Interview with Andy, Michael and Fyfe

by Andrea Thorn for Making Music (March, 1994)

Never ones to miss an opportunity to meet some cuddly Irish noise merchants, Andrea Thorn corners singer Andy Cairns and bassist Michael McKeegan, while, down below, Geoff Nicholls talks drumming with the new Sandie Shaw of rock, Fyfe Ewing.

“A lot of people are offended by the fact that three bin men from Ireland can be successful,” chuckles Andy Cairns, “that three oiks can be famous.” Andy is vocalist, guitarist and chief songwriter with punk/metal band Therapy?, currently one of the hottest rock acts on the planet. He’s also the nicest character it’s ever been my pleasure to interview. Not a revelation in itself, but this is the man who roars out lines like, ‘I’m gonna get drunk/Come round and fuck you up’ over a crushing sonic guitar assault, and looks like a younger version of Robert De Niro’s demonic Louis Cyphere in Angel Heart. Appearances, it seems, can be very deceptive.

I might come home drunk one night and have this brilliant concept in my head, record it on a four-track and wake up the next day and think, ‘Christ!’.

Andy is filling me in on a few background details while we wait for bassist Michael McKeegan to arrive. Therapy? formed in 1989—before then Andy had been a bedroom player, never inspired enough to form a band. Then he met drummer Fyfe Ewing at a local gig. “There was this band playing with a guy who looked about 12 drumming. They were doing covers, but the only thing that stuck out was that he was such a good drummer. I went up later to compliment him and found out that he didn’t want to be in a covers band because he loved Sonic Youth and Big Black, who I used to listen to at the time. He invited me to his house for a jam and we decided to form a band because we really liked what we were playing. Fyfe was still in the sixth form at school and Michael was in his geography class. Fyfe didn’t know him, but knew he had a bass guitar so we asked him to a practice. This guy turned up who none of us knew…”

Melody

Fame arrived fairly promptly for the fledgling band. In 1990 they decided to make a record (“because demo tapes usually get thrown in the bin”), saved up £1200 and pressed 1000 singles. When Andy and Michael went to see The Revolting Cocks and Silverfish in Glasgow, they gave a copy of the single to a member of Silverfish. Two days later Gary Walker (head of hip indie label Wiiija) “phoned up, keen to release a record.” What eventually appeared was the mini LP Babyteeth, which strolled to number one in the indie chart. In 1992 Therapy? signed to A&M and their first proper album, Nurse, was released in the same year; a not entirely cohesive work, it none the less went top 30. Then in 1993 came the groundbreaking Shortsharpshock EP, which spawned the top ten hit Screamager—a pop/punk classic which represented a maturing of the band’s style. Their recently released second album, Troublegum, contains a similar blend of melody, aggression and power, and looks set to become a best seller.

“I really love melodies and short songs,” says Andy. “We didn’t want to write an album full of ‘Screamagers’, but it made us realise we shouldn’t be afraid of melody. With Troublegum we thought, we’ll not be scared of choruses; that turned the direction of the band.”

Andy wrote most of Troublegum himself but, “it wasn’t intentional. Whenever we toured America I got really into writing songs on acoustic guitar, so when we got back we had 12 new songs. I’m prolific, but you have to wade through 90 percent of what I do because it’s rubbish. I might come home drunk one night and have this brilliant concept in my head, record it on a four-track and wake up the next day and think, ‘Christ!’. I’m glad I have that sobering up period to re-evaluate, otherwise there’d be some absolute nonsense. There have already been some close shaves gone out on record, due to a moment of schizophrenia.”

We used so many dialogues out of films that everybody started doing it, from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin to Ministry. In between every song, ‘I woke up this morning and I had a gun to my head,’—it was like ‘fuck off!’.

“Nurse was very long-winded and clinical: I’d spend ages getting the guitar effect, then Fyfe would play some kind of rhythm, then Michael would come in and after three days we’d have one piece of music, never mind the lyrics. We’d use vocals as another instrument so eventually we had all these ‘songs’ which were just pieces of sound with vocals thrown in incidentally.”

“When the band started we didn’t worry about the confines of verse, chorus and middle eight. It didn’t matter if it sounded nonsensical. Some of the sounds we get now verge towards the traditional, but we’re aware of anything sounding too traditional. Our sound’s quite metal, but there are enough other things to make it sound like Therapy? I can’t play guitar solos—they’re minimalist because my ability verges on the minimalist. What I like about heavy metal is the riffing and power chords. If we start throwing in traditional lead breaks then it’s all over—we’ll sound like another rock band.”

