Therapy? have been playing on the swings and roundabouts again. It doesn't seem very long since they were being nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, selling the odd million records, frightening the pop kids on Top Of The Pops and being the second biggest-selling Irish rock band behind U2. They are also (fact fans) the only band to ever go from playing gigs in the good ol' Underground venue on Dame Street to headlining the Point, taking in most of the usual stops along the way. Heady days indeed. Given the chance to turn into Green Day or make the sort of music that Captain Beefheart would be proud of, they chose the commercially tougher option - and when their record company (A&M) was sacrificed during the Seagrams takeover of Polygram, they found themselves back, not far from where they started, at Wiija Records.
Those early Wiija releases (Babyteeth and Pleasure Death) are now the template for hardcore Irish rock music. The band then upped the ante considerably by signing to a major, bringing the melody line in their songs right to the front and releasing the magnificent Troublegum, which spawned Screamager and Nowhere, and put them on the brink of ye olde international superstardom - at least in a rawk sense.
Two things intervened: the band came down with a touch of rock'n'rollitis, the next album, Infernal Love, didn't - in record company speak - "perform" (despite great songs like Loose, 30 Seconds and Stories) and the exceptionally good drummer, Fyfe Ewing, left. The muted Semi-Detached followed before the record company fiasco kicked in, and things looked a bit dodgy for a while.
Back with a new label and a grindtastic new long player, Suicide Pact - You First, they've finally rediscovered the Babyteeth spirit on an album which shakes, rattles and rolls. Not that Andy Cairns has forgotten how to pen a ditty - take a listen to the superb Six Mile Water on the new album - it sounds like R.E.M. with balls.
Still a teeth-rattlingly good live act, you really wouldn't want to be missing the band when they play The Olympia tomorrow night (doors 8 p.m.).
With the mighty Mike Hedges on board to produce their album, and a major label behind them, it looked like all systems go for the Kildare band, Juniper, three years ago. Then exit stage left the lead singer with the Lipton Village-esque name, Dodi Ma, and that seemed that. But the remaining members are back, this time called Bell X 1. Their new songs are again impressing big-name producers, this time in the shape of Crowded House's Nick Seymour, who has just finished work on their debut album, Neither Am I, to be released later this year. Meanwhile a single, Pin- ball Machine, is on release. Slow, moody and very understated, it's worth a listen . . . The Heineken Green Energy line-up is almost complete, with Gomez, The Charlatans, The Cranberries, Embrace, Tracy Chapman and Joe Strummer, alongside a few other names to be confirmed, for the May bank holiday weekend . . . Before that, young Tom Dunne from Today FM will be hosting a series of Pet Sounds nights at the Olympia: the Afro-Celt Sound System are there on March 25th; The The (there's a joke John Cooper Clarke used to tell about them playing a gig in Barnsley, which is self-explanatory) on March 28th and Beth Orton on Friday 31st. Two out of three ain't bad, I suppose - and I'm not referring to Beth Orton . . . Elastica will be playing the Temple Bar Music Centre on May 11th to celebrate the release of their new The Menace album - a mere five years after their last one.
