Tom Dunne: In the music trenches, we saw Cathal Coughlan as officer material
Tom Dunne with Cathal Coughlan a few years ago.
If punk rock was a sort of revolution, Cathal Coughlan was its Michael Collins. Cut from a similar but superior cloth to us. In the punk trenches he was officer material. He was better spoken, educated, better read. He saw things faster than us. We looked to him. Not surprisingly, those who knew Cathal - and many others who listened to his music - were gutted to hear the news of his recent death.
I first became aware of him through the legendary Kaught at the Kampus EP featuring Nun Attax, Mean Features and Microdisney live at the Arcadia in Cork. Three unique and quite incredible front men, Donnelly, Mick Lynch and Cathal. There was something happening in Cork.
I too was in a punk band, The End. Our guitarist used to joke that we played “84 gigs to 83 people”, and it was almost true. The punk scene was tiny. People would advise you to ‘Go to London’. But The Vipers went and disappeared and when DC Nein went as a punk band and they came back as Tokyo Olympics, a New Romantic one!
‘Go to London’ became a euphemism for oblivion. When Microdisney went I expected the worst. That this coincided with a ‘put down childish things’ phase in my life conspired to confirm this. The NME was one of those things and with it all reports from the UK indie music scene.
So, some years later, with childish things picked back up and a band on the go, when I turned on my TV to see Cathal singing on the back of a truck it was quite the event. They had survived London.
It was definitely Cathal. Same regulation-issue black leather jacket, same accent, same ‘I am patently not a rock star, I am one of you’ vibe. There was hope, and eventually the man that signed Microdisney signed Something Happens.
Virgin took us to lunch with Cathal and Sean O’Hagan, his partner in Microdisney. We felt like interlopers. They had a few albums behind them at this point and were indie music royalty. It was like we’d been joined by a West Cork flying squad. We could hardly speak.
I interviewed him for RTÉ some years later. The business had bruised him. The adventure had been the early years, Peel sessions, tours, number one indie albums. But it had been simply too tough, too much sleeping on floors, too much hardship. “Virgin came too late,” he told me, “our hearts had gone out of it a bit.”
As the dust settled I went into radio and set about acquainting the world with what it might have missed. Pre-internet, it was harder for albums like The Clock Comes Down The Stairs to find its audience. It was time for redress.
Listening to the album anew, I realised that I, and many Irish people, had lived through its songs. The lack of jobs in Ireland, the suffocating Catholicism, the narrow-mindedness. And then the Ryanair flights to the UK, gigs in the Mean Fiddler and Finsbury Park. The excitement, the escape.
Irish people in the UK made a beeline for our gigs. They were young, fresh out of college. There was a boy and a girl we knew from gigs in the Boxing Club in Drogheda. Now they were a couple, still kids in my eyes, on this new adventure in London, staying with an aunt out by Seven Sisters.
This world is perfectly observed on Clock. Ireland’s poverty, its ruralness and lack of sophistication, and England’s pretence and self-delusion, stronger now than it was then, are both put to the sword. From “bus people arguing” to “cocktail bars in Engels Court”, you “run from the past, into the past.”
Two songs have always dominated that album for me. ‘And’ and ‘Are You Happy?’. They both have a morning-after feel about them, that moment when the crazy stops and first light of day catches you, and you see exactly where you are and what you have left. They are beautiful, aching, mournful.
Clock has long since become my favourite ever Irish album. This occasionally requires me to argue with Van Morrison fans but what of it? The bit where Cathal sings, “I am God and I bring you an instant picnic.” That’s a third-round KO right there.
And although Shane MacGowan is often heralded as Ireland’s greatest songwriter, especially on the ‘Irish in the UK’ angle, I prefer Cathal’s take. The fun, the acerbic wit, the poignancy.
I never got used to him. When Robert Forster (The Go-Betweens) brought Cathal with him for an interview I almost fainted. He was, and always will be, a giant to me. He had no equal.
