SEMI-DETACHED: THE WORDS, THE MUSIC & THEIR ORIGINS

Buried beneath the barrage of dark noise, Semi-detached is in many ways Therapy?'s most optimistic album to date. In conversation with Billy Chainsaw, Andy Cairns deconstructs it track by track...

1: CHURCH OF NOISE
"Some of the tracks on the album were written when I was listening through the whole back catalogue of The Stooges and the MC5, and I wanted to write some really dumb rock 'n' roll tracks. I came up with the music for CHURCH OF NOISE in Randals Town, Ireland when we were over doing some of the album there. The lyrics are kind of about the cacophony of everyday life. It's not really about anything in particular; it's just a kind of celebration of disharmony, and how that keeps the world going round. It was inspired by the 'Orange' parades going on outside the studio ­ the noise of it filtering through to the studio ­ the friendly, jovial banter between people in the studio, domestic rows that people were having individually, and all the noise we were making on the guitars ­ a celebration of disquiet. At the time we were writing CHURCH OF NOISE, Britpop was going off all over the country. It was all kind of Beatles this, Beatles that... I was listening to a lot of contemporary stuff as Therapy? Usually do, but I thought "Britpop is being touted as the new rock 'n' roll" and all the bands in their anoraks were going on about how rock 'n' roll was jangle guitars and love songs, and I thought "let's go back and see what inspired me"... it was never metal, it was punk music, and then I went right back to the origins and it was The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Suicide, MC5 ­ much to the disgust of the rest of the band, 'cause they were kinda still on their Ambient dance tip ­ I bought all the albums into the studio and played them. I wanted it directed to a really garage, dirty rock 'n' roll riff, and that was CHURCH OF NOISE. It just came into my head as most tunes do, while playing around with the guitar. It's one of those songs where it took me ten minutes to write it, which is how those kind of songs should be written. I imagine songs like I Wanna Be Your Dog by The Stooges, Kick Out The Jams by the MC5, were just written off-the-cuff emotionally ­ completely spontaneous."

2: TIGHTROPE WALKER
"I was living in Kingston, just outside London for a while last year, and I was on a real health kick ­ I wasn't drinking or smoking too much, and watching loads of videos ­ and I found I got all this energy back that I thought I'd lost for a long time. I was thinking it had been quite a long time since we had put any stuff out, and that there was quite a lot that had gone on during that time, quite a lot of things had changed in out lives. I was watching the night-time people outside the window... there is a hospital across the way from the flat, so there was a constant flow of students going to and from clubs, bars, and university. I was observing people in their everyday life, thinking "what I want to do from now on is not get wallowed down in things which have kept me down in the past, and keep on walking, keep on going straight ahead" ­ and TIGHTROPE WALKER is kind of how it felt. It felt like... when the band come back, we'll be taking the first few uneasy steps, as anyone does everyday when they step outside the door of their house, or the skip ­ wherever they happen to be fortunate or unfortunate enough to live. It's about having time to reconsider and re-evaluate, taking the first few tentative steps and knowing that the first rule of tightrope-walking is don't look down and don't look behind you ­ just keep your head up and walk straight ahead.
Martin (McCarrick) had the idea, but the original music had a different rhythm, and there were no stops between the verses. I suppose it could have been a Screamager or Nowhere kind of thing. It was a full flowing song, Graham (Hopkins) came up with a drum beat that broke it up a bit, and I decided to make the vocal on the verse a bit more manic ­ make it a bit more exciting ­ 'cause the chorus is quite pretty, and I thought "well if it's quite pretty during the verse it might not be as exciting". So we spent a bit of time just breaking up the rhythms, and making the verses a lot more manic and the choruses a lot more melodic."

3: BLACK EYE, PURPLE SKY
"That was written when we came back off an American tour with Girls Against Boys. I think subliminally, the inspiration for BLACK EYE, PURPLE SKY was a mixture of The Stooges, Girls Against Boys, and also (now that I listen back to it) Black Flag... because I'm a big fan of their early stuff, I think there's a bit of that kind of disharmonised riffing, which Black Flag were very good at.
The song itself is another reflection on picking yourself up after a bad fall, and realising that you have to learn from your mistakes. It's kind of like a ghost-written letter to a friend, about keeping your chin up and learning from your mistakes."

