The Beat Surrender

Therapy? were one of the bands who had massive success with both singles and albums in the 1990’s, this in spite of (or possibly because of) the fact that they didn’t really fit neatly into any one particular scene at the time.

The hits may have dried up a while ago, but the band are still prolific and proved that they are more than capable of delivering a good album still, as they did with this year’s Crooked Timber release. Often overlooked and under valued in my opinion, I think it’s time that Therapy? were given the credit they deserve for such longevity in what is a very fickle business.

I caught up with bass player Michael McKeegan recently to find out how things were in the group and to find out a little bit more about the new album from the groups perspective.

You had a fair bit of commercial success in the early part of your career, do you miss the higher profile that came with that now?

Depends I suppose, there are lots of things I really don’t miss at all and then there are some other things I think “woo, that was cool” etc. To be honest I’m very happy with where we are now, I feel we’re doing killer music and the chemistry in the band is great. “Crooked Timber” is our 12th album and it’s our 20th year as a band next year so we have lots to be happy and positive for, not a lot of bands can say that these days.

There was a period where you were having hit singles etc, did you expect it to end and why do you think it did?

The ‘hits’ make more sense when you look at the fact our music was probably a lot more ‘radio friendly’ and at that time, early/mid-90’s the whole ‘melodic punk/metal’ sound was quite innovative. Now every boyband worth their salt has a ‘punk dude’ in the line-up and that sound as a whole has been very watered down and seems generic.

With regard to “expecting it to end”, I honestly know we didn’t expect the songs to be as popular as they were so we just enjoyed the ride. Obviously we loved the songs and were into making killer albums but I never imagined that “Screamager” would be a top 10 hit for example.

We had less ‘hits’ over the years just because the band had been around more than a couple of years and there’s always a younger/smilier band coming along. I suppose that’s the nature of the music industry, always craving ‘fresh meat’ so to speak ;) By that stage we’d moved on to different sounds like “Suicide Pact…”, the more experimental stuff.

You’ve got a new album out now and your first single release in four years, can you tell us a bit about those please?

Last album was in 2006 so we toured that, signed a new deal and then took some time off to write and concoct the new tunes without any pre-conceived ideas or deadlines looming. It did us the world of good as we wrote all the songs from scratch and treated each one as little concept with regard to sound, approach and theme. As a result all the songs are quite unique entities but still reflect the classic T? elements…

For anybody who hasn’t heard material for a while, how has your sound changed over the years?

As I touched on above, the ‘classic’ elements are all there, just some of them have been exaggerated and expanded upon. The rhythmns are heavy like the early mini albums and the guitar noisy and a bit angular with lots of melody on top. As you can tell this is a pretty awkward question for someone in the band to answer, it’s hard to paraphrase 19 years of musical development into a paragraph…sorry!

How do the live shows compare to ten or fifteen years ago and do you still get the same buzz out of them?

Buzz for us onstage is exactly the same. Give it loads and hopefully the audience will enjoy!
The title track and single is called “Crooked Timber” and it’s a driving dirty beast with influences from Krautrock, Steve Reich and Kant…

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