In the mid-1990s, when Therapy? were bulldozing the UK Top 20 with songs such as Screamager, singer Andy Cairns was often asked about the political situation back home in Northern Ireland. He would take a moment, choosing his words with care. Say the wrong thing and the consequences could be dire – and not just for him.
“I was brought up on a very loyalist estate,” Cairns recalls. “Now, if I had said anything against loyalism in Hot Press magazine, or in the Irish press, people know where my mother and father live. It wouldn’t have been a ‘might have’. They would have got a visit from people. It was better for us to keep our mouths shut.”
Thirty years on, all has changed utterly – for Northern Ireland and Therapy?. The Belfast Agreement has endured, somehow, for a quarter of a century. Cairns and his band have similarly survived several near implosions and now return with a zinging new LP, Hard Cold Fire. It’s a rollicking slab of post-lockdown heavy rock that doubles as a tribute to Larne and the community in which Cairns came of age.
Hard Cold Fire, Cairns explains, comes from a line by the poet Louis MacNeice, who wrote of “the hard cold fire of the northerner…frozen into his blood from the fire in his basalt”. MacNeice grew up in Carrickfergus, down the road from Larne, and Cairns feels that his poetry captures the hard-knock essence of the inhabits of Antrim’s east coast.
“That’s where myself and Michael [McKeegan, bassist] are from: Ballyclare, Larne, Carrickfergus,” Cairns says.
“What MacNeice is writing about – it’s stoicism, it’s resolve. And also basalt is very prominent in County Antrim. It [Hard Cold Fire] is a great phrase. We thought of it a long time ago. When the pandemic hit, we thought… well, this might be, post-pandemic, the best title for the record.”
Therapy? were Britpop’s unlikely gatecrashers. They’d come up during the early 1990s with a blend of industrial rock and grunge. But with Troublegum and hits such as Screamager and Nowhere, they flipped to zesty punk-pop. The shift brought enormous success. Troublegum peaked at five in the UK. Suddenly, Therapy? were on Top of the Pops and on the cover of the NME.
[ Therapy? 30 years of power chords and metal riffsOpens in new window ]
This was 1994, the year of the first IRA ceasefire. Therapy’s golden age coincided with peace in the North and a more general sense that Irish music had cast off its restraints and was going somewhere (The Cranberries and the Divine Comedy would break through around the same time). Yet even amid the success, Cairns was careful to never take it all for granted or assume the purple patch would last forever. Nothing does – especially in music.
“Before Troublegum we’d been around for years. A lot of people on the outside thought Troublegum was our first album. We came from that DIY punk background,” Cairns says.
“We didn’t go into this to play golf with Elton John.”
Cairns now lives in a village outside Cambridge with his English wife. It’s bucolic and a welcome contrast to the hectic pace of life on the road. It also feels universes removed from Larne in the 1980s and 1990s, when bands were sometimes reluctant to confront, in their music, the messy reality of sectarianism in the North.
That reticence no longer exists. For millennials and Gen Zers, the Troubles is ancient history: fuel for TikTok skits and Up the Ra call-and-responses. What does Cairns think of younger people chanting support for the IRA – or of groups such as Belfast Irish language rappers Kneecap, whose music both parodies and celebrates republican pageantry?
Those Kneecap tunes are great. The way I look at it is, it just sounds so full of life and brio
“This reminds me a little bit of when the wall came down in East Germany. After the initial euphoria, I remember a lot of our German friends saying that eastern European communist chic had become trendy [among] people that were way too young when the wall came down to remember what the old east [was] like,” he says.
East Germany had its German Democratic Republic “Ostalgie”. In Ireland we have… Up the Ra-stalgie?
“The return to the iconography of the Troubles is about people who missed it first time around and think it’s a bit exciting,” says Cairns.
“People will watch old football hooligan videos and think, ‘that must have been amazing’. For a band like us, that lived through it – there was a reason we weren’t direct.
“We had plenty of political songs. Potato Junkie was political [it references the Battle of the Boyne in the line, “How can I remember 1690?/I was born in 1965?”]. Church of Noise was political [being about a Romeo and Juliet romance across the sectarian boundaries]. But we couldn’t be as binary as bands can be today.”
In the specific case of Kneecap – who feature a DJ wearing a tricolour balaclava and whose audiences chant “Brits out”– Cairns’s response is straightforward: the music is fantastic.
“It just sounds joyous. Those Kneecap tunes are great. The way I look at it is, it just sounds so full of life and brio,” Cairns says.
“It used to be difficult for people from the North of the country. It was hard to be proud of where you were from without taking a certain side. You always had to straddle the middle of the fence.
That was a bizarre record. I’ve only learned to live with it recently, because of the fallout
“You couldn’t say what you felt back then,” he continues. “We used to consider ourselves Irish, from the North of the country. Mixed religions and backgrounds in the band but a band from the North of the country.
Hard Cold Fire is among the best Therapy? records in years. But they’ve had to fight to make it to three decades. One of the biggest challenges was in the mid-1990s when, following the success of Troublegum, they endured the mother of all backlashes.
