This year is the twentieth anniversary year of the Belfast-based alternative rock band Therapy? The upcoming new album ‘Crooked Timber’ is their tenth full-length studio album, although guitarist/vocalist/master brain Andy Cairns already speaks of their thirteenth album. He possibly counted ‘Caucasian Pychosis’ (a compilation of the first two EP’s of the early nineties), the EP ‘Hats Off To The Insane’ and ‘So Much For The Ten Year Plan – A Retrospective 1990-2000’ as well? Let’s hear what he has to say about this new album, which title refers to a quote from the great, late Immanuel Kant. O la la, are we becoming philosophical, Therapy?
Andy is in the American Hotel in the heart of Amsterdam on a fresh, but sunny Wednesday in early February and his anonymous appearance makes him almost unrecognizable. He’s wearing a big, black nameless hoodie, hasn’t shaved his beard for at least a week (or two) and is wearing glasses with a thick, black frame. But his eyes shine with nothing but kindness and he looks extremely at ease. Maybe because I’m the first interviewer he sees here in Amsterdam for a two-day interview marathon? I tell him that Therapy? has a special place in my heart, because it was the first band my girlfriend and I were listening together. That was on the International Four Day Marches in Nijmegen in 1995, where we walked 40 kilometres each day, while learning to know each other and listening to a Therapy? live recording in my walkman I’ve recorded from a radio show. On a cassette tape that was… Andy has immediately an anecdote about Nijmegen. One of the first places we played in Amsterdam was at the Milky Way back in 1991, or 1992. After the gig we were travelling with a day off. We were kinda exhausted and stayed the night in Nijmegen. We went to a coffeeshop– like we did when we were younger [chuckles] - and had a few beers and some [speaks very silently] hash. We went to bed in that hotel that night, giggling and stoned, and suddenly the ground, walls and everything was shaking. We thought a train was going over our head. We saw the cracks in the wall. Because we were so stoned we thought a train or a huge truck or something hit the hotel. The next day we got up – while still heavily stoned – and asked the concierge about the train. “No, sir”, he said, “there was an earthquake last night.” It happened to be a very small earthquake that hit Nijmegen.
So how’s Andy doing now? I’m doing great actually. Although it’s been over a year since we’ve been here in Holland, and it’s been two and a half years since our last album came out. We also haven’t toured in a while.
When you asked me, I think 2008 was a kinda lazy year for Therapy?, isn’t it? Yeah, it is! I’ll tell you why. We’ve been together for nineteen years now, and we’ve released twelve albums, EP’s and lots of singles. We got in that pattern of releasing an album and touring afterwards every two years. But while we were touring for our last album, ‘One Cure Fits All’, we realized we weren’t as happy as normal. We were enjoying the tour, but not as we used to do. We didn’t know exactly what it was. So after the tour when we got together again to write some new songs, I suggested taking a year off. Not to make a big deal out of it, but if we weren’t careful, we probably could run out of ideas. It happened when we just got a new record deal with Demolition and we didn’t want to go into the studio just for the sake of recording a new album. The break did really good to us. We all feel very healthy and we’re really proud of how the album turned to come out. And luckily we were able to take a break. Although we’re not rock stars or something, the days when we did make a lot of money, we kind of invested it wisely.
Let’s hope it’s not on Icesave… So what did you do when you were not the singer of Therapy?? Living a family life? Yeah, basically that’s it. And that’s good. I have a nine-year old son [Jonah Ramone] and I spend a lot of time with him. My wife Kristina, Jonah and me went on a couple of trips together as a family. Also, I always wanted to do something more with computers, especially since my wife and son know a lot more about computers than me. I also played a lot on my guitar and listened to a lot of music. But whenever I’m home a lot and I’m there all day, I get on my families nerves. My wife has her business; my kid is at school all day, so eventually my guitars were all over the place in the house. It’s not that I don’t do anything when I’m at home; we all get up at seven o’clock, I do have a schedule like taking the dog out, going to the gym etc., and I hate doing nothing.
Everyone needs some kind of regular system in his life… Though it was pretty strange to me. When I left school, I took a year off with the intention of doing some further education. During that year off, I always stayed up late and was a nighttime person: I played the guitar until four or five in the morning. The first job I got was working nights [in a Michelin tyre factory], working from eleven PM until seven AM. I did it, because the money was great. I left that job, because I started playing in a rock & roll band where you get up on stage at ten o’clock, so you basically have the same life. So since the age of nineteen until about nine years ago – when my son was born – my rhythm was nightshift. In the beginning the nightshift was good anyway (doing the diapers and giving milk at night and so…), but when your kid is growing older and started to going to school, it’s not. So he went to school about five years ago, so then I suddenly changed my rhythm and got up at six o’clock in the morning. The first time we went on tour then, after we had also a break of like a half a year or so, my body was used to get up at six o’clock or so. It was about half past nine and everyone was filled with adrenaline, while I was already getting sleepy [chuckles]. But I’m doing all right with it. It takes about three nights and then I’m used to live at night again.