Mouldy

But Therapy?’s use of samples has always set them apart from the rock mentality, and confused the media who couldn’t decide if they were punk, metal or industrial. They’re not so prominent on this album, though. “We used so many dialogues out of films that everybody started doing it, from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin to Ministry. In between every song, ‘I woke up this morning and I had a gun to my head,’—it was like ‘fuck off!’. We used things like footsteps and traffic noise on Troublegum, because it was getting a wee bit ‘yawn’ using films all the time.”

Not only has the band’s style cohered on this latest release, so has Andy’s guitar sound; a hefty, rasping creature which is recognisable at 100 paces. Andy, how do you get that amazing sound? “It wasn’t accidental. I’ve always loved heavy metal guitar sounds—that big, chunky Metallica sound, but at the same time I love the way Bob Mould uses Sixties chords and Steve Albini uses things like clear harmonics. I think there was a bit of idiosyncrasy in the early records; one track would sound like Hüsker Dü, another like Ministry, and another like Big Black. It took three years to come up with the Troublegum sounds, which is a mixture of all three. It was just a matter of finding my own identity.”

They were saying, ‘are you going to be in Kerrang!, are you going to have your Marshall stacks in magazines?’—and we were lying, saying ‘yes, yes, of course we are’.

“We used to be really influenced by Hüsker Dü; some of our early demo tapes sound just like Hüsker Dü by numbers. No matter what he tells you, I think he plays barefoot because he watched a video once and Grant Hart was playing like that. I remember when I didn’t know much about guitars seeing Bob Mould playing a guitar solo and hammering on with his small finger. It sounds rubbish, you can’t even hear any difference but for me the fact that he did it made him the most amazing guitar player in the world.”

Early

Michael arrives, excited because the hotel porter has recognised Andy (“’ere, that bloke with the beard, is that your man out of Therapy??”), and talk turns to school days in Larne, where Andy began his musical career on the trombone. “They wouldn’t buy guitars because that’d be really popular, so they bought a small wind section instead. It’s amazing to think that when they teach music at school they inflict these horrendous instruments. But it might backfire: if they taught bass, drums and guitar, people would rebel by learning to play the oboe and clarinet. And down the Camden Falcon you’d see all these string quartets…”

Andy and Michael have a down-to-earth approach to their gear. Michael: “I use an Ampeg cab and head and a bottom of the range Status bass which the people in the Bass Centre painted black for me. Before, it looked like the top of a coffee table, it was a joke for six months, until I snapped. It was like something from MFI, you got a couple of chests of drawers and some nice Laura Ashley curtains free with it.”

Andy: “At the start I had a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Twin Reverb. It looked brilliant, it was the right cool set-up, but then I realised it didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. After we did Nurse, the producer suggested I get some Marshall stuff. Marshall to me always equalled Twisted Sister, but I got a deal with them. They were saying, ‘are you going to be in Kerrang!, are you going to have your Marshall stacks in magazines?’—and we were lying, saying ‘yes, yes, of course we are’. I always played Fender guitars because they were supposed to be cool and sounded OK. One of them bit the dust in Newcastle and in the music shop there was a Hamer Custom. I played it and it sounded brilliant, like the old punk guitars, the Pistols sound. I bought that but couldn’t get a deal with Hamer. Then I got one with Gibson. I really wanted a Les Paul because they’re punk rock, but every one I played sounded shit. I was really jealous because all these bands have an amazing Les Paul sound and I couldn’t get it. The SG sounded really good, so I’ve stuck with that and the Hamer ever since.”

Fyfe’s been a real pain in the arse in the past about his drum sound, but if he worried too much Chris would go, ‘Just fucking do it and fuck off’.

“I use Marshall JCM100 heads and two 4x12 cabs, and I’ve discovered the JMP-1 pre-amp which has all these programmable sounds. I only know about these settings on it, because I’m very primative, I have to be led by the scruff of the neck to the stage and told, ‘press this, press that.’ But if I need a sound from the record, I just hit a button and it reappears.”

