Rick Rubin is “not musical… at all”, according to the Cult’s Billy DuffyThe Cult guitarist Billy Duffy has recalled his time working with producer veteran Rick Rubin, recounting in the process his lack of musical ability.
Despite his stature as one of the industry’s most commercially successful producers, Rick Rubin has made no secret himself of his lack of musical ability. Back in 2023, he famously sat down with CBS’s 60 Minutes and revealed that he knows “nothing about music”.

READ MORE: Jacob Collier disagrees with Rick Rubin’s philosophies: “His audience is non-creative people for whom creativity is novel”

When pressed by interviewer Anderson Cooper, Rubin iterated that his value as a producer lies in his “taste”. “My ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists,” he said.
So it might come as no surprise, now, that Billy Duffy is corroborating Rubin’s own statements about his lack of technical ability. That said, he does also confirm that Rubin was helpful to The Cult’s artistic development, nonetheless.
In a new conversation with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt on their Rockenteurs podcast, Duffy remembers how Rubin was drafted to work on their 1987 record, Electric. Hot on the heels of their previous album Love (1985), Duffy and his bandmate and frontman Ian Astbury sought to develop their sound.
“Long story short, we’d heard of Rick Rubin,” Duffy says [via MusicRadar]. “We’d heard from a friend in Canada. He’d done the Beastie Boys’ Cooky Puss, which is basically [the] Back in Black riff with a beat.”
“And we met Rick in New York, and the whole deal was, Rick was gonna just mix. He said, ‘I’ll remix your whole album, but you must let me record one song from the ground up.’ That was the deal. So we said, ‘Okay.’ The record company [wasn’t] gonna let us re-record a super-expensive album again.”
Knowing his weak spots in terms of musicality, Rubin recruited a team to help him finish the album.
“He did hire Andy Wallace to be the engineer. He’s not stupid,” Duffy says. “And [producer and A&R exec] George Drakoulias was there all the time. Rick and George were like a team.
“I would say Rick was the senior partner, but George and Rick were like literal partners because George was more musical. Rick’s not musical… at all.”

“We literally deconstructed the album on the spot. I went from a Gretsch with the Roland and the chorus and the echoes. And he was like, ‘Well, that’s a Marshall, that’s a Les Paul, off you go.’ It was quite traumatic for me, I gotta tell you.”
The recruitment of Rick Rubin proved to be a good choice for Electric. The album subsequently went platinum in America and is often seen as one of the top rock albums of the late ‘80s.

Rick Rubin is also widely known for his rules-free attitude to music production. “The rules regarding the right way to do it – none of those are real,” he said last year. “You can discard all of them.”
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