Let’s talk about the new album. It’s even more focused on rhythms as before. I hear Helmet, Prong, The Jesus Lizard… Oh yeah, definitely Jesus Lizard! Especially the songs ‘The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself’ and ‘Exiles’ are very Jesus Lizard. I always liked Jesus Lizard, and especially Duane Denison’s guitar play. It’s heavy, but intense. They’ve got back together now. But the Helmet thing is funny, because on this album we want to break with the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus; you know, the typical rock song formula. I mean, when you’re fifteen, sixteen years old, an album like ‘Troublegum’ or a band like My Chemical Romance would be your kinda thing, not when you’re a bunch of guys in their forties like us. So we started to taken our influences again when we started up with Therapy? The song ‘Enjoy The Struggle’ is for instance heavily influenced on the song ‘Haitian Fight Song’ from jazz bass player Charles Mingus, where we based our guitar riff on his bass riff. When we heard the song back we thought: “But... this sounds like Helmet!” And we toured with Helmet in the past and what we remembered was that Page Hamilton studied jazz at that time. He used to write guitar riffs around jazz swing themes. So that’s why it sounds so like Helmet. By the way, in 1993 we toured in The States for two and half months with The Jesus Lizard and Helmet on the same bill, so there you go.
The main riff in the last song of the album, ‘Bad Excuse For A Daylight’, is taken from Igor Stravinsky. He wrote a piece called ‘The Rite Of Spring’ which caused all kinds of mayhem when it was premiered almost hundred years ago. We were reading about it in a brilliant book called ‘The Rest Is Noise’ by Alex Ross, which is a history about avant-garde music of the twentieth century. It starts with the premiere of ‘The Rite Of Spring’ and goes on with Stockhausen, Velvet Underground, Charles Mingus, MC5 and so on. While we were trying to play some chords from ‘The Rite Of Spring’ on our guitars we thought it sounded like it could have been on ‘And Justice For All’, Metallica’s last complex album. So we’ve played it with the guitars, but with the ‘Rite Of Spring’ timing: that’s why it has such an unusual rhythm. On top of that, we’ve been listening lately to a lot of electronic music called dubstep, like Burial and Kode 9. What I like about it is that it takes all the atmospherics from reggae, like the echoes and those ghostly noises, but the beats are very slow. Imagine Black Sabbath’s playing hip-hop. So we were listening to a lot of that and the big ominous intro of ‘Bad Excuse…’ is influenced by this type of electronic music.
For us writing this kind of stuff is brilliant. Every song has a concept and for instance the aforementioned Jesus Lizard-kinda song ‘The Head That Tried…’ is partly inspired by the opening scene of the opera ‘Death In Venice’ of composer Benjamin Britten and also partly based on a techno track called Doomsday. We were all working on the songs. I wrote all the words, but the band wrote all the music together. That was exciting. It was like being on summer camp. During the times of ‘Troublegum’ I wrote the songs alone, sitting at home with my acoustic guitar, trying to play in the style of my favourite bands like The Undertones and Ramones [Andy hums ‘Nowhere’ to illustrate this] and after that I went to see the boys to make it heavy. I got a bit bored with this way of song writing, because the kids these days can do it a lot better than I do now, and it’s also more “appropriate” when a 21-year old write these songs than an old guy like me. We did try a couple of pop songs for this album, but the reason why we didn’t use them is because they sounded AOR [Andy makes a wry face]. It just didn’t sound cool.
On the previous album you worked with producer Pedro Ferrera (The Darkness), but on this new album it’s Andy Gill (ex-member Gang Of Four, producer of The Peppers, The Stranglers and… The Jesus Lizard). We like to work with different producers. Yeah, it keeps our minds fresh. We wanted to work with Andy Gill about three albums ago, because he’d done a Killing Joke album. But he wasn’t available at that time. This time we wanted to produce the album ourselves, but we got a phone call from our record label and they said: “We ran into Andy and he said he’s available, but only for four weeks to mix and record the whole album. Can you guys get the album done in that time?” Well, fortunately we did. As we already were concentrating on the rhythms, it was good to have Andy, because he’s particularly good in rhythms. He likes to build a song from the ground up, while Chris Sheldon (who did ‘Troublegum’) and Pedro Ferrera like “the songs”; they like to make sure everything’s geared towards the melody. So with them the voice would be quite loud in the mix, the harmonies would be really good and the songs would come out like it’s made for the radio.
Andy on the other hand builds it from the foundation up; he records drums separately, adds cymbals separately, records really heavy and intense bass sound and then gets a kind of unique, spacey guitar sound and inputs the vocals on top. So that’s a completely different way of working, and also not the way of producing the album when we had the intention of doing it ourselves. We just wanted to record like for instance Steve Albini produces: play it more live and overdub the vocals. But we’re glad Andy did the job. I think sonically it works better if you build it up like bricks. So I think Andy was right, because to me it doesn’t sound too artificial. Although I would really, really love to work with Steve Albini one day, which we never did so far. We did record an album ‘Suicide Pact – You First’, which was very much in the Steve Albini-style: the music was played live with lots of effect pedals, and I was lying literally on the floor screaming my lungs out at two o’clock in the morning. That was quite exciting as well, hahaha!