4: LONELY, CRYIN' ONLY
"The music was inspired by hearing Roy Orbison (which my dad used to listen to a lot) on the radio one night, in Homestead Studios, Ireland. It was three in the morning, and the only two people up were me and Graham. I said "let's go in and play about, play an up tempo, really melodramatic song like Roy Orbison would have written". We came up with the melody and the guitar music. Then one night me and Martin were writing the lyrics together ­ we were in Mole's Studio in Bath, and we wanted to write a sweeping, slightly dark take on Roy Orbison, so we came up with the lyrics 'What if the sky falls....' those kind of things, big melodramatic imagery."

5: BORN TOO SOON
"Initially inspired by listening to MC5's High Time, a lot of the tremolo kind of guitar sounds, they're sort of subtly psychedelic, but also like a big rock noise. The music's something we'd been playing in Pete Webber Studios in Putney (London) when we were rehearsing for the album. It was never really a song, it was just an instrumental we had; but eventually when we got the melody and the middle bit it turned into the actual song BORN TOO SOON.
The track itself is about someone I know who had a miscarriage. It was my way of trying to tell 'em to keep going it's not all that bad. They've probably had a lot more happen to them in that seven or eight months of their lives, than a lot of the things I moan about that happened in my life over my entire thirty-two years."

6: STAY HAPPY
"It was written in the studio around the time of the Louise Woodward case. At that time everyone back home in England was telling her to keep her head up... but I had absolutely no opinion whatsoever on whether she was guilty or not. STAY HAPPY is about smiling through misery. It was also me thinking about comedians like Robin Williams ­ who have always frustrated me and excited me in equal measures. The kind of full-on people who always wear a larger-than-life smile, and are goonery, total tomfoolery... but you often hear that in (their) reality there's so much darkness going on. There's something very grotesque about some comedians, when they're smiling you can kind of sense it's a kind of show biz smile, or a stage smile. The music is supposed to sound a bit like a screwball thing in a madhouse... it's a bit like the film Marat Sade (directed by Peter Weiss), which is about the Marquis de Sade doing a play in a French asylum, and there's a band playing strange instruments that make whoops and whistling noises ­ that's what we tried to get with the guitar sounds. There's also a bit of The Pixies in there too, because we were listening to the Death To The Pixies album quite a lot ­ so that kind of shaped it as well."

7: SAFE
"That was inspired by the Todd Haynes' movie Safe. Martin and Michael (McKeegan) had written the music, whenever they had a couple of days off they went into the rehearsal studios and that's when they came up with it. Initially it was more like a dark heavy metal thing, but we changed it to sound a bit more rhythmic, and a bit more claustrophobic. It was kind of inspired by our time at Mole Studios (Bath). There was a big row of terraced houses outside the back of the room where I was staying, and every night when I went to bed I would just watch... and I sort of got to know people even though I'd never met them ­ because of their mannerisms, the clothes they wore, their behaviour towards each other, what they did. I also watched the film Safe, which is about a woman being allergic to the 21st Century. I was applying the paranoia in the movie to the kind of personal paranoia that I presumed must go on in some peoples lives, some of it I was feeling, through being stuck in a room sometimes just watching other people; but there were also times when it was quite exciting to nosy into peoples lives... observing."

8: STRAIGHT LIFE
" STRAIGHT LIFE was just a pure frustrated rant. The title comes from a book about jazz saxophonist Art Pepper. I didn't really know much about his music, but someone I knew gave me a fantastic book about him as a present ­ after I read it I did check out his music, which is great. The book's all about his life, how he did things his own way, and still managed to come through in the end. He never did things the way that people supposed he should ­ no compromise. The whole song was written during the time of the so-called 'new optimism' and 'feel good factor' which was
creeping in all over Britain. A lot of it I was glad to see, but at the same time I thought, "don't count all your chickens just yet". Also having dealings with certain people in the media around London... I was having a particularly bad time in London at that point, people just frustrated me. It just seemed with the whole invasion of music, and even sport, everything had turned into a huge competition. There was no sense of creativeness anymore, there was no-one seeing music and everything as an art anymore, it was all seen in fake sales figures and concert attendance’s; but at the same time the whole excuse for all that was "isn't it making the country feel good?". I just thought "well no it bloody isn't", not from where I'm coming from, and not with the like-minded people who are with me."

