Tearing up the heavy-metal Faustian pact

Frontman Andy Cairns tells Tony Clayton-Lea why Therapy?, one of the top Irish rock bands of the past 15 years, have been virtually forgotten

Andy Cairns, guitarist and singer of Northern Irish metal band Therapy?, has blood dripping out of his mouth from eating a mound of raw meat. By his side sits a naked woman in a lopsided Shirley Temple wig, with lines of cocaine arranged like sergeant stripes on her lightly tanned stomach. Beside Cairns, a battered flight case lies open to reveal wads of $1,000 bills, a DVD pack of Russ Meyer movies, scrunched-up blackmail letters from the "pretty one" in a once popular boy-band, and a scorched Faustian pact signed by Cairns and the Devil and witnessed by a crooked lawyer.

So where did it all go wrong, I ask. Cairns looks at me with glazed eyes, a feral sneer, and spits out an answer: "Enough of your landscapes, tell me about the worms."

With the exception of Cairns quoting the line from Waiting for Godot, the above paragraphs are a total fabrication, a sham. The perception of metal bands, however, is that they are attached to the notion of being outsiders, the kind of people who aspire to dysfunctional lives. The cliche is that members of the metal fraternity (and it is virtually 100 per cent the domain of the male) are cruel Sin City types with no regard for rules, no hint of dignity.

The truth is somewhat more prosaic and lies closer to refinement than we want to believe. Cairns might make a living from belting out poppy metal tunes in front of people young enough to be his children (he has just turned 40), but behind the metal veneer lies someone who is rather fond of visual art, extreme French cinema (Baise-Moi is a recent favourite), the music of John Coltrane and Charlie Mingus, and the collected works of Samuel Beckett.

Backstage at last weekend's Download metal event, Cairns looked very much the part of the relaxing metal frontman. He retains the kind of soft-spoken civility he has always had, a modesty that stems from his background as a Ballyclare kid and as a worker in a factory in the late 1980s/early 1990s, surrounded by older, avuncular guys who told him he and his noisy band would never appear on Top of the Pops. They were wrong. With 11 UK Top 30 hit singles (from 1992 to 1998), two UK Top 10 albums (1994's Troublegum, 1995's Infernal Love) and a Mercury Music Prize nomination, Therapy? remain one of the most successful Irish rock bands of the past 15 years. Why, then, have they been virtually forgotten?

"In the 1990s we were classified as a mainstream band in certain ways," says Cairns. "We had albums in the charts, but we had a three-year absence between Infernal Love and 1998's Semi-Detached, and the records we made after that weren't very chart-friendly. It's only on the more recent albums that we started to sound like what people remember Therapy? as being like.

"For a while, some people who listened occasionally to metal or rock - or whatever you want to call it - thought, perhaps, that we had disappeared. We're not the kind of band that appears on MTV2, though. What happened was that the momentum we had built up wasn't maintained. To a lot of people who go to mainstream rock gigs, Therapy? didn't mean that much. The true believers of the band, however, always knew what we were doing through our website and through some of the more underground press."

What took place next was a classic example of creativity versus commerce, and the pull-push between the two.

"We were just making music we liked, much to the chagrin of people in major record labels," Cairns says. "Troublegum sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and then we quickly released Infernal Love, which was quite different. It did OK.The record company guys were saying that they saw us as the European Metallica, but that they didn't really understand what we were trying to do on Infernal Love.

"We had trouble fitting in - we weren't like a typical iconographic rock band like Guns'N'Roses and we weren't nihilistic like Nirvana. We were just doing our thing. We didn't have the mechanism as a band to know how to behave once we got to certain level. Our heroes were the likes of Husker Dü and Steve Albini. We didn't have heroes that were classic rock icons, so once we got to that quite popular level we just continued doing what we did.

"I don't regret any of it, because some of the records that didn't sell at all - in particular, 1999's Suicide Pact: You First - are some of the best we've done. I just think we didn't play the game, and it wasn't deliberate, we just didn't know what to do."

Cairns is fully aware of the swings and roundabouts of the music industry and has adjusted the buckle on his studded belt accordingly. Because of this, Therapy? have been making a reasonable living for quite some time. Cairns lives in a sedate area outside Cambridge and accepts his mid-rung position on the metal ladder with grace, charm and realism.

"The saving grace of Therapy? is that we never considered ourselves rock stars, but rather rock musicians - and not in a portentous way," he says. "We decided to carry on as long as there was an audience for us, as long as we could gig, as long as we could pay the rent and, just as importantly, as long as we could continue to do what was vital to us.

"There were times when the venue size would decrease and the record sales would diminish, and that was tough, but because we'd built up such an audience it never got so bad that we felt we should move on. We were fortunate, because we did - and still do - pull in a lot of crowds. We were massive in France with Troublegum, but after that not so much. We gave it a wide berth for a few years, yet with the past couple of records we've been going back there."

The band's latest album, One Cure Fits All, sees them return to the melody-driven metal of earlier, more successful times. While it's possible their ship has sailed in commercial terms, the prospect of the band giving it all up for a life pottering around gardens on the outskirts of Cambridge seems remote.

"We were never the cliched heavy-metal bozos," stresses Cairns, "who were happy with beer in the fridge and who, once the music packed in, thought along the lines of a career in McDonald's. Within the realms of what we do, we have to make it work. On one side, I've learned over the past 15 years that to continue being creative you've got to stop taking things too seriously. Take what you do and your art very seriously, by all means, but not the whole circus that surrounds it."

Another lesson learned, says Cairns, quoting someone perhaps less revered than Beckett (Ozzy Osbourne, in fact) is to be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet them again on the way down.

"I've seen it happen," he says, experience lining his face. "I'm sure I've been a nasty piece of work now and again - I'm only human, after all - but I'd like to pride myself that I'm always aware of how quite ridiculous you look when you act like Johnny Rock Star. It can only backfire, and when it backfires you will most certainly be reminded that it was not a good idea to wear that pair of silver leather trousers."

And with that, he reaches down into the battered flight case and rips up the Faustian pact, burns the blackmail letters and the dollar bills. The naked woman is sent packing too. Curiously, the Russ Meyer DVD pack stays put.

One Cure Fits All is on Spitfire Records