Therapy? have said in the past that they have trouble recreating their live sound on record. Andy elaborates: “On stage we just go for it, but in the studio we think too much. All it takes is for one person to say the guitar sounds too metal, or too straight, and I get a doubt and start fretting. But with Troublegum we used Chris Sheldon who wasn’t a big producer. He’d engineered for The Pixies and Radiohead so he was experienced enough to know what he was doing, but not a dictator. The minute we started bickering he just said, ‘Hold on; go from the start and just play the fucking song’.”

This approach was a success. Troublegum has a very live feel. “We did it really quickly and blasted through the songs,” says Michael. “Maybe it speeds up and slows down, but at least it sounds live.”

Quickly

“We weren’t afraid to turn the guitars up this time”, continues Andy, “Michael and Fyfe got all 12 rhythm tracks done in two and a half days. Then they fucked off back home and left me. We got a really good guitar sound, recorded it, and didn’t think too much about it. If you’re a real trainspotter and listen carefully, you can hear me hitting bum notes. But if it sounded alright within the song, we kept it.”

“There’s not one visionary in our band. We all have very different musical tastes, so it’s three people constantly fighting each other. We never thought we’d need a producer in that sense, but it’s good to have somebody who can stand back and tell you when you’re getting long-winded. Fyfe’s been a real pain in the arse in the past about his drum sound, but if he worried too much Chris would go, ‘Just fucking do it and fuck off’.”

Stroppy

“We let Chris mix it on his own,” explains Michael, “because if we’re mixing, it turns into bass versus guitar, drums versus guitar, all the levels go full up and then it’s back to the start. Chris knows how things should sound on big and little speakers, so we let him do it.” The tracks on Troublegum all run into each other—the band’s idea. “We did that on Babyteeth, my favourite album before this one,” says Andy. “You put it on and this [raises two finger salute] comes out of the speakers. It sounded really amateur and the songs weren’t that good, but it had real attitude. We wanted that same attitude here, but with a new-found songwriting sense. All the tracks on Troublegum sound uniform, they’re all powerful and direct, so if you put them on one after the other, bam, bam, bam, it’s like a live show. The album’s only 47 minutes long, because I like an album to make it’s point and then fuck off. That makes more of an impact.”

If we used anything else it’d probably be a cello or something, not another guitar. If we had another rhythm guitarist we’d think too much about trying to play off each other and it wouldn’t be natural.

With three different charcters working so closely, are there many band fights? “No, our arguments cause more in-jokes than fights,” says Andy. “We have this thing called ‘stroking the chin’ where one of us suggests an idea, to be met with somebody else gazing into space going ‘hmmm’ and stroking their chin.” “Thinking, ‘hmmm, that’s the shittest idea I’ve heard in my life’,” quips Michael, to mass hilarity. “Being a three-piece is hard because you always know the other two will gang up on you,” continues Andy. “There’s nothing more soul destroying than coming up with a brilliant idea and then turning round to see the other two looking at each other and trying not to catch your eye.”

But he’s quick to stress the advantages of this line-up: “We’ve got a better idea of how we want the sound, we’ve got better control of dynamics, we don’t have to worry about certain things sounding like a sludge. We all have to work harder, and things like stops and starts in the rhythm are more important to us. It’s been suggested that we get a second guitarist, and it’s something we’ve thought about, but at the moment we’re comfortable with the three of us. If we used anything else it’d probably be a cello or something, not another guitar. If we had another rhythm guitarist we’d think too much about trying to play off each other and it wouldn’t be natural. And we’d fight about who got the best part and try to outdo each other—it’d sound like absolute rubbish.”

On early recordings, Andy overdubbed up to six guitars. “I’d read about Bob Mould doing 16 guitar tracks, and J Mascis doing eight and I thought, ‘that must be the way you do it.’ Then the producers told me, ‘if you use two guitars for rhythm and one for lead, that’s enough.’ it’s so true because the guitars on the early albums cancelled each other out. If you use one with a biting tone and one with a thick tone, then the two merge together and make a really good wall of sound.”

Despite having been once described as ‘the Metallica it’s politically correct to like’ Andy maintains that they don’t have a political message. “I always cringe when I see people like Jim Kerr and Bono getting up and making political statements.”

Andy’s not overly bothered about trying to recreate three guitar parts in a live situation. “It’s so loud that people don’t notice things like the bottom end dropping out when I do a solo, which happens sometimes. But you can do things with dynamics to divert people’s attention, like adding echo and messing about a bit more.” In order to create a fuller live sound, Andy uses a pitch shifter. The signal is split so that his guitar comes out of both speakers, but is pitched slightly higher on the left.