The catalyst was 1995′s Infernal Love LP, which committed the double heresy of lush product and of being stacked with ballads, including a cover of Hüsker Dü's Diane (featuring a seminude Cairns in the video). The reaction was negative – if not vicious. They were eventually dropped by A&M Records, the media deserted the group and much of their audience ran for the hills. The case against them was that they’d gone from sounding like Throbbing Gristle to emulating Meatloaf.
“That was a bizarre record. I’ve only learned to live with it recently, because of the fallout,” Cairns says.
The Irish are very good building myths. But the thing about the English is that they start building myths around things that don’t exist
“Fyfe [Ewing, the band’s drummer at the time] left because we became totally uncool. Not just Fyfe – certain members of the entourage found that incredibly difficult to deal with.
“You became all of a sudden very uncool, in the middle of Britpop.”
Cairns stayed away from Infernal Love for years. But recently he and McKeegan went back. It wasn’t nearly as bad as they remembered. “Myself and Michael were looking over one of the old reviews of Infernal Love.
“It said, ‘Oh dear… they’ve become a trad rock band’. We sat down and thought, ‘okay…the first track has a free-jazz bit in the middle’. There are interludes by the electronic musician David Holmes. It’s not Saxon, it’s not Iron Maiden.
“I don’t know where they got that from. Because there was a scorched earth policy with Britpop, we were kicked out.
“In the UK and Ireland, it got a hammering critically. But it still did very well for us in Spain, Italy, Portugal.”
What hurt, he recalls, was the personal nature of the criticism.
“Having people criticise you at that time, was something we were only getting used to,” Cairns explains.
“With Troublegum, we were getting featured in magazines and on front covers. We were on TV and radio. With that came having to deal with personal digs.
[ ‘We were asked in 1991 would Therapy? still be around in 2011. We all laughed’Opens in new window ]
“If someone said, ‘I don’t like the record, it’s crap’ – fair enough. But if someone said, ‘I don’t like the record because this Irish guy has got a s**t beard – that’s a bit more hard to take’.”
Hard Cold Fire was the product of another challenging period for Cairns and Therapy?. The singer coasted lockdown, learning jazz guitar and generally enjoying the first extended break of his career. When live music resumed, he took Therapy? on a greatest hits tour around Europe. It was only after that, with his return to Cambridge, that the comedown struck. A deep sense of helplessness descended on Cairns: he wondered if he could carry on.
I live in Cambridge. People play f**king Quidditch in Cambridge. It doesn’t exist. There’s this ridiculousness
“When lockdown hit, I was getting calls and texts from people I knew in bands. ‘I’m struggling – I don’t know what to do’. Friends of mine were calling me up going, ‘I’m struggling to hold on here’,” Cairns recalls.
“What I’d actually done was deferred the feeling everybody else had. Then it hit me when we came back. I came back from tour and felt down.
“I was calling everybody involved in the band and just saying, ‘I feel flat’. They all said the same thing – ‘during lockdown you were chipper, maybe it’s catching up with you’. I think that’s what it was.”
The album is a wonderful slice of slamming rock. However, Cairns wears his heart on his sleeve too. Consider the track Poundland Of Hope And Glory, an explosive riposte to the ritualistic nationalism that has become common in the UK around Brexit.
“The Irish are very good building myths. But the thing about the English is that they start building myths around things that don’t exist,” Cairns says.
“King Arthur never existed: he is now seen as an icon. Sherlock Holmes… you can go and visit his house.
“He’s a fictional character. Harry Potter has taken off – a lot of people are getting themselves into financial penury trying to send their kids to private schools over here.
“If you go to a private school you wear a blazer and a hat, like Harry Potter. I live in Cambridge. People play f**king Quidditch in Cambridge. It doesn’t exist. There’s this ridiculousness.”
We’ve always done things to suit ourselves. We’ve never been that devastated by stuff that has gone wrong
The lyrics came to him as he was watching the BBC Proms – an annual orgy of flag-waving that typically concludes with a rendition of William Blake’s Jerusalem and its pledge to “build Jerusalem” in “England’s green and pleasant land”. Cairns rolls his eyes.
“Listen, Jerusalem is a city in the Middle East. The Jerusalem you’re talking about, this majestic utopia – it’s another one of your myths,” he says.
“That’s how that came about. We had to tweak the lyrics – initially it was a rant with me talking about Harry Potter and James Bond.”
The new album will be eagerly received by fans. What it probably won’t do is bother the higher reaches of charts (their previous two records peaked at 43 and 79 respectively in the UK). The success Therapy? experienced in the mid-1990s isn’t coming back. Cairns is fine with that. Therapy? still have a loyal audience, which will no doubt flock to see the group when they take Hard Cold Fire on tour.
“We’ve always done things to suit ourselves. We’ve never been that devastated by stuff that has gone wrong,” Cairns says.
“If we go and play and we’re playing The Olympia, we’re not playing an arena … who cares?
“It’s brilliant. There’s lots of people enjoying themselves. We feel so blessed to still have this chance to play the world after three decades. We’re happy doing what we do.”
Hard Cold Fire is released May 5th
