Prozac and Whimsy

1998 was the worst year of my life. 1998 was the worst year of my life so far. My very first actual girlfriend was pregnant, swore me to secrecy and then dumped me. I wasn’t there for the birth as I was in bed with another girl. I didn’t see my daughter until she was a few months old. To my eternal shame I can’t even tell you how old she was when I first saw her in anything other than a photograph. I stole a friends first true love, took her virginity while I was drunk and then she dumped me for a dude called Pablo. I was stuck in a dead end job and lived for gigs and getting wasted and if I could combine the two then even betterer. But, and there is always a but, Therapy? released Semi-Detached.

Therapy? are a fucking tremendous band. They achieved massive success with Troublegum in 94, but that isn’t my record. I recognise it for what it is as I’m not that much of a fucking idiot but *MY* Therapy? record is Infernal Love the 95 follow up. I’m not ready to write about Infernal Love yet and at this point I don’t know if I will be any time soon but I hold it in the same sort of regard as The Holy Bible, and you all know how I feel about that.

So today we’re going to talk about 98. I think things being as bad as they were then and the years that followed is what is making this all so hard right now. I have a roof over my head, a good job, friends and family who love me. I’m safe and clean and sober and none of it feels like it is helping. Everything felt so much easier when everyone hated me and expected nothing from me as I was a waster. I’ve gotten old and soft and lost my fight. I have lost my will to carry on out of spite alone.

I was working in the canteen of a company that used to make trousers but at this point were importing them from the eastern bloc and selling them on after a steam clean and relabelling. I had a small radio in my small kitchen and listened to Radio One as I was still in their target market. I can remember Church Of Noise getting some airplay but you could feel the tide turning against the band. The critics and trend setters had already tasted blood with Infernal Love as everyone wanted and expected Troublegum II not realising that Troublegum was the anomaly not everything that followed.

The band themselves admit they should have took time out between the albums but the 15 month turn around between Troublegum and Infernal Love is fucking insane and makes Infernal Love everything that it is and needed to be. The breather from Infernal Love to Semi-Detached saw them lose a drummer (somewhat careless but seems to happen a lot) Regroup and come back fighting fit. Church Of Noise was the first single and opens the record but the second single Lonely, Cryin’, Only with it’s opening of “Leave a message, or leave me alone” is what really floated my boat and still does as well to be honest.

In 2017 while I was still JJ I released a book called Stay Happy, which is named after one of the many stand out tracks of the album. I describe Stay Happy as a love letter to my depression and the hopelessness and beauty of the world, because I can be a pretentious prick when I put my mind to it. It’s the best thing I’ll ever write. It damn near killed me. I thought it was going to be “the one” and was going to be picked up and made into a hard hitting ITV drama starring Stephen Graham and Maxine Peake and all that daydreaming authors do but never openly admit to. Instead it owes me quite a bit of money and no one talks to me about it, for reasons that are fairly obvious if you have read it.

Semi-Detached is, for me, where Therapy? start to become the band they are to this day. Uncompromising almost to the point of self sabotage at times but honest to themselves in a way we should all strive to be. The venues may be smaller but fuck me they are as good now, if not better, than they were back then. It’s loud, it’s angry, it’s defiant, it’s everything I needed in 1998 and fits like a glove now. I love them and will go and see them every time they are even vaguely near me. I went to Swindon, SWINDON! To see them once but that’s a different story and involves free food from Taco Bell that was somehow still disappointing.

I’m going to be ok. I know I am going to be ok because I always am in the end. But right now I am tired and I am tired of being tired and tired of saying I am tired. The album ends with the beautiful The Boy’s Asleep, “thanks for coming mind the step on your way home.“