Going somewhere

Twenty years in and Therapy? are still airborne, albeit a little under the radar. Andy Cairns tells TONY CLAYTON-LEAabout the trips, the tragedy and the Troublegum years

Therapy? around for 20 years – bet you didn’t see that one coming?

Well, there has never been any plan for us, as most people know, but, yes, where have the past 20 years gone? On the one hand it’s quite frightening how quickly the time has gone. On the other it’s been great, because we have somehow managed to make a living out of what we do on our own terms for the past 20 years. That’s been great – we’ve had a couple of dark moments, but compared to most bands that have been around for a similar length of time we’ve had it easy, I reckon.

What were the worst times?

In 2001 we lost a drummer and a record label within a couple of months of each other. We were basically told that wages would be drying up and the record contract would be finished, and within two weeks Graham Hopkins left, and that was heartbreaking. The other bad thing was the death of a friend and part-time Therapy? drummer, Keith Baxter, who died at the age of 36. It was alcohol-related, but I remember thinking that we all like to occasionally party, and for someone to die just because they were partying too hard was a wake-up call. Not just to us but to a lot of people who knew him.

You’ve been doing things your own way, which is admirable but lucky . . .

Well, without getting too class-directive, we’re all very working-class in and around the band, and we are very much realistic about what we can achieve with the kind of music we make and the kind of people that make it. We realised there can be a lot of folly in chasing things that probably aren’t meant to be. Some people might recall that we had a little dalliance in the early-mid ’90s with the mainstream. We were in the right place at the right time – guitar music was very fashionable – but in our heart of hearts we knew that the way we looked, the background we had and they way we conducted ourselves in public that we were never going to go as big as, say, U2, Green Day or Red Hot Chili Peppers. We knew we weren’t destined for that level of success, and that saved us to a certain extent. Some people I know in the business, a lot of them have fallen by the wayside through false expectations. Delusions of grandeur have destroyed many a good musician, and we have always kept an eye on what we knew we could realistically achieve, and what we could have. We know what our means and limits are. We were never very good at networking, or hanging out at Elton John’s masked balls at the end of the year. That was never very high on our agenda or social calendar.

What were those mainstream pop-star years like?

We were really fortuitous with those mid-’90s albums. They were great fun. We went from playing tiny gigs and no record label to almost a fairy-tale ascendence. I remember John Peel picked up on our music, and then we signed a worldwide major record deal. Three albums went Top 40, and one album went Top 10 in quite a few countries, and all this was within the first five years of the band. It was a lot more than we had ever expected, but doing things like Top of the Pops, being on the covers of magazines, appearing on The Late Late Show – I was really chuffed with stuff like that because I had grown up with them. It was fantastic stuff that we took in our stride.

Playing Troublegum in its entirety – good or bad?

It’s fun, actually. I was initially concerned about doing it, but I remember seeing The Stooges play all of Fun House in London two years ago, and it was just amazing, total blow-your-mind stuff. You know, it doesn’t have to be cheesy. With us and the Troublegum album, it’s amazing to us how much a part of the metal canon it has become. I never thought it was our best record, but I can understand why it sold so much.

Cover versions of Therapy? songs – would you ever have guessed that?

No, I most certainly did not!

Therapy? will perform Troublegum at Vicar Street, Dublin, on November 5. New live album We’re Here to the End is released in November