Ian Astbury is 54 now, but he reckons he has an empathy for young artists.

Astbury, the singer in the seminal British rock band The Cult, says today's up and coming musicians don't get the same opportunities to build the body of work he has.

"It's great everybody has got access to make music and distribute music and put music out and all the platforms are there to do so," he says from his Los Angeles home.

Larry Marano Ian Astbury of the Cult on stage in New York in 1987.

"But when the artist's time energy and life experience and uniqueness and unique perspective and whatever that is … basically you're told your art is worth nothing. It's just reduced to Spotify [paying you] 0.017 of a per cent for a stream."

READ MORE:

* The Cult play New Zealand

* Gig Review: The Cult in Auckland 2010

Formed in Yorkshire way back in the early 1980s, the release of Hidden City in February marked The Cult's tenth studio album. The five piece will perform in Dunedin and Auckland on their brief visit this week.

Supplied The Cult founding members Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy.

After all this time, Astbury says he doesn't consider himself simply a songwriter. "You just don't objectify yourself in that way … it's more like 'hmm today I just feel like I wanna get on the piano and play some chords and just kind of work something out here and just kind of do it'."

Astbury says the only formal music training he ever had was two years learning the tenor sax at school. But even then he admits he didn't take it too seriously, spending most classes talking to a friend.

"We'd talk to each other through our instruments and do like Monty Python sketches while the class was just going on, we were goofing around."

However their interest was sparked when a teacher would play Frank Zappa tunes. "She got fired eventually," he says. "It was kind of cool going to school and being exposed to Frank Zappa. That in itself is an education."

Astbury had a nomadic upbringing, attending 12 different schools in three distinctive settings: by the time he turned 18, he had lived in Canada, Liverpool and Glasgow.

"Growing up as a teenager in North America in that period, music was so available, we had FM radio and stereos where they'd play entire albums," he says. "That's kind served me growing up in a very diverse cultural sphere of different influences, it made me open to other cultures," he says.

To this day a broad range of influences plays an important role in the sonic landscape of The Cult.

While Astbury is aware their sound isn't for everybody, people are quick to put them in a box, he says.

"So quickly you get marginalised and pushed aside because 'oh yeah it's hard rock and that goes over there in that pile'," the 54-year-old says.

"It's like 'well, wait a minute, wait a minute, we wouldn't have worked with [producer] Rick Rubin if it wasn't for hip-hop'.

"I've really tried to help people open up a little bit more to the broader diversity within The Cult canon, our body of work.

"We've been in so many different spaces."

The Cult, Dunedin Town Hall, November 19, Auckland Powerstation, November 21.