The Angry Brigade

CHRISTMAS 1998. Andy Cairns was sick to his back teeth of the music industry. His band s last album Semi Detached had virtually gotten buried under the collapse of A&M (whose parent company Polygram, was subsequently bought out by Universal) and the quartet were forced to subsidise the last leg of the 98 tour with money made from their biggest selling album Troublegum no laughing matter for a married man/expectant father and a bass player with a mortgage to feed. Then, to cap it all, drummer Graham Hopkins broke his arm.
This wasn t the same Therapy? who first erupted onto the scene in 1989, decimating the competition at a Baggot Inn Yellow Pack Night with the aid of blunt instruments, embolistic blasts of hardcore, songs about James Joyce fucking your sister, and titles like Meat Abstract , then destined to be released on the band s own Multifuckingnational imprint.
It s easy to forget how Dublin a city characterised by a musical and moral code of fellowship, melody and good vibes recoiled from these guys. Therapy? weren t Swim or No Sweat or The Black Velvet Band: this was evil shit, a slow beast crawling from Belfast, its hour come round at last. Norn Iron was forged, leaving Dublin eating dust, although soon the capital would be crawling with its own steel-capped acts, the likes of Mexican Pets, Pet Lamb, Jam Jar Jail, Female Hercules and Venus Envy.
But by late 98, Andy wasn t sure he liked what his band had become, suspecting they d strayed too far into the mainstream for comfort. Universal raved over the new demos, but the singer thought they sounded old and jaded; pop-punk by the numbers. Such three-minute heroics had borne fruit with the Mercury Music Prize-nominated Troublegum, but by Infernal Love, despite the addition of cellist Martin McCarrick, Cairns felt they were on auto-pilot, chasing the dollar. The follow-up Semi Detached, with Graham replacing Fyfe Ewing on drums, was better, but still directionless and plagued with internal problems.
Plus, the climate had changed: US hardcore had mutated into grunge and then into squeaky powerpop like Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring, while on this side of the water, the earnest mediocrity of Stereophonics was selling by the shitload. Punk s second wave had failed to splinter into strange new shapes there were no abstracted alchemists snapping at the Foo Fighters heels the way Television and PiL succeeded the Ramones and The Damned in the late 70s.
In short, if Therapy? didn t do something mindblowing in 99, they were up shit creek.