Mentality

One of the many striking things about Therapy? is Andy’s lyric writing which deals almost exclusively with violence, fear and confusion. Is he really this screwed up? “I feel that way within songs because I have music as an outlet. If something’s fucking me off, I write a song and get it out of my system.” What would happen if he didn’t have this outlet? “I’d probably be a classic geek, sitting in my room with no friends, which is fundamentally what Knives is about. The whole album is about that kind of mentality, when you get sand kicked in your face and you go home but in your head you’d love to go back and beat the fuck out of the person who did it. But it doesn’t happen, it’s that little big man mentality.”

Despite having been once described as ‘the Metallica it’s politically correct to like’ Andy maintains that they don’t have a political message. “I always cringe when I see people like Jim Kerr and Bono getting up and making political statements. Coming from Northern Ireland, we’re surrounded 24 hours a day by all these facts saying how horrible it is. The last thing people want to do is go to a rock concert and hear somebody else telling them about it. For us, music is a form of escapism. Ninetynine per cent of bands who sing about Northern Ireland don’t actually come from Northern Ireland.”

Cheeky

At the end of the album, there’s a ‘bonus track’ of sorts—a short rendition of You Are My Sunshine followed by 20 minutes of fake record scratch which cause the word ‘away’ to loop continuously. Andy’s idea. “I was just being a cheeky bastard. After all this intense soul searching, it’s like ‘all right,’ pat on the back. And just when you think everything’s okay, it goes into the scratch. Originally we had the idea of letting the CD run for two minutes and then having the police knocking at the door. You can just imagine if you were a student listening to it and you hear ‘open up, it’s the police’. We thought, ‘we can’t do that, it’s just too cruel’. Just think of all the hundreds of pounds worth of drugs getting flushed down the toilet…”

Fyfe & Drums

It’s particularly notable the way self-taught Therapy? drummer Fyfe Ewing comes up with so many different rhythms. He says: “I was always trying to be original. Our first single, Meat Abstract, has a drum beat which is now notorious in Ireland—young drummers come up and say, ‘I don’t have it yet but I’m working on it’. Even back then we were consciously trying to do something off the wall with the rhythm section.”

And I don’t like wearing [drummers’] gloves either, although I get blisters. I just stick waterproof tape on, grit my teeth and let the adrenaline take over. It’s part of the job.

For inspiration Fyfe listens to everything from heavy dub reggae to C&W. “I’ll admit I steal ideas from good dance music: some of those weird little snare patterns—if a rock drummer uses them it sounds completely different. And I tend to play off the guitar more than the bass, like Mitch Mitchell did with Hendrix.”

Fyfe also has a distinctive rasping snare sound. “That’s a really old six-inch Slingerland metal shell. It’s about to implode, it’s cranked up so high. And I use ‘bullet-proof’ Falam 2 heads. Before, I was going through two or three snare drum heads in a set. Sheer brutality.” The rest of Fyfe’s kit is a Sonor HiLite (13in, 16in, and 18in toms), but he also uses a timbale, and some undefinable sounds, like the bongo effect on Teethgrinder (from the Nurse album). “That’s just something I sampled on Andy’s guitar. It’s played live—triggered—I use an S1000 and a drumKAT with three extra pads. We’ve used samples on all our albums. I like the idea of mixing in different sounds with the kit.”

Fyfe plays some pretty fast beats with a single kick pedal. “John Stanier from Helmet influenced me for that—he’s got the best technique I’ve heard—so tight and very loud.” But Fyfe plays bare-footed: “I just prefer the feel. I’ve got the pedal all padded up. On sweaty gigs I slide all over the place. And I don’t like wearing [drummers’] gloves either, although I get blisters. I just stick waterproof tape on, grit my teeth and let the adrenaline take over. It’s part of the job. And I’ve had a couple of strained wrist tendons—sheer hell.”

And the ears? “The worst was the first European tour. I lean right over the snare drum, and I got ringing for two days. So it’s been earplugs ever since. Because the kit’s so loud I have to have unfeasibly high guitar in the monitors. I use swimmers’ rubber ‘magic mushroom’ ear plugs.”

Related Interviews