Troublegum

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Kneecap performed during the Electric Picnic Festival in Stradbally, Co Laois last year. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

We’d already done our apprenticeship on the major label with Nurse, and we sort of learned the mistakes that we shouldn’t make with this one; like, not to take acid and run around in a field full of cows, and or not to take speed and get into fist fights. We worked with Chris Sheldon who was a really up-and-coming producer at the time, and he’d already worked on the Screamager single with us. I remember him saying, ‘This is a real step-up for Therapy? People will be singing this and it could go into the charts. Have you got any other stuff like this?’ We had a bunch of songs that were inspired by the Ulster punk of Stiff Little Fingers, but also by Helmet and Metallica, which were bands we also loved. We played him Nowhere and Die Laughing and he said, ‘Guys, these are all singles.’ At that time people knew us for songs like Teethgrinder and Potato Junkie; we’d only written one song in the five years we’d been together that was poppy and it became a top ten single. So writing a whole album that was complimentary to Screamager was a big risk. But Sheldon said, ‘You’ve got the songs there. Why don’t you give it a go?’ So we did. The Mercury Music Prize nominated Troublegum from 1994 and Infernal Love, the follow-up from 1995, are both issued as multi-disc deluxe editions. The two albums spawned a number of UK top 30 singles in what was the band’s most commercially successful period.

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I grew up as someone who wasn’t exactly pin-up material, with weight and confidence issues, plus I had all this stuff I was carrying with me from Northern Ireland, the religious divide,” says Andy. “All that was in there.” We’ve always done things to suit ourselves. We’ve never been that devastated by stuff that has gone wrong It will be good fun when we set out round the UK. It’s the 20th anniversary of Troublegum tour which will be great to revisit and then loads of festivals and tons of shows later in year with the new album which we are working on right now.’

Find sources: "Troublegum"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( October 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) The middle of the album changes things up a little in places. “Die Laughing” has a different groove and different mood, rolling smoothly through the song rather than belting you bluntly over the head. “Unbeliever” is similar in a different way, where there is not so much aggression in the song. This is more the sad reflection on what is happening in life rather than being angry about that same life, almost like the slide on the other side of drunkenness as against the rise of the anger as the drunkenness is taking effect. Do I know this from experience? Perhaps. “Trigger Inside” perhaps has more of that anger involved, but is followed by “Lunacy Booth” that has a similar musical feel to the previous two songs. Femtex" – 1994, with "Pantopon Rose". This was a coloured 7-inch released only in the US and limited to 500 copies. People will watch old football hooligan videos and think, ‘that must have been amazing’. For a band like us, that lived through it – there was a reason we weren’t direct.

It just sounds joyous. Those Kneecap tunes are great. The way I look at it is, it just sounds so full of life and brio,” Cairns says. I find myself in a strange position of wanting some sort-of self-aware version of 'troublegum' (perhaps catchy pop music that espouses 'making trouble'?)without any hint of the 'religious-tinged' wine. I would recommend skipping the album, but I cannot stop you from listening to it, I suppose... This was 1994, the year of the first IRA ceasefire. Therapy’s golden age coincided with peace in the North and a more general sense that Irish music had cast off its restraints and was going somewhere (The Cranberries and the Divine Comedy would break through around the same time). Yet even amid the success, Cairns was careful to never take it all for granted or assume the purple patch would last forever. Nothing does – especially in music.

I remember my younger brother being like, ‘That's a punk band! Punks razorblade grannies, and they spit on children!’ That was a media outrage. Then I got into The Clash and the Sex Pistols, I got a little tiny spiky hair cut. Michael: The original has that ornate high keyboard, and it’s possibly one of Joy Division’s less ominous-sounding songs. But we were approaching it from the standpoint of ‘Joy Division do ominous’. The bassline, there’s a lower bass overdub down an octave which you can hear on big speakers. The original Martin Hannett production is so influential, and we had a lot of fun mixing it – that’s the joy of a cover. The lyrics came to him as he was watching the BBC Proms – an annual orgy of flag-waving that typically concludes with a rendition of William Blake’s Jerusalem and its pledge to “build Jerusalem” in “England’s green and pleasant land”. Cairns rolls his eyes.Everley, Dave (7 November 2019). "Therapy?: How Troublegum catapulted three unlikely Irish lads to stardom". LouderSound . Retrieved 15 July 2022. Because the band's name is accompanied by a question mark, it seems to indict that there may or may not be something wrong with the person, or group of people, in question. Our patients' collective "psychosis", or whatever term the behavioral, brain science officials deem appropriate, may be a natural product of being 'people in a band'...but has somehow been construed or escalated to them needing therapy? Because they may not be doing 'natural' things? That's what "Therapy" describes? The potential patients going to therapy? Therapy? the alt-metal band from Northern Ireland see two of their best known albums reissued in March 2014. Knives" – 1994, with "Knives" (kiddie version), "Pantopon Rose" and "Nowhere". This single was a US only promo release. The Irish are very good building myths. But the thing about the English is that they start building myths around things that don’t exist,” Cairns says.