Faced with musical and financial bankruptcy, Andy Cairns did the sane thing. He became a crank, took to wearing a green fishing jacket and a baseball cap, grew a huge Grizzly Adams beard, and listened to little else but the Stooges Fun House and Captain Beefheart s Clear Spot. When Graham got well enough to play again, the band bought a load of vintage equipment, reconvened in a freezing rehearsal room, dismissed the roadies and did the donkey-work themselves. Then, the quartet spent long hours playing, respraying, overhauling, thinking, talking, playing pool, and generally putting in the flying time required to write songs that matched the sounds they heard in their heads. And sure enough, something positive happened. The music got weird again. More twisted. More fugazi, as in Vietnam vet slang for fucked up . . .
. . . and we started playin , and we just had a real fuck-you defiance about it, because nothing else could go wrong.
This is Andy speaking now, eight months later in Dublin, accompanied by Graham, who seems content to sit back and let his bandmate do most of the explaining. The new album Suicide Pact You First is finished and ready to go. Cairns fishing jacket, bushy beard and baseball cap are gone, yet this is unmistakably a man who has realised the dangers of having your artistic vision made blurry by spending too long on industry swings and roundabouts.
We realised everything went wrong because on the last two records, we were not putting any thought or care into the creative process, and we weren t inspired, he reckons. So this time we took a lot of time, just jammin for hours, going in every day at 11, coming out at 10, and the result is the album that we did.
So, the band bought back into the hardcore doctrine sonically, but not socially. Not for Cairns the lifestyle whereby a recruit is required to remain celibate, teetotal, and dedicated to a strict code of the road that involves subsisting on a diet of old tractor tyres and lighter fuel. But on the other hand, domesticity and the prospect of parenthood didn t exactly mellow him out. In fact, the opposite happened his tastes became more extreme.
A lot of people thought, Well, Andy s married with a kid on the way, Michael s got a mortgage, the band are getting older, the next record s gonna be a big Rock-Lite crossover with radio-friendly hits on it, he admits. And I think if that had happened, we d have split up a month after the record was released, cos I couldn t live with myself. I mean, even now I sometimes go into shops and look at Infernal Love and just think, We completely lost the plot there, lads .
Creatively, I mean, I m not even talking about drugs or social behaviour. And we said, This record has to be fucking fun, because if it sells ten copies and no-one likes it, at least I wanna go into a shop and see it in the bargain bin in five years time and go, I love this record, I don t care , as opposed to a record where we tried to make money. We wanted to have a little bit of fucking dignity back.
All the same, those who ve never had to deal with the anarchy, excrement and sheer noise generated by a newborn mightn t automatically equate the hardcore life with that of a homebody. Does this two-headed rockbeast from hell find it hard to reconcile the street devil/house angel dichotomy?
No, because I still listen to really noisy and obnoxious music, and my wife can t understand it, he reasons. She goes, You re 34 years of age and you re playing Atari Teenage Riot at ten o clock in the morning! You ve nothing in common with these people! I ll listen to absolutely everything, but I still love the power of just basic hardcore music, anything by the MC5, the Stooges, James Brown, right through to bands like Today s The Day.
And as for that Clear Spot fetish . . .
Beefheart s got such a great sense of play in his music which people often overlook, he enthuses. People go, The guy s avant-garde and he s out there , but he s not, he s like a big child in his playroom with all these things put together, and I like that.
The image of Cairns as a post-punk street preacher with mountainy-man whiskers, a Beefheart heart and a Tourette s tongue might be a colourful one, but it s not that far removed from what the band were shooting for on Suicide Pact You First.
It s sort of angry, but it s also ranting, he says. It s not Radiohead, it s not the Manic Street Preachers, it s not teenage angst strung out for a few more years. It s just fucking ranting and raving, the lyrics are like dipsomaniac literature, barroom philosophy. A lot of it is very surreal.
With titles like Wall Of Mouths on the set-list, he s not kidding, although the idea for said tune derives not from Cairns De Sade fetish (see panel) but a rather more sedate source.
That s from when I went scuba diving at Christmas, he explains. I swam through a shoal of fish, which are grotesque enough creatures as it is. And a lot of them don t budge, they just swim around you. And if it s a dense shoal of fish, you re confronted with a wall of these gaping lifeless mouths that part just before they get to your mask. That was quite creepy, and I wrote the title down as soon as I got out of the water.

True to its lyrical content, Suicide Pact is a fractious and fractured record, occasionally veering towards outright musical perversion, particularly on He s Not That Kind Of Girl . Andy s voice is masqued for much of the album; an approach adopted partly as a dada-ist protest against what he sees as a prevailing Serious Rock conspiracy, partly for the sheer hell of it.
A lot of it was a reaction against the really, really bleeding-heart earnestness that has crept in and made so mundane an awful lot of contemporary music, he avers. Thom Yorke, that kind of stuff. And we did that a little bit with Infernal Love, but something about me seems quite oafish whenever I try and do that, I m quite heavy-handed and clumsy at it. I actually wanted to have more fun with my voice this time, and not have so much importance on the lyrics.
Nevertheless, certain of those lyrics, particularly Six Mile Water and the bigot-baiting God Kicks plus almost all of the music evokes Ulster, specifically the dread of living in a warzone. When did Cairns first feel that fear?
You witnessed things from a very early age with the Troubles, he remembers. You re in town and a bomb would go off a mile away, and you ask, What s that? and your Dad kind of explains it to you. And the saddest, most disturbing thing for me was that you actually get used to it.
That time that all the soldiers were killed on horseback in London years ago, I remember my grandmother crying. And no-one ever cried at atrocities on TV unless it was really, really bad, something worse than the one before. And this was because it was horses they had killed. My grandmother was going, Look at those poor wee horses , cos human life, in the Troubles, was an everyday thing. And that was the point that I thought, This is so fucked up .
But did the sense of a province hanging on tenterhooks since the Good Friday Agreement have any explicit effect on the new record?
I think the title Suicide Pact You First kind of applies to the peace process, Cairns concludes. The stubborn-headedness and immovability of the two figureheads at the centre of it. I think, especially for me and Michael, in a lot of conversations we ve had recently, we ve realised that the sense of humour and survival instinct we have actually comes from being from Ulster. You d be very hard pushed to see anyone in the creative field of rock n roll from the North doing a Kurt Cobain. People are in it for the long haul. n
Suicide Pact You First is out now on Universal Records.