Artist: Therapy?  

Date:  26 October 2009 

Approaching their 20^th anniversary next year, Therapy? are legends and I was lucky enough to chat to them before their headline show at Manchester Club Academy about the upcoming anniversary as well as a few other things ...

MM: So how’s the tour been going and what have you got planned for when it’s over?
Andy: The tour’s been going great, a lot better than we thought, especially in the middle of a recession. Turnout-wise, it’s been a lot better than we thought, a lot of people buying shirts and they all really like the new material so that’s good. What we have planned for when it’s finished is more touring after taking Christmas off. We’re going to Greece in January and there’s talk of Finland as well. Fingers crossed we’re going back to Australia and America later in the year as we’ve had an offer from Australia and the album comes out next year in America. And then we’ll be doing lots of festivals which brings us up to September when we’ll be starting the 20^th anniversary celebrations. We’ll be planning shows all round Europe, a handful in England and definitely one in Ireland and one in Scotland.

MM: Fantastic. Obviously there’s a history with you guys and Ricky Warwick. Is it particular special when you get to tour with somebody you’ve known for so long?
Andy: It’s the first time we’ve done it. It’s the first time we’ve had a really good mate out on the road with us. Well, I know James from the Manic St. Preachers really well and in the 90’s we toured France and over there we were more popular than the Manics and they ended up opening for us, but only for about 10 gigs or something like that. That was quite good fun but that was when Ritchie was still in the band and they were going through a bit of a difficult time I think. But someone like Ricky (Warwick) who we’ve known for a long time and we’re both from Northern Ireland, it’s great and he’s such an easy-going guy which means there’s no trouble and no egos involved.

MM: Cool. How’s the response been to the new album Crooked Timber since it was released a few months ago?
Neil: The response has been brilliant. Obviously when we finished the album we were very proud of it which helped but then you put it out there and you hope everyone else likes it. Review-wise it’s been good and for the punters who come to the shows, it’s been going down great. And that’s not just at the headline shows but also at the festivals too. With the wide-ranging back catalogue that the band has got, you’ve always got to choose your songs carefully and drop in the new songs from Crooked Timber and it all fits really well. And we really enjoy playing them as well. With a lot of the shows, we’re playing a lot of the album. It’s not just one of these things where we’re just going to play the single, back in May we actually did the whole album live and it’s been going down great so we’re very happy.

MM: Obviously the album makes reference to the famous Immanuel Kant quote. Was he someone you were reading a lot of at the time?
Andy: It came from reading Samuel Beckett, really. A lot of his best books were written in the 1950’s and he was part of the post-war generation that saw Europe in ruins (he lived in France) but one thing he did notice was no matter how badly off human beings are, we always manage to carry on and pull through and at the time he was reading a lot of philosophy and one of them was Kant which is where the quote came from and I think it sums up the resilience of human nature to keep going through adversity.

MM: A lot of your stuff through the years has had a contrast between how dark the songs appear on the surface but also the positive message behind a lot of them and this album seemed really dark on first listen. Is that representative of where you were personally at the time?
Neil: A lot of people say how dark the record is, but I think in the studio the three weren’t sat there purposely trying to create this dark and moody record and I don’t personally see it as that dark. I mean Andy is the lyrics man but musically I find it quite uplifting.

Michael: Yeah, there’s a good, positive message to it I think.

MM: For a producer, what made you go with Andy Gill? Is he somebody you’ve wanted to work with for a while?
Andy: For quite a few years actually, yeah. The one thing we all clicked with on Andy Gill is the Killing Joke album he made in 2003 that Dave Grohl drummed on. I’m a big Killing Joke fan anyway, I mean, we all are and I remember getting the album when it came out and thought it sounded amazing and saw it was Andy Gill producing. I knew of Andy Gill before from the Gang of Four who I like a lot and I always thought it would be nice to work with him and when we signed this new deal with Demolition, they asked us who we would like and we said Andy Gill and when they called him he said yes straight away, as he knew the band's history which was great.

MM: After doing this for so long, is there ever a struggle to find inspiration? Do you ever suffer from writer’s block?
Andy: Personally I do, yeah, it happens all the time. Whenever I go home, I’m very much a creature of habit and routine so I’ll fall into the trap of doing the same things so I make myself do something different. Like if I go out of the house, I’ll turn left instead of right, stuff like that. I’ll go home, I’ll walk the dog and I’ll do certain things but if I don’t make myself get off my backside and write I’ll end up leaving it and the next thing you know we’ve got to start rehearsals and then I’m in trouble!