9: HEAVEN'S GATE
"HEAVEN'S GATE is the last song we finished, because it was two different songs. There was one song that sounded like Thin Lizzy, and one that sounded like The Archers Of Loaf or The Police... we had it all pretty straight, then we did the chorus in a kind of Northern Soul tempo. So the music was finished, with the lyrics being left 'til last. We were trying to get something together about the Heaven's Gate cult, but I thought "well I don't wanna write that, it's too obvious, it's too like something that we would have done on our first album". So I applied it to escapism in general, and how the Heaven's Gate cult members needed something to fill a void in their lives so desperately, that they chose to believe in something so ludicrous to take them away from the whole place. It was the last lyrics I had to have written, and when I was in the studio people kept coming and knocking on the door. I'd had a lot of bills that had come in at home, I had things to sort out at home (but I was in the studio away from home)... people were coming and saying "come on Andy you've gotta come and finish this vocal". HEAVEN'S GATE is about how some people will escape into fantasy to escape reality. I was putting my head under the covers pretending not to hear the studio door being knocked upon... the same with the Heaven's Gate people, their escape for copping out of life was because someone was going to come and take them away. It's kind of like an Ostrich burying its head in the sand and hoping that everything will go away."

10: DON'T EXPECT ROSES
"It was written about the same time as STRAIGHT LIFE. It's about being in London during the whole time of the elections and Labour winning. It was great to see for the country, that that happened; but at the same time it wasn't this whole new renaissance that is looked at through 1960's rose-tinted round glasses that everyone would like it to be."

11: TRAMLINE
"Martin came in with a four-track tape he'd done in his bedroom one day. It was a kind of rhythmic track, which tended to veer off at tangents, with what reminded me of the Outer Limits, kind of like keyboard, cello and guitar from 1950's and 60's b-movies. We put a bit more music on it to make it more raucous. TRAMLINE was about the same kind of idea as STRAIGHT LIFE... I couldn't think of very much I wanted to say, but watching award ceremonies on TV I came up with the line "I'm getting swallowed up in all of this, and the last thing I want is some rock star bullshit". It's kind of about, sometimes when you talk to people outside the band and the immediate circle of friends, there is an expectation from certain people in the media and some people around you, to kind of want you to be this big stadium band; and at the same there were all these award ceremonies on television from somewhere in Europe, with loads of people going "mwah!" "mwah!" on each others cheeks. It's something which we've experienced in the past which is really, really hideous ­ and TRAMLINE is of our reaction against it. We thought, well this is the noisiest, most discordant, least melodic track on the album, so it was most fitting to put that emotion to that musical background."

12: THE BOY'S ASLEEP
"Well I suppose if you want to be metaphorical and portentous about it, that's kind of about... now that I've listened and listened to the album, and having lived with it for a few months, THE BOY'S ASLEEP kind of sums up our two and a half years off, and the fact that it starts off where we started off with new band members ­ "whahey! let's go". There was a bit of frustration about 'right we're gonna do this album and we have to time our own lives around it, and make sure it's a good stepping stone for 1998, and an introduction to the band'; to kind of (with me) reflect on all the things that have happened... so it gets really dark around the time of SAFE, TRAMLINE kind of slaps itself around the face, and THE BOY'S ASLEEP is as if we've made peace with ourselves.
It originates from music that Martin and Michael had written whenever Graham was asleep in the studio. It was a beautiful piece of guitar music (no drums). Chris Sheldon our producer kept badgering me to go in and do some vocals, but I hadn't got anything written... I was too scared of it turning into something which is maybe a bit like a string-laden ballad. I wanted it to be more natural, have a more kind of 'end of the album' feel. Then at about four o'clock one morning, I just went in... and what you hear on the album is the first thing that came off the top of my head ­ one take, no overdubs, no research, no lyrics. It did take me quite a while to work out exactly what I was mumbling, because it was late at night, ­ but we decided it was a really natural way to finish the record."

Billy Chainsaw: March 1998

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