Biography

Cathal Coughlan has been writing songs since his youth, which was spent in Ireland, and singing them in public since 1980. The intervening years have seen him write and perform in various musical styles, and in contexts ranging from semi-conventional ‘rock’ album recording and touring, through spoken word performance, film soundtracks and musical theatre. If there could be said to be one characteristic which recurs in this work, it would be the auto-didactic, wilfully colloquial-styled form of expression which was seen in the new music of the post-punk period during which he first performed and recorded - a place and time rather different to the gesture-saturated landscape of the gathering 21st century.

A chance meeting at that time, in Cork, with Sean O’Hagan, led to the formation of the group Microdisney, which evolved, over time, into a UK-based misfit recording and touring unit. This association lasted until 1988, and produced five albums, all of them characterised by O’Hagan’s mellifluous melodies and arrangments (which were at sharp variance with what was expected on the margins of UK music at that time, drawing as they did upon influences including 70’s country rock, 50’s lounge music and the more unfashionable music of the their own era), and Coughlan’s splenetic lyrical observations and emphatic delivery (which also grated with the many who preferred their satirical and dissenting voices to adopt a different tone).

The group recorded four original albums, plus another collection of oddities, for various labels.

In 1989, after the demise of Microdisney, Coughlan, having caught sight of the possibility of leaving behind the entryism-obsessed attitude of self-apology which had informed most non-commercial music in the departing decade, gathered a more raucous group of musicians to him, in the shape of the Fatima Mansions.

In the new context, it became as regular an occurrence for Coughlan to sing a subtly-dissonant Kurt Weill ballad as to scream his head off over the white noise of Aindrias O’Gruama’s guitars, and as feasible for the Mansions to disfigure a pop-rock ‘classic’of the day over an emetically churning breakbeat as it was for them to serenade their own and ‘real’ rock bands’ audiences with lengthy, fuzztoned tributes to Johnny Ray which, along the way, insulted figures such as James Jesus Angleton, Lord Mountbatten and the Pope.

The group excelled in a live context, and this formed the basis of much of their activity, taking them all over Europe and the US. When contractual issues forced the curtailment of this activity in 1994, the group ceased to exist, leaving four albums, plus several EP's and semi-bootleg releases, in their wake.

Prevented from recording in the accustomed manner by the prolonged dispute which finished his band, Coughlan moved into the field of composing music for films, including 1997’s The Last Bus Home, which was, fittingly, set in the era of the largely-stillborn Irish post-punk scene which had first given him his voice.

1996 saw the release of Coughlan’s first solo album, Grand Necropolitan, and this set the scene for much which has followed since. The bloody-mindedness and anarchy of the Mansions were still present, albeit in smaller quantites, but slower, carefully-arranged songs such as Unbroken Ones, The Big Lukewarm and Two Grotesques, Embracing indicated that here was a more weatherbeaten and less reactive figure than had been presented to the world in the latter stages of the Mansions’ existence.

Continuing legal problems meant that the second solo album, Black River Falls, did not appear until 2000. Warmer in tone than its predecessor, though no more compromising in its lyrical concerns, which ranged from senile dementia to the nature of small-time war profiteering, it was well-received in the UK and beyond.

Keith Cameron, writing in NME, wrote: ’Once again, [Coughlan] proves himself to be everything most contemporary pop auteurs are not: poetic and pure, a challenge to our intelligence rather than an insult’.

Nigel Williamson, Sunday Times: ‘The macabre lyrical concerns are accompanied by powerfully brooding melodies, laced with grown-up string arrangements, and the effect is nothing less than startling.’

2001 saw Coughlan providing music for the Irish feature film Mapmaker, which has since been seen widely on the mainstream cinema circuit in Ireland, and at festivals in continental Europe and North America. At the end of 2001, he made his theatrical debut by way of a singing role in French composer François Ribac’s contemporary opera Qui Est Fou?, which continued to play at various venues throughout France and Benelux in 2002 and 2003.

In June 2002, came The Sky’s Awful Blue, a further album comprised of 12 new songs, performed in a more spontaneous manner than has been heard on Coughlan’s records for a number of years, and featuring, for the most part, the musicians who accompanied him on 2000’s live shows - guitarist James Woodrow, drummer Nick Allum, cellist Audrey Riley and double bassist Daniel Manners. Coughlan himself describes the overall effect as being akin to ‘Johnny McEvoy (Irish showbiz folkie of the 60’s), backed by Chicago Underground Quartet’.

The songs’ styles vary between the sprightly boneyard travelogue ‘Denial Of The Right To Dream’; the 80’s anti-nostalgia of ‘Goodbye Sadness’ (which shifts uneasily between the atmosphere at a scrapyard concert by Test Department, and the feverish cocaine visions of a wayward TV personality, all set to a wistful jazz waltz); the camp drama of ‘You Turned Me’; and the grim denouement of ‘A Drunken Hangman’ (wherein a failed executor of the State’s judicial will glimpses a salvation which will never be his, years after true reform has ceased to be a realistic possibility for him).

Cathal Coughlan, together with the Grand Necropolitan Quartet, played various dates in the UK and Ireland in 2002, with more expected in 2003, along with some more minimalist performances in France and the US.