Therapy? - Troublegum
- FaceOff - עימות חזיתי
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 07.02.1994
“We thought we made really good records, but we never envisaged hanging out and playing boules at Elton’s house on a Sunday. Some people, when you give them a little bit of fame and fortune they’re great with it. They’ve waited their whole life for it, and they take the baton and run. Hats off to them. But then you’ve got people like us, where it doesn’t sit comfortably, and it certainly didn’t at the time. We didn’t know what to do..”
— Andy Cairns
At the point when grunge was blooming worldwide and already beginning to fade, rock bands from the British Isles slowly started to nip at its heels. One of them arrived straight from the old port town of Larne in Northern Ireland. No one expected that "Therapy?" (the question mark was born from a design mistake on their debut album), a band raised on metal and punk, would suddenly turn into a group writing fast, direct, and highly communicative songs that would become live anthems and chart staples. But the EP "ShortSharpShock", released in March 1993, produced the explosive anthem "Screamager", which, to everyone’s surprise, climbed to number 9 on the UK charts.
"Therapy?" were formed in 1989 in the town of Larne by guitarist-vocalist Andy Cairns and drummer-vocalist Fyfe Ewing. To complete the lineup, the band brought in bassist Michael McKeegan.
In April 1989, they recorded a demo containing four tracks, titled "Thirty Seconds of Silence", with Andy playing bass guitar borrowed from Fyfe’s schoolmate, Michael McKeegan. When they decided to start playing live, they recruited McKeegan permanently and performed their debut show at the Belfast College of Art. Their sound was heavily influenced by bands that emerged from the indie-rock movement, such as The "Jesus Lizard", "Big Black", and "The Membranes".
After releasing their first single in a limited pressing of 1,000 copies, they set out on their first UK tour and managed to catch the attention of pioneering musician and broadcaster John Peel.
“When we formed the band, we were completely influenced by groups like Big Black, Tar, and Hammerbox,” recalled Cairns. “But after we made the album Nurse, things started to change.”
The next album, "Troublegum", released on 07.02.1994, opens with "Screamager".
“We’d been talking about the history of Ulster rock and bands like "The Undertones" and "Stiff Little Fingers", and when I was 12 or 13 those bands were massive in Ireland and I was a big fan,” Cairns explained.
“I wrote Screamager, kind of as an Ulster pop tribute song, and I brought it to the lads. They liked it, but we decided that it maybe wasn’t the kind of stuff we should be doing. But our producer Chris Sheldon was due to record some new stuff with us and he really liked Screamager because it had that big riff and the Helmet-style stop-start thing and the chorus was really catchy. That was the start of Troublegum.”
Inspired by the EP and the success of its breakout hit, producer Chris Sheldon approached the band with an unusual request: to recycle that success by writing another song in the same vein. "Therapy?" hesitated. They felt they couldn’t keep holding both ends of the rope at the same time.
While the riffs and noise of their early records remained a fundamental part of their sound, the band’s new songs were far more direct and melodic, leading to an album unafraid of moments of almost shameless simplicity when facing an audience.
Sheldon’s request for another hit reminded frontman Andy Cairns of his pre-Therapy? days, when he played in a different band.
“I had a song from an old band I’d been in that became Nowhere and I had Turn as well, so we demoed some of this stuff and it sounded great, and we just decided to make a whole album of it.”
"Troublegum" was recorded in several studios across England during 1993. It still carried traces of the antisocial noise and abrasive rock that had always been central to "Therapy?’s" sound, but above all, it was an album dominated by massive anthems.
“Like the music, we stripped the lyrics down,” says Andy. “[Acclaimed producer and noise rock legend] Steve Albini always said that lyrics should be punchlines, and that’s what we tried to do: make them short and snappy.”
In line with their new philosophy of reducing everything to its simplest form, Therapy? underwent a major lyrical shift. Andy’s natural tendency toward darkness and oddness was quickly overtaken by a new approach, one that ensured every song on the album contained a line or two that anyone could shout along to, whether drunk or sober.
"Troublegum" is an album that balances despair, frustration, and a faint belief that tomorrow might be better. It opens with the gnawing desperation of "Hellbelly", a track that tackles the hypocrisy of Christianity in Northern Ireland, where child abuse, money laundering, and similar crimes could be hidden behind a religious façade.
It is followed by "Stop It You're Killing Me", which hints at the troubled situation in Northern Ireland. On one side stands the British government, attempting to reassure everyone that everything will be fine and that all sides will be satisfied, while doing nothing to stop the violence between terrorist factions on both sides.
One of "Therapy?’s" greatest anthems is "Nowhere", driven by its distinctive dual-siren sound, created using a delay pedal with a built-in sampler purchased by Andy Cairns. The track is heavily influenced here by Bob Mould, best known for his work with "Hüsker Dü" and "Sugar".
Andy Cairns based "Die Laughing" on an old Irish story:
“A man goes to the doctor suffering from depression after trying every pill and every form of treatment available. The doctor tells him that the only thing left he can offer is to go and see a clown who makes everyone in the town laugh. Only then does it become clear that the clown is the patient himself.”
Another band that proved influential on "Therapy?" was the New York metal outfit "Helmet". "Helmet’s" singer and guitarist Page Hamilton even collaborated with "Therapy?" on the song "Unbeliever".
Other standout moments on the album include "Isolation", a reworking of the song originally recorded by "Joy Division", and "Turn", which was written under the influence of "R.E.M." during their "Murmur" era and carries with it a story that raises a smile.
“I was reading a great book called Storming Heaven by this guy Jay Stevens,” Andy Cairns explained, “One of the chapters was called Turn And Face The Strange and I honestly did not realise that was a David Bowie lyric!.”
“We were on a festival bill in Belgium with David Bowie a few years after Troublegum came out and he was on two bands after, and about three songs into the set I look over and standing by our monitor was David Bowie! He watched the whole thing and we played Turn, so I started to worry about having to walk past him to get to our dressing room, thinking he's going to say 'you thieving Irish toerag!' but he just went 'great energy!' I was off the hook."
The album artwork perfectly captured the sense of mischievous menace bubbling beneath the album’s fast, hook-laden melodies. It was created by and features photographer Nigel Rolfe, who shot an image of a naked man with his head stuck inside a rubbish bin.
“Nigel was a performance and design artist,” explains Andy. “He did a series of pictures where he covered himself in white paint and rolled around in sawdust. We’d been talking with him about this Samuel Beckett play, Endgame, which features guys in dustbins at the back of the stage, and then he brought this huge portfolio of stuff a couple of weeks later, featuring this naked man covered in sawdust, and the dustbin shot was the one that we all liked.”
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
Comments