Back in the days people asked me why we didn’t make more albums in the vein of ‘Troublegum’, which is by far our commercially most successful album. I know we sold about two million copies worldwide of our albums collectively, and I think about half of it must be ‘Troublegum’. But we couldn’t do that. We’re not a band like AC/DC, Motörhead, Turbonegro, Ramones, Status Quo or even The Rolling Stones to a certain extend. They’ve got a formula, and they’re fucking great at it. I’ve respect for bands that do that, but I couldn’t. If we had made two or three more ‘Troublegums’ we could have been multi, multi, multi millionaires, but then I wouldn’t be sitting next to you now, because after three ‘Troublegums’ or so, the formula would have been dried out. Now, we’re still around.
Maybe that’s why you still give such sincere and affectious live shows after almost twenty years. Even when a person is not into Therapy?, just because of the fun and enthusiasm you have on stage and creates in the crowd it’s still a pleasure to watch you perform live. The audience is seeing a band that’s having the time of its life, every time. Yeah, we love playing. Being around as long as we have and meeting so many other bands, I’m always very surprised by how many bands rather go home. I would say that about eighty per cent of the bands that I know hate touring. And it’s not even because they’ve had to spend in the tour bus every night, be on the road, sleep in a hotel and stay away from home. No, these bands even hate it to go on the fucking stage. They are like: “Oh well, we’ve got a new album out, so we have to promote it.” I won’t mention any names (logically, but unfortunately, EDS), but I’ve seen bands in the dressing room, saying immediately after the show: “Let’s get the hell out of this fucking city.” I don’t mind if we play for twenty, thousand or twenty thousand people, we just love playing.
The album cover shows an "angry looking triangle". It's a drawing that pops up here and there on several Therapy? releases and on T-shirt prints over the years, and now it's even promoted as the new album sleeve. What is it? Well, it was one night that Fyffe (Ewing, the first drummer) and me were watching a football documentary about Holland against Scotland on the World Cup 1978, where Scotland beats the famous Holland team with 3-2, thanks to two goals from Archie Gemmill. We saw this shorly before we went on our first English tour. We had asked our manager's assistence that we need a box of two hundred T-shirts, because we would be on the road for a couple of months. So while we were watching this documentary this manager's girl shows up, asking: "Have you got a T-shirt design? I go to the T-shirt company now, so we have to have a design tonight." Oh, shit... So I took a napkin away from the beer and chips, and instantly draw this triangle myself. I asked: "So what do you think?" She said: "Yeah, it's good. What's it called?" "It's called Gemmill..."
Two days later we got a box of two hundred T-shirts with this triangle...
As long as I’m speaking with you, it looks like you are a happy man. A happy family life and happy with the new upcoming album. But regarding the lyrics it seems like there’s some bitterness in you. Well, I don’t think it’s bitterness. There where two things that has its effect on the lyrics. The first thing is that Keith Baxter died. He was a brilliant drummer from 3 Colors Red and helped us out when our drummer Graham Hopkins and played with us on the summer festivals in 2002. But last January (2008) I got a phone call and they told me he died, 36 years young. He was sitting at home with his partner one night, saying he was not feeling all right. He coughed and there was a little bit of blood in his hanky. His partner drove him to the emergency hospital, but that same night he got two heart attacks and he died one hour later. The other thing is that I had a little bit of health care myself. I had all kinds of pains and difficulty with breathing, so I had to go through X-rays, scans and all that. Luckily it was false alarm. I’ve got some sort of asthma, which I had neglected too much. But also due to the fact that Keith just died a couple of months earlier, I was kinda worried and my mind was filled with these questions. So I think the lyrics are more lots and lots of questions, with an open end to it.
Probably a lot of the lyrics won’t make any sense to the people that like ‘Troublegum’ or so. I think it has a lot to do with aging throughout the years. I was reading a lot about the concept of consciousness. There’s a thing called ‘consciousness of being conscious’ – which theme we used for the song ‘The Head That Tried…’: the thing that separates us human beings from the animals is that we know we gonna die. That defines our lives. That colours our lives and how we live it. It can be the cause of wars, religious wars and anxiety. I also read another book called ‘I Am The Strange Loop’ by Douglas R. Hofstadter, and he argues we are a figment of our own imagination. We are both made from energy, and our brains conduct electricity, so our consciousness is just many, many, many series of repetition and signals. So we are almost like an illusion.
Therapy?
Andy Cairns (guitar, vocals)
Michael McKeegan (bass)
Neil Cooper (drum)
So how’s Andy doing now?
On the previous album you worked with producer Pedro Ferrera (The Darkness), but on this new album it’s Andy Gill (ex-member Gang Of Four, producer of The Peppers, The Stranglers and… The Jesus Lizard).
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