MM: Neil, you mentioned the band’s extensive back catalogue earlier. Do you ever find it hard choosing the setlist?
Neil: That happens just about every night. There are so many tunes that we enjoy playing, there are many tunes that the crowd want to hear so every single night we go through that, yeah.

Michael: I’d much rather have 140 minutes and still be able to leave stuff out as opposed to some gigs I go to where after 40 minutes you’ve heard the band’s back catalogue. It’s just one of those things you have to roll with and we change it around and make sure all the areas of the band are represented and also play the stuff that’s exciting us rather than just generically hash the same songs out every night. We always like to pick older songs that we enjoy playing together and obviously we’re playing a lot of the new album which is really exciting to play as well.

Neil: The one thing I always think as well as the relative newcomer to the band about the tunes from Babyteeth and the earlier records is that they still stand up and they’re fantastic to play. You get some bands who think they should leave out their earlier stuff and we don’t do that and that’s one of the great things about this band.

MM: Cool. Well I wanted to ask you what your take was on how the internet has affected the music business in general both on the positive and the negative side of things?
Andy: Personally I think that’s just the way music is now, it’s something we all have to adapt to and that’s a fact. A good leveller for me is, I think to myself if I was a 13 or 14-year old kid, which is when I started buying records, who wanted an album, would I download it if I could get it free? Of course I would and there’s no point me sitting here and saying ‘no, I’d save for 5 weeks then go buy it’, no I bloody wouldn’t – I’d download it for free or get it off a mate in school who has the link or whatever and that’s the way it goes.

But the way you accept that is if they go to a show by the band and get into the band as a lot of people who we’ve met in the last couple of years do, they’ll buy a t-shirt and then maybe see a copy of Babyteeth on red vinyl and think ‘oh god, I’ve got to have that’ you know? Or they’ll want to go back and explore and think ‘oh High Anxiety, I’ve never heard that’ and then see it in a shop for £7 or something like that so it is all relative. I think initially people around us were more concerned. 

Our days of hoping for chart places and thinking about what we’ve done in the first week, they’re gone now, I mean our records sell over the course of the year and we’re very happy with that so it doesn’t really affect us because we’re in no rush. I think if we were only a few albums in we might panic a bit more but you’ve got to think that home-taping didn’t kill music. As long as there’s always music there, the medium will change and in 50 years time there will be another way of getting music.

Neil: The people who have the biggest problem are the pop acts, really. These people who have an album but really there’s only one tune on it and the label or the management are pinning everything on this one tune and if that’s all you’ve got then of course people will download it. In our position or bands of a similar mindset, it’s like, ‘ok, download that and that for free’ there’s no problem with that but people will then go and buy the album and go to the show because it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Kids aren’t daft. If they want to get into a band then they want the CD, they want the t-shirt and everything is certainly not lost just because they’ve downloaded one or two songs.

MM: This summer you played Download to a rapturous response, what was it like being back at Donington?
Andy: I really enjoyed this one. We’ve played it four times and I’ve enjoyed it twice. Once was in 1994 when we were on the main stage and we were second on and the other time was the one we did this summer. The one with Metallica in 1995 I didn’t enjoy so much. And the other one when we headlined the 3^rd stage in 2005 we were all knackered because we’d been away and only had 2 hours sleep after playing in Eastern Europe. But I really enjoyed this year and I like to see people getting into it and before we went out we heard people chanting the band’s name which really made my day.

MM: And how was it playing Damnation a couple of days ago given it’s ‘extreme metal’ tag? Did that influence your choice of setlist?
Andy: Well we’ve always listened to that kind of music and we were actually the loudest band on that stage that day. It was the loudest drum kit – when Neil went up and hit the kit the front of house PA guys shit themselves, ha-ha!

Neil: The kit fell apart!

Andy: Yeah it did! With our history, I think an awful lot of it has to do with image. Our music can be as intense as those other bands. And we listen to it as well, we’ll listen to Sun O))), Earth, Jesu, Michael will listen to black metal and Neil will listen to a lot of left-of-centre metal that I’ve never heard of. And I quite like turning up to a festival like that and not being a generic band and looking like all the other bands. I’m not criticising the other bands at all but I like the fact that we’re different. I mean, when Therapy? started, metallers would laugh at us. 

