Therapy? celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of their breakthrough album Troublegum with gigs in The 3Olympia, Dublin this Thursday and the Ulster Hall, Belfast on Friday. Front man Andy Cairns talks to Alan Corr
It sold a cool one million copies, scored high in album of year polls, was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and made them Top Of The Pops regulars and now Northern Irish trio Therapy? are celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of their breakthrough album Troublegum.
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Recently re-released on coloured double vinyl with 14 new songs, it has lost none of its raw power. From the killer opening salvo of Knives and Screamager to the brooding discord of Stop It You're Killing Me and the clean, poppy lines of Nowhere, the album still bristles with pent-up rage and dark humour.
Ballyclare native Cairns, who was working in a local tyre factory at the time. formed Therapy? in 1989 with drummer Fyfe Ewing and bassist Michael McKeegan. A classic power trio, they arrived with the hardcore sting of early songs like Potato Junkie and Meat Abstract.
Following the modest success of early albums Babyteeth, Pleasure Death, and Nurse, Troublegum was released in 1994 and propelled the band to a different level.
The tailwind of grunge certainly helped but Troublegum distilled a certain type of teen angst, shot through with a very dark and very Irish sense of humour. Therapy?’s melodic songs of every day self-loathing were nearly always loaded with a kind of comic existentialism and Cairns played the small town Beelzebub with glee.
On the phone from his home just outside Cambridge in England, where he lives with his wife and 24-year-old son, 59-year-old Cairns is as funny and erudite as ever.
"All of the sentiments on Troublegum were real but being from Ireland, the only way I could stare it in the face was to use that dark humour we’ve had over the years, from Beckett to Joyce and Heaney’s esoteric poetry," he says. "It makes life a lot easier to deal with.
"Whenever we drove down to Dublin or Cork or Limerick, there was still a hard border and there were still searches. We had to get our gear out for the British Army and listen to the wisecracks."
"When I sing some of those lyrics, the immediate thought is here’s someone who is 16, 17 in their bedroom but I wrote those lines when I was in my early twenties and they weren’t about not wanting to tidy my bedroom up.
"You know what goes on in the North," he adds. "People don’t like naming things; words can get you killed. I was talking to Michael McKeegan in the band about this, a lot is hidden in there. That’s what I take from Troublegum now."
The album may read like the diary of a particularly troubled teenager but for Cairns, who grew up on the Loyalist Erskine estate in Ballyclare, most of the songs were borne out of feeling like an outcast.
"One of the key lines on the album us from Unbeliever, `I don’t belong in this world or the next one’," he says. "I’d consider a lot of the people I grew up with as part of a new generation from the north. They wanted different things for themselves and they weren’t stuck in the old ways. They had this feeling of being torn apart - where do I fit in? What am?
"People in other countries seemed to have it a lot easier, they were proud of their identity and who they wanted to be. Pile on top of that, your teenage years and unemployment . . . I felt like someone who just never fitted in and that was the bottom line.
"To be honest I still feel like that sometimes today and it’s something that will always be inside me. It’s something that me and Michael and Fyfe had in common when he was in the band. It probably drew us together when we met each other and started the band."
A lot of Troublegum deals with impotent rage and what Cairns calls the worldview of "the pathetic bloke". "I’ve always tried to point this out - when Troublegum came out a lot of music magazines said, `oh, he’s got the goatee beard, he’s trying to be the devil’," he says. "But nothing could be further from the truth. The whole thing was based around impotent rage.
"We came from hardcore housing estates, which my parents still live in, and, over the years, people would comment to my parents in supermarkets so we had to be very, very careful how we put things."
"A song like Knives, which goes `I’m gonna get drunk, come round your house and f*** you up’, it’s about a guy sitting in his room who is never going to get anywhere, he’s sitting in his room all alone screaming at the walls. If Phil from Pantera wrote that it would be a far more macho thing, very alpha male."
And in a world of incels and ogres like Andrew Tate, it certainly leaves some of Cairns’ lyrics wide open to misinterpretation. "That’s terrifying and that’s why I think that song was a misstep because I don’t think I communicated the farcical nature of the lyric," Cairns says now.
"I hope people know where Troublegum came from, that dark Irish humour. But if you released some of those songs now, you’d have to be very careful about how you pitch them because in the wrong hands, they could backfire."
Therapy? clocked up a total of 12 Top 40 UK hits and nine Irish Top 20s and appeared on Top Of The Pops six times but they were never cut out for pop stardom.
"It’s like that line from Screamager," Cairns says. "`With a face like this, I won’t break any hearts’. I grew up around people that were good looking and very slightly talented that had their whole lives planned out for them.
"I was talking to Michael the other day I said `do you remember when we put on school plays and it was always the favourites who were picked for the lead roles? How many of them ended up in the creative arts’. Not one of them did. They were picked because they were popular kids and more importantly they were pretty.
"They weren’t picked because they were good singers or had a great future after appearing in a terrible Gilbert and Sullivan production in the school assembly hall. None of us in Therapy? were primed for pop stardom. We came from a punk background."
Still appearing on Top Of The Pops was an exciting time for the band. "I saw Thin Lizzy and The Undertones on that show so I was really excited to be there, too. So, we turned up and they had a lot of pop bands on and all the kids were dancing and when we came on to rehearse, they were all wondering when the band was coming on - they thought we were the roadies."
"Kneecap make such infectious music while also addressing things that the rest of the world needs to hear and they’re bringing the Irish language back. If you had told me that when Troublegum was out I would have thought you were mad!"
Then there was the time Davina McColl thought Cairns was a roadie when he turned up to do an interview for MTV in London and instructed him to move some amps. "I moved the amps and then I cleared off this table and then our actual road crew arrived and Davina looked at me and looked at the road crew, and someone said something into her earpiece . . . she was so apologetic."
Thirty years later, they may never have matched or even tried to match Troublegum’s commercial punch, but Therapy? remain a consistently good going concern with a very loyal fanbase.
They are also the first Irish band to release 16 albums, including such career highs as 2009’s Crooked Timber and 2023’s Cold Hard Fire.
After dancing around the issue of the Troubles all those years ago, Cairns is now a big fan of Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap. They have "the luxury" of engaging head on with the vexed question of Irish identity that Cairns had to refer to obliquely and bleakly on early Therapy? tracks like Meat Abstract and Potato Junkie.
"I applaud Kneecap because it’s amazing that they make such infectious music while also addressing things that the rest of the world needs to hear and they’re bringing the Irish language back," he says. "If you had told me that when Troublegum was out I would have thought you were mad!
"The thing about us was we were still in the shadow of so much violence and this was all before The Good Friday Agreement so we had to be careful about what we said.
"Whenever we drove down to Dublin or Cork or Limerick, there was still a hard border and there were still searches. We had to get our gear out for the British Army and listen to the wisecracks.
"We were working class lads who were open minded politically but we came from hardcore housing estates, which my parents still live in, and, over the years, people would makes comments to them in supermarkets so we had to be very, very careful how we put things. It’s very different now and people are a lot more open about what they talk about and can engage thankfully.
"Back then it was either be careful or go the other extreme and wear shamrocks and a plastic hat, which wasn’t great either."
Therapy? Play The 3Olympia, Dublin on 31 October and the Ulster Hall, Belfast on 1 November
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