Therapy?

Track	Album
Loser Cop	Babyteeth
Potato Junkie	Pleasure Death
Teethgrinder	Nurse
Knives	Troublegum
Trigger Inside	Troublegum
Diane	Infernal Love
Jam Jar Jail	Suicide Pact – You First
Somnambulist	Crooked Timber
Die Laughing	Greatest Hits (The Abbey Road Session)
Days Kollaps	Hard Cold Fire

At the time of writing, Therapy? have just finished recording album number 17. Bands this deep into their recording career often find themselves in a creative slump. Deep Purple’s 17th album Bananas is widely regarded as their worst. Black Sabbath’s #17 is the lumpen Cross Purposes. Neil Young’s 16th and 17th releases are the execrable Old Ways and Landing On Water (and I love Neil Young).

And that’s if bands ever get to album #17. AC/DC only managed it in 2020 with Power Up (it’s a bit meh). Therapy? can see in their rearview mirror, bands who had a huge head start on them such as U2, Aerosmith and R.E.M. – a measly 15 albums each. Their mates Manic Street Preachers? 15 and counting.

Maybe a better comparison is fellow Northern Irish upstarts Stiff Little Fingers? Only 10 studio releases since 1979’s Inflammable Material. How about Ash? Not even in double figures yet. Even a band as widely considered prolific as New Model Army has only released 16 albums. The Wildhearts’ incredible Satanic Rites Of The Wildhearts (2025) was that band’s 11th release but they have combusted and reformed with different lineups more often than you’ve had hot dinners. Throw in Ginger Wildheart’s solo, side and short-lived projects and among their early 90s ˈBritrockˈ contemporaries only then do Therapy? begin to look like comparative slouches.

Here’s my Toppermost Therapy? guide. It’s not the band’s ten best songs nor even my favourite ten. Rather, it’s ten that I think best sums up their long career.

Loser Cop (1) is not a song I would rank in T?’s top tier cannon but I include it here because it shows the musical chops that most people were probably unaware the band hand during their mid 90s pop-punk peak. With the Troubles raging, T? were part of the DIY, punk-ethos Warzone Collective and amidst the debut mini-LP Babyteeth’s (1991) spikey, grubby noise, Loser Cop freewheels into avant garde, Zappa-esque jazz. It’s not a great song but it was early proof that this trio – one Catholic, one Protestant, one a ‘Mongrel’ – were going to be difficult to pigeonhole. Not ‘typical’ Northern Irish punk, not metal, not garage rock nor hardcore, but distilling elements of each with a healthy dose of dance music.

With its refrain of “James Joyce is fucking my sister”, Potato Junkie (2) remains a live staple and is a political song. Speaking with Louder in 2023, Andy Cairns said, “The two questions we’d be asked in interviews the most were ‘why’s there a question mark in the name’?” and “being from Northern Ireland, why do you not sing about politics like Stiff Little Fingers and Sinead O’Connor?” Potato Junkie is political. Only, in the band’s own dark, distorted way. For Cairns, the Joyce lyric was a surrealist jab to the ribs of those romanticising and simplifying Irish culture. “I [felt] like part of my upbringing was being fucked with by someone selling the culture.”

Major label debut Nurse is a great album but hamstrung by a feeble production from the bands’ live sound engineer. Teethgrinder (3) is not only probably the best-known track off it, and remains a live staple, but it is the song that ‘survives’ the production best. Fun fact: Nurse was recorded at Loco Studios in Caerleon near Newportand during the band’s time in south Wales, they saw Nirvana at the legendary and long-lost TJs, the gig after which Kurt proposed to Courtney.

Screamager probably should have been selected but it’s a given that even someone who has never listened to T? has heard Screamager, lead track on 1993’s Shortsharpshock EP. It’s 3 minutes of pop punk perfection and the EP reached no.9 and no.2 in the UK and Ireland singles charts respectively. Had the band pretended they were from California and dyed their hair a different colour they might have shifted Dookie or Smash-sized units of 1994’s Troublegum which included Screamager. Nevertheless, the band hit paydirt, the top 20, and the Mercury Prize shortlist (along with Take That’s Everything Changes, Pulp – His ‘n’ Hers, and that year’s winner Elegant Slumming by M People). Opening track Knives (4) sets the scene and tone for the album. I remember buying Troublegum on cassette from Spillers Records in Cardiff and putting it in the car when my mam picked me up. Twenty seconds in and I’m blushing as Cairns spits: “My girlfriend says / That I need help / My boyfriend says / I’d be better off dead / I’m gonna get drunk / Come round and fuck you up.” “Maybe you can listen to it when you get home,” mam said. And I pressed eject.

Michael McKeegan isone ofmy favourite bass players and Trigger Inside (5) encapsulates what he brings to the T? party: a rumbling bottom end with a danciness that betrays their acid and house influences. It has another macabre opening refrain that speaks to all us misfits: “Here comes a girl with perfect teeth / I bet she won’t be smiling at me / I know how Jeffry Dahmer feels.” Has the Mercury Prize ever shortlisted another album that namechecks the 1990s most notorious serial killer? Maybe Adele on 19… This version is off the 2020 Abbey Road sessions where the Evil Priest’s bass sounds even gnarlier.

