Richard North watched Southern Death Cult from the crowd and, by his own account in the NME, danced in his seat.
That was 19 February 1983, in "Punk Warriors," the article that gave a whole scattered scene the name positive punk. Southern Death Cult barely survived long enough to read it in print: a week later, on 26 February, they played Manchester and split for good. The record built from what was left, The Southern Death Cult, was assembled and released by Beggars Banquet only once the band no longer existed to have an opinion about it.
It draws on the "Moya" single, issued the previous year on the Situation Two imprint, plus live tapes and a BBC session, which makes it less an album than a rescue operation: thirteen tracks pulled together to document a band that lasted barely two years out of a council estate in Bradford.
Ian Astbury sang, chanting more than crooning, over Buzz Burrows's guitar and a drone that sits somewhere between a cheap keyboard and a guitar effect nobody has quite pinned down since. "Moya" remains the reason people still talk about the record: tribal drums under Astbury's voice, lyrics that read like fragments of ritual rather than lyrics, a title the band has said was borrowed from Native American myth.
The name itself was a small provocation. Southern Death Cult referred to a real archaeological term for a pre-Columbian ceremonial culture centred in the American Southeast, chosen partly, Astbury has suggested, as a dig at England's own North-South condescension — a Bradford band claiming a grander, older lineage than the capital was willing to grant the North.
None of the members stayed put. Bassist Barry Jepson went on to form Getting the Fear; drummer Aky Qureshi later co-founded the hip-hop and world-music collective Fun-Da-Mental and also worked with Burrows in a band called Joy. Astbury, within weeks, was writing songs with a Manchester guitarist named Billy Duffy under the name Death Cult, soon shortened to something that needed no further explanation: The Cult.
Most listeners now meet Southern Death Cult backwards, arriving at a two-year-old Bradford band through the multi-platinum one it accidentally produced. That's a strange way round for any record to survive, but it hasn't hurt this one: heard cold, without the family tree attached, "Moya" and the rest still sound like a band in a genuine hurry, working something out before the money or the time ran out.
Astbury has called California home since the late Eighties, a long way from Bradford, which makes The Southern Death Cult's continued life on Bandcamp feel like an archive tended from a considerable distance — proof that a band this short-lived can still outlast the postcode it came from.
