Giving good hedonism

You’d have thought I’d have learned my lesson eight years ago when I almost had to be air ambulanced back from Wales but, no, here I am again on tour with Therapy? Even worse, our first stop-off is that epicentre of decadence and bad behaviour, Amsterdam. You can promise all you like that you’re not going to get fucked up, but as soon as you’ve dumped your bags it’s off to the nearest coffee shop to check out the local produce. I’m not going to bore you with tales of journalistic derring do – well, not yet! – suffice to say that it’s amazing how much damage you can do for €5.

The consensus at home might be that they’re past their sell-by date, but in Holland, Andy Cairns, Michael McKeegan, Martin McCarrick and Derby County supporting new boy Neil Cooper are still major news. And a godsend to the ape-like touts outside the Melkweg – that’s the Milky Way to you, squire – who are charging fifty notes for a €15 ticket. They mightn’t have troubled the top 10 recently but Therapy? are still perfectly capable of stuffing 800-capacity venues, thank you very much!

“We’ve always valued our fans but last year they were actually what stopped us splitting up,” Andy Cairns divulges over a pre-gig litre of Heineken. “Our Shameless album selling no copies because the record company didn’t get it into the fucking shops was bad enough, but then Graham (Hopkins) announced he was leaving and it was, ‘Great, no deal, no drummer!’ When you’re in that situation you have to ask yourself, ‘Do I have the energy to go on?’ I wasn’t sure at first but then the letters and emails of support came in and I realised we had a duty to those people to stick with it.”

While highly critical of their former label – “Fuck all positive came out of our relationship with Ark 21” – Cairns has only nice things to say about Graham Hopkins who’s currently to be found fronting Halite.

“There were no fist fights or bitching behind people’s backs,” Cairns resumes. “Graham had other things he wanted to do and chose a time when we weren’t on tour or just about to go into the studio to tell us. I’m sure he’ll be at our Dublin show in two weeks’ time (he was!) and meet us after for a beer (he did!).”

Not wanting “to write a really bitter anti-music business album”, Andy went home to the wife and nipper in Cambridge and did what he hadn’t done since Therapy? started in 1989 – sit on his arse for a couple of months.

“I hadn’t been to the cinema or talked to people who weren’t involved in the industry for, God, I don’t know how long. Once a bit of normality had re-entered my life, I found myself writing like I hadn’t written in years. Michael and Martin were doing the same, so almost without trying we had an album’s worth of material ready to go.”

A year on and the majority of those songs are to be found on High Anxiety, the first fruits of their liaison with American independent Spitfire Records whose roster also includes Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde. Therapy?’s confidence in the record is such that they include seven songs from it in their Amsterdam set.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Cairns reflects. “The reason why we’re still here is that we did have two huge albums, but as proud as I am of Troublegum and Infernal Love I couldn’t go out and just play our ‘Greatest Hits’. The day when people stop wanting to hear new Therapy? songs is the day I jack it in and go and study penguins or something. We’re in the fortunate position of having enough money in the bank that we don’t have to do this. It’s through choice.”

Judging by the Melkweg reaction to newies like ‘If It Kills Me’, ‘Not In My Name’ and the majestically titled ‘Hey Satan - You Rock’, that Antarctic expedition is going to have to wait. (Penguins can also be found in Argentina, Chile, Falkland Islands, Peru, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – Zoologically-inclined Ed.) Mixed in with such Therapy? classics as ‘Screamager’, ‘Nowhere’, ‘Potato Junkie’ and ‘Diane’ – surely the oddest top 5 single ever – it makes for the most rambunctious night this hack has had since falling off Joe Strummer’s tour bus. Job well done, it’s over to the nearby Zebra Club where, perched on a stripy fake fur settee, Martin McCarrick recalls previous mayhemic exploits.

“We did a boxing arena in Chile with Megadeth which was totally insane,” says the ex-Siouxsie & The Banshess and This Mortal Coil man. “The thing there is that you have to be in the moshpit, so kids who’d been assigned seats upstairs were jumping off the balcony hoping they’d be caught. Michael and myself were watching at one-point and saw this guy go ‘smack!’ onto the concrete. I’d be amazed if he didn’t break his back.”

“It was like playing in the ninth circle of hell,” Andy Cairns takes-over. “The Megadeth fans were spitting at the supports, which was fine until Clawfinger’s bass-player, thinking it was a bit of fun, jumped into the crowd and was beaten to a pulp. By the time police and security dragged him out, he’d had all his clothes torn off.”

Over the top, sure, but Chilean crowd riots aren’t nearly as sphincter-relaxing as murderous rock ‘n’ roll reprobates Emperor.

“Their drummer was sentenced to eight years in jail for stabbing a homosexual to death, which strikes me as being a bit lenient,” Michael McKeegan reflects. “He also burned down a church which, judging by that, he got community service for! A mate of mine interviewed them shortly after he was released and said it was so bizarre because they were sat there, in full corpse paint, doing Ali G routines! ‘You’ve killed people, what are you doing?’”

Martin McCarrick has encountered worse, though.

“Having seen her in a few fights, I can vouch for Siouxsie being a lot scarier than any Norwegian death metaller!” he proffers. “She’s very switchable which is partly down to ego issues and partly down to hedonism. I remember one time playing to 4,000 Portuguese Goths who, not wanting to ruin their hair or make-up, just stood there watching reverentially. Halfway through, these guys in the pit started handing round sandwiches, which didn’t go down at all well with Siouxsie who stopped mid-song and went, ‘Dear, oh dear, what do we have here? A fucking picnic?’ Next thing she’s picking up monitors and chucking ‘em at these kids who were totally petrified. I really thought we were going to be had up on manslaughter charges.”

While not necessarily in the Siouxsie league, Therapy? have been known to throw some spectacular hissy fits of their own. Like the time they got all chemically enhanced on the Late Late Show.

“We were meant to be playing ‘Isolation’ but the sound crew were really fucking about saying, ‘You’ll have to turn it down’, so we meekly gave in. Or so they thought! Come live broadcast time, we turned everything up to ‘11’ and did ‘Knives’ instead which is full of rude words and gave the grannies from Mullingar in the front-row a heart-attack.

“Gerry, our manager, went mental: ‘At least if you’d told me I could’ve prepared for it!’ We were literally escorted from the premises and told never to come back. Oh for the days when you could piss people off so easily!”

“You never told me that,” says Neil Cooper, unaware of the bad company he’s been keeping. The poor innocent drummer boy will learn! A former member of Derby thrashers The Beyond, his initiation into the band couldn’t have been smoother. Apart from the busted arm, that is.

“I broke it playing football and, needless to say, didn’t get any sympathy whatsoever,” he rues. “All they were worried about was the ‘If It Kills Me’ video, which I did bombed out of my head on painkillers.”

That’s something else his new bandmates probably haven’t told him!

“Ah, the Benilyn years!” Andy Cairns reminisces fondly. “We couldn’t afford proper drugs when we started, so we used to make ourselves a cider ‘n’ cough medicine cocktail and go on stage hallucinating. There came a point, though, when A) We couldn’t physically do it anymore and B) We realised we had to get something out of it. I’ve said this before but it’s hard to think of a musician from Northern Ireland who’s drunk or drugged themselves into an early grave. The nature of where we’re from being what it is, we’re survivors.”