"We thought we made really good records, but we never envisaged hanging out and playing boules at Elton's house": How Therapy? ram-raided the mainstream with an ode to the soap opera of teenage existence

Therapy? in 1993, studio portrait.

By 1993, the golden age of hotel hedonism was over. And so it was that Andy Cairns and Michael McKeegan from Ulster alt-rockers Therapy? found themselves TV channel-hopping on a dull Sunday in a Nottingham bolt-hole.

“Me and Michael were sharing a hotel room, and it was about three in the afternoon, and we were sat there like the two old blokes off The Muppet Show, Statler and Waldorf,” recalls frontman Cairns. “We were like grumpy old men, although we were young at the time, shouting at the telly. The Smash Hits Awards were on TV, and Michael was talking about all the young girls screaming at [host] Phillip Schofield and whoever else was on, and he said: ‘Look at all those screamagers.’ I thought: ‘That’s a great title for a song.’”