We got denied a gig once at a club because someone had heard our demo and offered us a gig supporting Candlemass but when we drove up to the gig the guy who ran the club said ‘I’m not putting you guys on because you’ve got short hair!’ And that gave us a real ‘us against them’ mentality, you know? The music can still be as brutal, I mean on the new album there’s a couple of songs tuned to A-sharp so it’s not as if it’s The Smiths! Not that there’s anything wrong with The Smiths, I really like them but it is quite heavy and intense it just doesn’t have a singer that uses that death-metal bark.

Michael: I think it’s brilliant that we can go from doing Damnation with bands like Lock-Up and then we’ll be on the bill somewhere else with The Kooks and I don’t think anyone else at Damnation would end up playing with The Kooks! We’re quite lucky that there’s such a broad range of people that are into us.

MM: You get booked on quite a lot of varied bills particularly in Europe too...
Michael: Absolutely. It can be all weird, dark-wave Goth bands or it can be world music or it can be a big pop festival with Lady Ga-Ga and people like that. It’s nice to be able to play with that many artists, I mean, I wouldn’t want to just do Damnation all the time, but I also wouldn’t want to play with Lady Ga-Ga all the time either so it’s nice to be able to mix it up and move between the two extremes.

MM: You mentioned the 20^th anniversary coming up next year. Is there anything special planned for that yet?
Andy: The plan is to do something special after giving Crooked Timber a year of touring. If you come along and see a 20^th anniversary show, we don’t just want it to be an hour and 45 minutes like you’ll see tonight. There’ll be something a bit different like maybe getting some musician friends of ours to turn up at certain venues to play songs with us, stuff like that. We’ve just started talking about it now so we’ll have to see what gigs are available, what the current climate will be, etc because we want it to be a lot of fun.

MM: You mentioned listening to some newer bands earlier. Is there anyone else you particularly like at the moment?
Andy: Rock-wise, I like a band called Part Chimp who are a noisy band from around Oxford who have got their second album out now called Thriller if you can believe that, ha-ha! And there’s a band from just outside London called Teeth of the Sea who are a post-rock band and there album’s called Orphaned by the Ocean and it’s amazing. 

There’s an American band called Pontiac as well who play some really bizarre stoner/blues stuff and I’m also listening to a lot of electronic music on the Hyperdub label like Code 9, Cult of the Thirteenth Hour and Burial, I really like them as well which is kind of dark and atmospheric. Someone described it as Black Sabbath in Reebok trainers, ha-ha!

Michael: There are tons of good bands. I like Future of the Left, their last album was brilliant and there’s a Northern Irish band called Dutch Hopes, their album’s great and another Northern Irish band called And So I Watch You From Afar which is all instrumental stuff and the new Baroness record is brilliant as well.

Neil: As Michael said, the Future of the Left album’s brilliant. I’ve got a little label of my own with a band called Die Chihuahua Die and I’m putting their album out next year.

MM: Is this something you’d consider for the 20^th anniversary next year – possibly taking some these bands out with you?
Andy: We’d love to. Of course it depends who’s available, maybe they’ll be on their own tours but there’s a lot of people we could ask, yeah. Also a lot of bands that we like may not even like us. It’s happened in the past where we’ve asked bands and they’ve said no because they weren’t really fans of the band which is fair enough. I think we’d go for people who we think would fit and also people who have helped us in the past.

MM: You finished on a cover of ‘Isolation’ by Joy Division at Damnation. Are there any other songs you want to give a Therapy? make-over to?
Andy: Maybe ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ by The Beat, we could do it in the style of Fugazi which would fit in with the current mindset that we have but there’s a sax solo in it which kind of got the alarm bells ringing, ha-ha! The last time we got a friend to play sax for us was on our first album Babyteeth and Keith Thompson was a jazz saxophonist who worked in our local record shop and we wanted this kind of avant-garde sax sound but what we didn’t want was Keith to turn up, drink a bottle of tequila and pass out in the studio bath! So we’ve always got to tread carefully when we’re talking about sax on a record!

Michael: We could go for ‘Baker Street’!

Andy: Well, the Foo Fighters beat us to it there, so unfortunately it’s been done.

MM: Ok cool, well we’re just about out of time so thank you for taking the time out to do this and good luck for tonight.
All: No problem, thank you very much.

Interview by: Adam G.

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