’. You go OK, that’s instant rapport – instant bond.”

The Cult play Eatons Hill Hotel Tuesday October 1.