We’ve always done things to suit ourselves. We’ve never been that devastated by stuff that has gone wrong Andy: Body OD was an early and very rough version of the song, and with Stop It You're Killing Me, I had written the verse and chorus on an acoustic guitar. It was very similar in terms of the chord progression. Again, we decided, 'Well, we could actually make this a lot tougher.'

Top 10 Sales in Europe" (PDF). Music & Media. 26 February 1994. p.16 . Retrieved 22 September 2023. If you go to a private school you wear a blazer and a hat, like Harry Potter. I live in Cambridge. People play f**king Quidditch in Cambridge. It doesn’t exist. There’s this ridiculousness.” That short vinegary burst of hatred that makes you hold grudges were too wearing though so I let that go but there is still enough vitriol in my system. Michael: There's a lot that we all felt really good playing, and I know Knives is one of those ones. Just dynamically it all made sense, even before there'd been any vocals or lyrics on it. And when we did the original demo, I thought, 'Oh my god, this is going to be fantastic.' It was just screaming out to be the album's opener. Cairns now lives in a village outside Cambridge with his English wife. It’s bucolic and a welcome contrast to the hectic pace of life on the road. It also feels universes removed from Larne in the 1980s and 1990s, when bands were sometimes reluctant to confront, in their music, the messy reality of sectarianism in the North.Perhaps this album’s biggest problem is that it killed any chance for any other Therapy? release to get a fair hearing. With so much tied up in this album, any subsequent album had to be able to do these same things to me and FOR me to be considered close to its equal, and the band hasn’t been able to reproduce that. There are good albums yes, but nothing that can match what is on Troublegum. For the same reason I can understand (to a certain degree) when people say they don’t think this album is anywhere near as good as I think it is. That’s completely understandable considering what I have tied up in this album emotionally. Each song means something to me, and is tied to emotions I have felt in many different moments in my life. It still speaks to me today in the same way even though I don’t feel those same things anymore, because I remember what I felt at the times these songs remind me of. It used to be difficult for people from the North of the country. It was hard to be proud of where you were from without taking a certain side. You always had to straddle the middle of the fence.

With hindsight, Ewing's departure seems to be imprinted within the grooves of Infernal Love. Not only is he lower in the mix, his playing seems far less expressive, strangely muted, already disillusioned perhaps. Ewing quit the group during the Infernal Love tour, fearing that if he didn't he would "go mad". He then disappeared into obscurity, depriving the world of one its most exciting young drummers.
Incidentally, you can keep What's The Story, The Bends, and that Sparklehorse album with the clown on the front. The best album of 1995 (and second best album of the 90s) was Infernal Love. Dr Victkurt Cobainstein dealt with the unsettling success of his second album by doing too much heroin, hitching a lift on Captain Albini's expeditionary ship, pursuing his Nevermind monster to a mansion in the North Pole hoping to slay it with nothing but a borrowed shotgun and a copy of In Utero, before slipping tragically under the ice. Andy Cairns dealt with the unsettling success of his second album by taking lots of cocaine, shaving his head, investing in false moustaches, and making a bizarre goth-pop album in Peter Gabriel's recording studio. They opted to take the plunge – not out of a desire to become famous, but because the new songs retained enough edge to deflect any accusations of selling out. We had plenty of political songs. Potato Junkie was political [it references the Battle of the Boyne in the line, “How can I remember 1690?/I was born in 1965?”]. Church of Noise was political [being about a Romeo and Juliet romance across the sectarian boundaries]. But we couldn’t be as binary as bands can be today.”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.

Andy: I got an awful lot of criticism in the press for Trigger Inside. I was reading at the time The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, about the Jeffrey Dahmer case in Milwaukee, by Brian Masters. And this is going to sound very convoluted, but there's a bit whenever he was young – I'm paraphrasing here – that he brought a present to a teacher at school. The teacher thanked him for the present, and as he left the he saw the teacher put his present in the bin. I actually had exactly the same experience at Ballyclare Primary school, whenever I was really young, of giving the teacher a gift and seeing her put it in the bin. With Jeffrey Dahmer, his reaction is all part of an enormous complexity in the guy's character or whatever, but the line 'I know Jeffrey Dahmer feels' came from me relating to that incident. Not relating to his killing spree, but relating how you can feel, even at the age of eight or nine years, as if your whole world has been a lie when someone does that to you.

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.