Therapy?

For over a decade now, a question mark has hung over Therapy?

The obligatory symbol, which will forever make the band's name a query, is apt. After a Therapy gig you speak only in questions. . . "Excuse me?" But before a single eardrum had been perforated, another inquiry had plagued the band.

These pillars of Northern metal find themselves in an altered musical terrain to the one they first ground axes on.

Back in 1990 tight trousers, black t-shirts and goatee beards were not quite the incongruities they are today. Compared to the current vogue for galvanised Nⁿ Metal, stylistically the band has been going nowhere. Could Therapy? hold their own? To answer, the Larne rockers simply did what they do. In regulation black tees, armed to the teeth with three-minute stabs of turbo-angst, they ended their new-album tour on a loud note. And then a chord submerged in distortion. Die Laughing, Teethgrinder and Stories got a heaving mosh-pit ever more frenzied, as fresh performances of their back-catalogue nuggets drew the most earnest Diablo salutes. Meanwhile, the pile-driving decibels of new number Stalk and Slash stood alone. All the cliches of an elapsed counter-culture were present and correct.

The power poses, profane ululations, Sturm und Drang, and grotesquely warped religious icons. . . it was all so terrifyingly quaint. But what keeps the outfit fresh (and apparently infuses its fan base with new blood) is something that cannot date. Therapy? are an act that interacts. Whipping the crowd into a pumping, yelling mass of disaffection, the band kept security staff on high alert, but to little avail. Delirious crowd-surfers were routinely fished from the pit, while the stage experienced systematic invasions.

These high-octane hijinks between rock priests and congregation left no question about it: some people still badly need Therapy.