Cathal Coughlan remembered: 'One of the greatest songwriters of his generation'
Cathal Coughlan in London in 2005. Picture: Bleddyn Butcher
Cathal Coughlan, the Cork musician who has passed away aged 61, was widely acknowledged as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.
With his bands Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, and later as a solo artist, he blended rapture and rage, beauty and scorched earth ferocity. Often he would do so over the course of a single song – Fatima Mansions’ 1990 masterpiece, Blues for Ceausescu, for instance, is a vitriolic deconstruction of despotism and right-wing politics that hits as forcefully today as when he wrote it.
Coughlan never became a rock star. He was, however, among the most important Irish artists of his era. In the 1980s, Microdisney emerged from recession-hit Cork as a sort of anti-U2 (Bono and the companions would later take the Fatima Mansions on tour as support for their Zoo TV shows). Forged in the contradictions between English ex-pat Sean O’Hagan’s soft-pop arrangements and Glounthane-native Coughlan’s thoughtful incandescence – topped off with that instantly-recognisable baritone voice – Microdisney were like nothing that Irish music has ever produced.
They were also a quintessential Cork band. Microdisney had a surreal quality that mirrored both Leeside’s sense of itself – but also the dystopian feeling that hung heavily as the collapse of heavy industry turned the city into Ireland’s rustbelt-in-miniature.
“Cork was so remote back then,” O’Hagan told the Examiner as Microdisney reunited in 2019 for a farewell gig in Cork. “It’s important to remember that. Stuff could still happen in isolation. There was a sense of humour and a pattern of behaviour that was very much part of that remote existence.
“You may not have really had a band at all – so you just made it up. The next thing you’re on stage and someone is going, ‘I thought you said you’d rehearsed?. You had culture and industry co-existing. I had never seen anything like that – a city full of breezy students swanning around but also remnants of the old Cork skinheads hanging about.”
Microdisney eventually moved to London. There they won a small but dedicated following among music journalists and at the record label Rough Trade.
“They were a brilliant group. We heard them and fell in love,” Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis told the Irish Examiner in 2019. “Cathal was writing such interesting lyrics. He was a little bit scary. Sean, of course, was writing brilliant melodies.”
Microdisney produced their share of masterpieces – 1985’s The Clock Comes Down The Stairs, is often regarded as among the greatest Irish albums ever. Yet, with Rough Trade focused on The Smiths, and critical acclaim for Microdisney failing to build into substantial sales, Coughlan and O’Hagan eventually went their separate ways.
“I have many regrets about how that ending came about, and in particular the tunnel vision which fuelled my apocalyptic over-reaction to the band’s circumstances in the final two years,” Coughlan would confess to the Irish Examiner. “Compared to situations I’ve been in since then, this was truly survivable stuff. But I just wasn’t grown up, not enough to have perspective.
“So it left me both embarrassed at having failed on mainstream terms which I’d never wanted to apply, and fearful of failing on the more humble terms which seemed to be my natural level thereafter.”
Coughlan’s next project was Fatima Mansions. Where Microdisney had kept a lid on his rage, his new project became an outlet for it. Songs such as Evil Man, 1000 Percent, and Viva Dead Ponies grabbed you by the scruff: they were a beautiful act of venting and channeled the anger many felt in an Ireland waylaid by corrupt politicians and fascistic clergy.
He didn’t suffer fools. When it was reported Michael Stipe had drifted into a Fatima Mansions concert in New York and drifted out again 10 minutes later, Coughlan took aim at REM with a scatological cover of Shiny Happy People – a demolition job best encountered wearing hard-hat and safety goggles.
That same wry ferocity was on display during the Fatima Mansions’ notorious double-hander of U2 support slots in Milan in May 1992. Booed on the first night, The Fatima Mansions took their revenge the following evening. Accompanied by the Mansions rattling industry rock, Coughlan performed rude acts with a Virgin Mary replica shampoo bottle while wearing an FC Barcelona jersey (Barcelona having defeated Genoa’s FC Sampdoria in the European Cup Final the previous evening).
“They all seemed to be quite amused,” he said of U2’s response to his antics. “It was a no-win situation really. The audience had been…I won't go into details. It was not the most smoothly run show of the tour. There were two nights. On the first night, we nearly got wiped out. On the second night, we decided to wipe them [the audience] out.”
There was a tender side to his songcraft too, as demonstrated by records such as Bertie’s Brochures.
“There was nothing and nobody like them, which was clearly how they preferred it. But it did kind of mean that nobody really knew what to do with them or make of them,” the journalist Andrew Mueller told the Examiner in 2020. “As was the case with Microdisney, however, people are still talking about them, while very much not doing so about many of their better-selling contemporaries.”
Coughlan was not done, though, and would later release a number of well-received solo LPs. And just this year he and Snow Patrol/Taylor Swift producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee joined forces for Teilifís, a Kraftwerk-inspired electro project that cast a wry eye over the surreal world of Irish broadcasting through the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
A sort of psychoanalysis of Irish identity as told through the prism of Bunny Carr’s Quicksilver and the Late Late Show, it was merely one more surprise from a musician who refused to stand still. And who, until the end, was always finding new ways of calling out the contradictions and hypocrisies of those in power.