One of T?’s biggest influences are another trio – Hüsker Dü whose Grant Hart-penned Diane (6) they included on the follow-up to Troublegum, 1995’s Infernal Love. Shoved back into the studio by their label, burned out, drugged-out and with a drummer wanting out, they also had no songs written. It is amazing that it did not break the band. But they would never be the same again. For years Infernal Love was an album Cairns looked back on with dislike. But fans loved it and he was finally won over on a twentieth anniversary tour of it. The label played it safe with the lead singles, snappy pop-punk efforts Stories and Loose (The Wildhearts had more than a reasonable case for plagiarism of the former’s take on Shame On Me). Third single Diane was unlike anything T? fans had heard. As single choices go, think if the Manics had released Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky off Everything Must Go. Gone, off Nurse, and Unrequited, off Troublegum, had alsofeatured the cello but they weren’t as, well, cello-ey as Diane. Its dark, brooding lyrics about murder are entirely on brand for Cairns but completely stripped down and slowed down it remains astonishgly powerful three decades later. It’s a good choice for that pub staple too: Name a cover that’s better than the original. Today, T? often include Diane in their setlists but tend to be faithful to the Hüsker Dü guitar-driven original.

Jam Jar Jail (7) is my pick off T?’s Suicide Pact – You First, a snarly, nasty song off the band’s ‘Fuck You’ album according to Cairns. Original drummer Fyfe Ewing had departed, and the band had been demoted to a subsidiary imprint of Universal Records who had picked up the carcass of A&M after it had gone bust and wanted as little as possible to do with the band. Arguably the band’s heaviest album they were at a crossroads and if they were going down they were going to go down fighting. Mary Anne Hobbs (in)famously said on her Radio 1 Rock Show, “I think this album should be destroyed.”

A mid-career slump followed – the albums Shameless and Never Apologise Never Explainare farfrom required listening – and while One Cure Fits All (2006) got the twentieth anniversary treatment from Mercury Studios earlier this year, I’ve personally never warmed to it. I was, if I’m honest, finding myself going off the band, at least in any contemporaneous sense. I still adored their 90s output but it was beginning to look like T?’s best days were behind them. Then in 2009 they returned with the inspired Crooked Timber. In that Louder interview Cairns admits that having lost a record deal after One Cure,the band was in the last chance saloon. So why not do what so many bands have done and knock out Troublegum 2.0? “If we went and made another Troublegum and it flopped then I couldn’t take the rejection, so I wanted to do something completely left of centre,” Cairns told Louder. As Hail Mary releases go, this is one from deeeeep in the pocket with a huge linebacker aiming for your head before you unleash a pass for the ages … and it sticks with your wide receiver’s outstretched hand.

Produced by Andy Gill from the Gang Of Four, it came after Andy Cairns had been debilitated through illness and though the songs were as topically dark as ever – because Cairns had been listening to a lot of modern classical and electronic music and very little rock music – Crooked Timber has a completely different sound, tone, aesthetic … well everything. Opening song, The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself has a pounding riff over a weird time signature and with a vocal performance from Cairns that is almost operatic. He wasn’t shitting us about the classical music after all. He also sings about the “the madness of the shrieking skull” which gives you another glimpse into his mindset. “I’m not sure where it would stand on our fans’ lists, but from a personal point of view I’d put it at number two because it’s got a really special place in my heart,” Cairns said. I’d not put it that high but it’s definitely top five. My pick is Somnambulist (8) primarily because of its filthy, hypnotic bass line. If it doesn’t get the anniversary treatment in 2029, we riot.

In 2019 the band headed back into the studio – Abbey Road no less – to re-record their ‘greatest hits’. It hinted at a paucity of ideas on Cairns’ part but they rationalised it by saying that since a second new drummer, former The Beyond sticksman Neil Cooper, had not played on the tracks first time round they were keen to re-record them with him. The album came out a month before we all went into COVID-19 lockdown and it ended up being like a comfort blanket. Maybe only a smarter replica of the tatty, tired one we had as a kid, but it served a purpose during those weird days. They invited James Dean Bradfield to add some guitar to any song of his choice, and he opted for Die Laughing (9) offTroublegum, a song I saw him join Cairns on stage at The Full Moon in Cardiff to play during a 2010s Cairns acoustic tour. Troublegum was released in February 1994 while the Manics were in Sound Space Studios recording The Holy Bible. Listen to the tone of Bradfield’s guitar on the re-Abbey Road version of Die Laughing and it not only embellishes the original T? song but simultaneously takes you back to his own band’s tortured masterpiece.

2023’s Hard Cold Fire has no right to sound as good as it does. The band sound as fresh as ever and though it does not break new ground like Crooked Timber, or does not invite listeners to pick at emotional and mental scabs like Troublegum or Suicide Pact – You First, it’s taut and muscular and is done n dusted in little over thirty minutes. Album closer Days Kollaps (10) is all anthemic, minor chords. As a product of a society that turned-in on and fought itself, Therapy? have much to teach us about the damage done by intolerance and bigotry. The closing lyric is as resonant, powerful and essential as it ever was: “All the days collapse as one / I need to find a place / Where bridges build not burn.”  

Therapy? Official Website

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Therapy? Fans Worldwide – Private Facebook Group

Russell Todd is a community development professional living in Cardiff. His first book, co-written with Alan Twelvetrees, “Community Development, Social Action and Social Planning (6th edition)” came out in 2024 on Policy Press (available here). He is currently combining working on the next edition with writing a biography of former Wales footballer Phil Woosnam who was Commissioner of the North American Soccer League during its 1970s heyday. He also produces podcasts for the non-profit sector and founded the first and longest-running podcast on the Wales national football team which started in 2014.

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