Live Review: Therapy? (Leeds Warehouse, 15/4/22)

It's safe to say that getting Therapy?'s greatest hits tour organised has been something of a trial - the fact that what was supposed to be the "So Much For The 30 Year Plan" tour has ended up becoming the "So Much For The 32 Year Plan" tour thanks to the onset of Covid tells you everything. Still, better late than never and as the band slam into tonight's set with the ferocious assault of Nausea which opened their major label debut Nurse, followed by the sinister Stories, it's clear that they're on good form tonight.

The nature of Therapy? gigs has definitely changed a bit since your correspondent first saw the band live way way back in 1995 on the first night of the Infernal Love tour at Leeds Town & Country. Back then, the gigs were a barely suppressed roar of rage like Joy Division (whose Isolation they cover tonight) squeezed through a Big Black filter - if you were a teenager or twentysomething who'd taken solace in the feral angst of Die Laughing or Knives then it almost felt like an exorcism of rage and frustration. These days, of course, we're all in our forties and fifties and the atmosphere tonight is more one of a gathering of friends come together to enjoy some good music - that Therapy? live album from a few years back wasn't called Communion for nothing.

As you'd expect from a greatest hits set, the focus tonight is very much on the band's '90s heyday but when the likes of Nowhere, Opal Mantra, Turn, Church of Noise and Potato Junkie still pack just as much of a brutal punch as they did back then, it seems churlish to complain about that while the more measured likes of Diane bristle with menace and Teethgrinder's mix of almost techno style drums and its piercing riff still sounds genuinely unique today. Neil Cooper and Mike McKeegan remain a supremely tight rhythm section after all this time with the former being allowed a drum solo during Potato Junkie as it's his birthday and the latter getting a chance to go back to his Evil Priest days with a cover of Judas Priest's Breaking The Law during the encore. Meanwhile, Andy Cairns remains the demonic ringmaster at the centre of the storm to good effect, geeing the crowd up throughout.

In terms of newer stuff, we get the menacing Callow from 2018's Cleave album and the frenetic Still Hurts from 2015's Disquiet plus a new song Joy which shows that the group are anything but a spent force - Cairns promises that the group will be back to tour the new record hopefully by the end of the year and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing it. By the time Screamager closes the evening out, it's pretty clear that while they may be 32 years into their career, there's plenty of life left in Therapy? yet. Roll on that new album...

Pictures taken by Andy James Close. All rights reserved.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure, ...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #19 - The Dictators - "Go Girl Crazy!" (1975)

Image
  "Set me free, I might know better when I'm older but till then..."  - The Dictators  - Weekend By some distance the oldest album we've featured in this column so far, I very nearly went for the Dictators' 2001 comeback album DFFD  for this feature similar to what I did with the New York Dolls GDR article a couple of weeks back but after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided it really had to be the group's 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!  just because it's arguably the great trailblazing US punk album that everyone's forgotten about. I guess that you could almost say that if the Ramones were the Sex Pistols of US punk then the Dictators were kind of like the Eddie & The Hot Rods in that they crashlanded just that one year too early to really reap the punk whirlwind when it took off in 1976-77 but if you listen to Go Girl Crazy! , it's got the fingerprints of a lot of bands who'd come along soon afterwards on it, especially da Bruddas. The big ...
Read more