Full metal beckett

‘Round here we’re suckers for brutalising records that betray some governing sense of wicked intelligence. Produced by Gang Of Four man Andy Gill – who’s also done the honours for the Chili Peppers and The Jesus Lizard – Therapy’s tenth album Crooked Timber sounds feral and sabre toothed, but there’s also an underlying layer of choral music (‘Exiles’) and even krautrock on the epic ‘The Magic Mountain’ (after Mann), not to mention a ream of literary references.

“A big defining influence on this record was Samuel Beckett of all people,” admits Therapy? mainman Andy Cairns. “Initially the record was going to be a lot more unhinged lyrically, ’cos I was dabbling in the Theatre of the Absurd, but I think the reference points of the album were dealing with the question of, ‘What is consciousness?’
“I read a brilliant book by Douglas Hofstadter called I Am A Strange Loop where he thinks there’s a possibility that the mind might actually be playing tricks and we’re actually illusions of ourselves, which really freaked me out, and that started off ‘The Head That Tried To Strangle Itself’. But we wanted to keep the music really kind of powerful as well, we wanted to lay back a little bit on some of the more obvious melodic traits that we’d used in the past.”
We’re talking cerebral metal here: the album’s title derives from the 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant’s assertion that, “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
“Well, indirectly through Beckett we got to the Kant quote,” Andy explains, “and an awful lot of Beckett’s heroes, for want of a better word, live slightly outside, but there’s a dignity to them. They might be living in a ditch with holey shoes, or they might be in an insane asylum, like in Murphy, but there’s a kind of a dignity to them which is almost noble in its tragedy.
“I’m not doing myself any favours,” he continues, “but this is probably the nearest Therapy? will get to a mid-life crisis album. I turned 40 a couple of years ago and had a health scare a couple of months before we made the record, and I kind of had to seek solace in stuff like the Theatre of the Absurd, that the human being’s ambition to keep on regardless is also helped and tempered by the fact that you can see the ludicrousness in life as well.”
Andy was recently quoted as saying that the new songs “examine what it means to be human – to realise that we are the only living things on the planet aware of our own deaths.” As Beckett wrote, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
“That awareness troubled me when I was a kid until a certain time,” he admits, “and then I just never thought twice about it. And obviously now I’m married and a family man, I’ve got a son, all this stuff suddenly hits you like a ton of bricks, and I find that I get an awful lot more resonance with certain works of art and certain records that I wouldn’t have a few years ago. That bit in Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett has it lit so that he constantly looks over his shoulder, as if death is quite literally on his shoulder. (But) there’s something quite glorious about the Victor Meldrew syndrome, I quite like the idea of being belligerent and raging against the dying of the light.
“I remember when Harold Pinter died recently, all the eulogies were appearing, and he’d made a really good comment. He’s well known for his rage and political anger, but he said that as he began to slide into middle age, what he most enjoyed was that grudges didn’t really matter anymore. He’d held quite heated and hateful grudges for certain people, but as he got older he didn’t even think about it. And exactly the same thing happened to me. I’ve actually felt quite comfortable in my own skin most of the time, and I know the rest of the lads feel exactly the same. And when we were making this album we felt, if not proud of what we were doing, then comfortable with each other’s ideas. There was no fear.”

Crooked Timber is out now on Demolition Records