So much for perceptions. Just when you think that Ireland's most successful metal band Therapy? – all the way from Larne and Ballyclare via Top of the Pops appearances and a Mercury Music Prize nomination – consists of fortysomething men with a penchant for feral sneers, Faustian pacts and snuff movies, along comes the band's lead singer, Andy Cairns, to dispel such ridiculous notions.
"In 2009, we released an album called Crooked Timber," relates Cairns the morning after the opening of Therapy?'s UK tour in Brighton a few weeks ago. "It referenced Immanuel Kant in the title, and at various points on the record there was a chord progression taken from John Coltrane's Giant Steps, a time signature taken from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and lyrics that referenced Samuel Beckett's playlet, Ohio Impromptu. But then, after all of that, a metal magazine reviewed the album saying it sounded like three men in a cave beating sticks. All those references, chord structures, time signatures: were they all in vain? Would we have got a better write-up if we had sung about ripping down a highway on motorbikes?"
Although it seems as if he’s griping, Cairns is at pains to point out he’s doing nothing of the sort – incorrect perceptions will always be there, and all you can do is let them slide off your back.
The main perception that has changed over the years is that rock music is a young person’s game. It’s instructive to note Therapy? formed in 1989, and that in September Cairns will celebrate his 50th birthday.
“Last night, after the show, we met a mother who had brought her 21-year-old daughter along. We get the new generation of fan quite a lot – more people are bringing their kids to the shows, and the parents were mentioning gigs they had been at in the early 1990s, gigs that even I had trouble remembering.
“We’re dealing with the increment of time on a daily basis, of course, and it’s only when you talk to other people objectively about it that you realise how many years have passed.”
Doing a Rolling Stones
Cairns vividly recalls someone asking him in 1991 if he could see Therapy? doing a Rolling Stones. “We were asked would we still be around in 2011. We all laughed because it seemed such a ludicrous idea. But nowadays, we feel that there is a market for bands that have been around for over 25 years. Back in the day, the standard bearer for musicians of a certain age to still be performing was in either country, classical or jazz. You may have gotten into Radiators from Space, Boomtown Rats, The Damned, Iron Maiden, or whoever, when you were a teenager, but the idea was that when you got into your 30s you’d dig out records by Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and, if you were a bit edgy, Elvis Presley.”
More Black Flag than Rolling Stones, Cairns acknowledges that – notwithstanding the band's commercial success during the 1990s, with 11 UK Top 30 hit singles and two UK Top 10 albums, 1994's Troublegum and 1995's Infernal Love – Therapy? hasn't been a mainstream act for quite some time. The band isn't out there, he says, rattling the gates of the dream factory desperately trying to break in. He remembers the band's several appearances on Top of the Pops as close to a fairy tale.
"We were kids from east Antrim – Ballyclare, Larne – and we remember seeing bands like Buzzcocks and Boomtown Rats on Top of the Pops, so while we might not have aspired to being on music shows like that, we certainly didn't snigger at it or throw scorn upon it."
Simple ambitions
The mainstream just isn’t Therapy?’s thing, is it?
“We know a band that looks the way we do, that makes the music the way we do, and that tackles subject matter in the songs the way we do, isn’t going to be a mainstream concern for any great length of time. Because we spent quite a few years in the underground and hardcore circuit before we experienced that crossover period in the 1990s, we knew we just wanted to be gigging musicians. The wilfulness within the band meant that we enjoyed the commercial success for what it was, but we weren’t prepared to make any more sacrifices beyond what we had achieved.
"Our ambitions were always really simple," says Cairns. "The very first ambition we ever had was to have one of our records displayed and sold at Caroline Music in Belfast. It was the only record shop in the city that you could buy indie and underground records; they had tastemakers working in the shop, and if they thought that one of your self-released records was any good, they'd buy some from you, display it on the 'local releases' wall and sell it. Our first seven-inch, Meat Abstract, was up on that wall."
Therapy?'s second ambition ("we were really in dreamland for this one") was to get signed to a record label they admired. "We signed to a Rough Trade offshoot label called Wiiija. On the face of it, this wasn't such a big deal, but Wiiija released our first album, Babyteeth, through Touch and Go Records, which was home to bands such as Big Black, Butthole Surfers and Jesus Lizard. Because we were so into these bands, we were thrilled, and so it was another ambition realised."
Cairns accepts Therapy? didn’t have, perhaps, the business or networking savvy to strategically capitalise on connections made with the likes of Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, two highly influential members of the international metal fraternity.
“Yes, we could have made more of those connections we made in the business down through the years. That wasn’t for us, though. We were far more content in getting by with the things that inspired us, pure and simple.”
Disquiet by Therapy? is on Amazing Record Co
CAIRNS’S LEFTFIELD PICKS: NON-ROCK FAVOURITES
- "I love the Burial album Untrue (2007). Just before Therapy? did the Crooked Timber record, which we released in 2009, I was getting really bored with music, but I discovered this album and, at the time, it was the most amazing, elegiac music I'd heard. It's a dub album, basically, but it's done in a skitterish, unusual way. The atmosphere on it sums up a kind of subterranean loneliness and melancholy that really spoke to me."
- "I like quite a lot of classic old jazz such as Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus – in fact, Haitian Fight Song, from Mingus's 1957 album, The Clown, is one of my favourite songs of all time. Things like that I can listen to for ages."
- "One of my favourite pieces of music of all time is Schubert's Winterreise (Winter Journey), which is a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano based on poems by Wilhelm Müller. There's a quality that is very powerful, very moving, very haunting. Samuel Beckett was a big fan of this song cycle. I like music that is either blunt and direct, or headphones music like Can, but Winterreise is up there with the best."
