After the breakthrough success of their second album,
Love, the Cult began working on a follow-up with producer Steve Brown. In the summer of 1986, they recorded twelve tracks at the
Manor Studio in
Oxfordshire. These recordings, which came to be known as the Manor Sessions, were to make up a new album, tentatively entitled
Peace. According to singer
Ian Astbury, the band was dissatisfied with the results of the sessions, stating, "We were in a residential studio in
Oxfordshire, packed with booze, unsupervised. It was probably the same for
the Stone Roses making
The Second Coming. We spent a quarter of a million pounds making an album that sounded like soup." Rubin instead asked the band if they would be interested in recording something more akin to
AC/DC or early
Led Zeppelin. Engineer
Tony Platt has stated that Rubin would compare the instrumentation on the album to "the guitar sounds from
Back in Black, the drum sound from
Highway to Hell, and the voice sound from
Led Zeppelin," playing snippets of each record during mixdown. Rubin's production emphasized the
bass drum, owing to his background as a hip hop producer. Although all twelve of the Manor Sessions tracks were initially scrapped, four of them would turn up as
B-sides to singles from
Electric. A further five of them appeared on a limited edition
EP, and with the release of
Rare Cult in 2000, the rest of the unreleased Steve Brown-produced tracks were made available, albeit in a limited edition format. They were finally made available on a mainstream release in 2013 as part of the
Electric Peace release. ==Critical reception==