Pass Notes: Michael McKeegan
Welcome to Pass Notes, our new advice page where we ask a renowned bass player for tips about building a career. This month: Michael McKeegan, Therapy?
In our new Pass Notes series, a prominent bass player gives you the tips you’ll need to get to the top and stay there. This month, it’s Therapy?’s Michael McKeegan on aging gracefully and giving the best performance you can
The Northern Irish trio Therapy?, now a going concern for 30 years, are unique in British rock music. They don’t sound like any other band, switching between metal, angry punk rock and other generally noisy approaches with equal facility. Bassist Michael McKeegan, a columnist for this magazine for the last eight years, occupies an enviable spot between Andy Cairns (vocals, guitar) and Neil Cooper (drums), delivering a mighty rumble that veers between supportive and creative. “I play Warwick Streamer LX basses,” McKeegan tells us. “I have two identical four-strings, although there’s a Hipshot detuner on one of them. My amps are Warwick LWA1000 heads with everything set at noon, so they’re basically a power amp, but with so much headroom that it’s insane. If we go to a festival and they give me two 8x10 cabs, it can drive them both. You could power the entire village we live in with one of them! I’m using Eden cabs: I have a really nice 6x10, which is very punchy and aggressive.”
For tone-sculpting, McKeegan has a novel solution. “The pedalboard has
a Sansamp VT pedal as the main clean DI, and then I’ve got a Geddy Lee YYZ Sansamp too,” he explains. “The front of house gets the clean DI, but they both go through the amp, so it’s a twoSansamp setup. I also have a Boss flanger and I’ve been experimenting with a Dr Freakenstein expression pedal.”
You’ll soon hear all this state-of-the-art gear in action on The Greatest Hits (The Abbey Road Session), recorded to celebrate Therapy?’s 30th anniversary. Meanwhile, what advice does McKeegan have for us about the noble art of the rock career?
Respect your past
“We’ve always done album-themed shows and tours, and acoustic stuff as well, which is really good for you mentally and playing-wise. It’s a tightrope, though; you don’t want to be too retro. We have a great body of songs and it’s great to honour that, so we’re straddling that line with the new album. Thirty years has crept up very quickly, especially in the last 10 years, which have basically been a blur. We made a big deal out of our 10th anniversary, and released a collection and did some shows, and then for the 20th anniversary we did a few shows to celebrate our Troublegum album from 1994. We knew we wanted to make the 30th anniversary fun and make it a celebration, so we thought about doing a live album, but we did one of those a few years ago – so there would have been a lot of repeated tracks. In the end we decided to re-record some songs, but in a session kind of way – just to go in, do them quickly and not overthink it, to keep the energy up. We did it all in a day at Abbey Road. One of the engineers said, ‘This is going pretty quickly’, and I told him we’d been in pre-production for 30 years...”
Stay healthy... And age gracefully “There’s a Peter Pan mentality in rock’n’roll which can be quite destructive. You see musicians trying to squeeze into clothes that they really shouldn’t be squeezing into. More seriously, people like their rock stars to be fucked up, but I like being healthy, personally. We’ve lost too many creative people at too young an age, including heroes of mine, in the last couple of years. We’ve never really talked about this, actually, but within our band I think there’s a sense of responsibility, boring as that might sound. We want to be in good shape for good shows, because people pay money to see you, so let’s not do them halfcocked. We’re really lucky to be able to do them, and the fact that everybody in the band is in good health is something to be celebrated. That’s what this year is about.”
Why worry about boundaries?
Say you’re working on album number 16 and, like us, you’re not a formula band like
Therapy?
AC/DC or Motörhead or the Ramones, with rigid rules – you can always push things in a variety of ways, although obviously we’re always going to sound like us. We can be more varied than a lot of bands, which is great because I would never want to write a ‘Therapy?-style’ song or album. Each song has to have its own character, which keeps it fresh for us. On the other hand, people ask, ‘Which Therapy? are we going to get today?’, which could be a disadvantage, ha ha! We thrive off that.”
Deliver the best show you can
“The only pressure that I feel nowadays comes when I realise that there might be someone in the audience who has seen us play 40 times before – because I want this time to be as good, or better, than those previous 40 times. It’s brilliant that we have some security in that people will probably come out to a show if we book one, but we never, ever take that for granted. The show has to be the best it can be, every single night, so we’re all very conscious of what we’re doing. It’s crucial to enjoy it, too. I get as much out of every show as the audience does. I don’t do sport, I don’t go out on Friday nights and get into fights – this is my release. It’s been a very cathartic thing for me. No matter how tired or sick you are, or what nonsense has gone on during the day, once you go on stage you know this is what it’s all about. We have a joke in the band: ‘We didn’t come all this way to play like idiots’. Even if you’re exhausted because you’ve travelled all night, and pissed off because your gear hasn’t shown up, why annoy the audience? The people in the audience might have just done a 12-hour shift in a factory, so give them what they deserve.”
Therapy?’s album The Greatest Hits (The Abbey Road Session) is out now on Marshall Records. Info: www.therapyquestionmark.co.uk.