A million years ago, I had a chance to interview the members of Big Country. One of the most surprising things to emerge from that talk was hearing that Mark Brzezicki, the band’s drummer, is the guy we see on the skins in the Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary” video.

This was curious, but with Big Country in to talk about their current album and tour, this was not the time to talk about such things, so I had to let it go.

Years later, I had a drink with singer Ian Astbury and he shed a little more light on why Mark appears in the video and not Cult drummer Nigel Preston. Nigel, shall we say, had demons of an alcoholic sort that made him rather unreliable.

(Side note: The reason the drumming is so minimalist in “Sanctuary” is because Nigel showed up to the recording session very, very drunk. The band and the producer kept taking away bits of his kit until they arrived at a set-up he was capable of playing in his condition. By a strange stroke of luck, the result was an arrangement that turned a psych-goth track into an alt-rock dancefloor filler.)

Cult guitarist Billy Duffy has posted the true story of how Nigel missed out on being in what is still the Cult’s best video.

The ‘She Sells Santuary’ video was our second attempt at making a music video and it was our first big budget one costing the princely sum of £25,000, which was a lot of money in those days. ‘Ressurection Joe’ only cost £5,000 but I really didn’t like that one, I was really embarrassed by the acting bit, I was hardly in it and all I ever said on the shoot at the time was “when are going to get to play music in this video?”. Therefore my first experience wasn’t that great and I thought it was kind of comical but with ‘Sanctuary’ we went for something much better, that was more obvious with a performance video on a stage set.

We’d hired a theatre in Wimbledon and everything was set, a team had been assembled and it was all wonderful. We were told to show up in the morning with all our stage gear though we didn’t have to take amps as it was just about capturing us playing, remember, we looked pretty glorious in those days!

We all showed up in the morning and obviously this was a massive amount of money, our first big shoot and after a while everyone was like “where’s Nigel Preston?… there’s no drummer!”

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