'We were altered by it': Jacknife Lee on working on Cathal Coughlan's final album

The California-based producer found out during the making of the Teilifís records that the Cork singer didn't have long to live

Thu, 13 Oct, 2022 - 21:30

Ed Power

When Cork singer Cathal Coughlan and his band, the Fatima Mansions, covered REM’s Shiny Happy People in 1992, it was an act of exquisite music vandalism.

“F**k your showbusiness, most of all f**k your show business,” Coughlan had proclaimed halfway through the tune, his voice a thunderous squall. This was evisceration as art, a poetic condemnation of REM”s major label success.

But because life is funny, and everybody knows everybody, Coughlan – who passed away last May after a long illness at age 61– would eventually find himself just one step removed from REM. This almost crossing of paths happened when working with producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee on their surreal and sublime synth project Telefís.

“I obviously worked with REM,” says Lee, whose collaborators also include U2, Snow Patrol and Taylor Swift, and who in the 1990s played in power-trio Compulsion.

“I said to Peter [Buck, guitarist] that I was doing a record with Cathal Coughlan from the Fatima Mansions. He said, ‘I f**king love their cover of Shiny Happy People’.

"I said it to Cathal. He said, ‘oh my god that’s such a relief’. He was concerned with upsetting everyone. Peter was a fan of Cathal’s.”

Buck wasn’t the only one to recognise Coughlan as a singular talent, whether fronting Fatima Mansions and Microdisney or as a solo artist. When his death was announced there was an outpouring of grief – in his native city and beyond. And shock too.

As an artist the Glounthaune-born singer lived his life at 1000mph, whether delivering red-eye polemics or performing crushing, crashing ballads.

That sense of a musician for whom songwriting was a thrilling act of defiance is preserved in Telefís’s wonderful second record, A Dó which has just been released posthumously and serves as a fitting celebration of Coughlan’s work and life.

Coughlan was private and it was not widely known that he was in poor health. However, early in their collaboration, he revealed to Lee that the clock was ticking. “We did the first song. And then he said, ‘I have to tell you something… let’s not make too many plans,” says Lee from his studio in Topanga Canyon, outside Los Angeles.

Telefís put out their first album, A hAon, in January to instant acclaim. Its special genius was to filter Kraftwerk-style synth pop through a filter of mid-20th-century Irish surrealism. As announced by the cover art of a retro RTÉ-style St Brigid’s Cross, the record took a skewed look at Ireland in those twilight years post-DeValera but before the decline of the Catholic Church.

The reviews were ecstatic. But, with Coughlan’s health failing, Lee and Coughlan were already pushing on. By March, they had finished A Dó, which unspools as a spryer, less angst-ridden companion piece to A hAon. It features contributions from Will Sergeant of Echo and the Bunnymen, and Sean O’Hagan, Coughlan’s close friend and songwriting partner in Microdisney.

“We were going to put out A Dó later,” says Lee. “In the middle of our conversation he’d go, almost like a joke, ‘you know I don’t have that much time, right? We should put it out in August’.

"So you’re thinking, ‘well whatever he wants to do is what we’re doing’. We were told he had more time. That’s why I was pushing hard to keep him focused. He was getting a lot of treatment, which is no fun. And physically painful. So I thought, let’s keep working.”

A Dó ought, on paper, be a haunting record, built as it is around Coughlan’s voice. It is closer to a celebration of his life and legacy. It also catches Coughlan’s introspective side – and his humility. These were qualities Lee was stuck by when re-introduced to Coughlan via their mutual acquaintance Luke Haines, of The Auteurs.

“He didn’t feel undervalued. He just didn’t think anyone was interested. It’s not like he felt he deserved attention because he thought he was great. He knew he was good. He just didn’t think he was required. Which is interesting.

"I’m always surprised when I’m working with somebody and they feel that way. A lot of big people feel that way: that they’re not very good. Part of lead singer syndrome is huge ego and a punishing vulnerability. He didn’t have the ego part. He just had the vulnerability.”

Telefís wasn’t the first time the duo had crossed paths. In the 1990s, when Coughlan was fronting Fatima Mansions and Lee was singing with Compulsion, they orbited the same circles in London. But Lee’s memories of Coughlan go back further.

“I thought he was ferocious in Microdisney. My first concert was Microdisney supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees [when they played the Grand Cinema, Cabra, in October 1980].

"I sat at the front row. I had no idea how people behaved in a concert. Did they sit down? Stand up? So I sat there in the front row. He was there. There was spittle coming out of his mouth, landing on me. He was formidable and ferocious then.

“Microdisney’s song Fiction Land. It starts off gently. Halfway through, he was roaring his head off. That’s what I really liked about Microdisney. People want a sad song to be introspective. Microdisney didn’t do that. They did sad songs but there was a ferocity to them.”

As Telefís, Lee and Coughlan never really discussed the music they were making together. And so Coughlan’s lyrics were often a mystery to his collaborator. Lee preferred it that way.

There was no ‘overthinking’. This was a project that seemed to tap into something deeper – to draw on their shared sense of being Irishmen abroad.

“It became a record for each other. I was trying to impress him. He was trying to impress me.

"It was a penpal relationship, a back and forth. Trying to thrill each other. I would send him something and it would make him giddy. He would send something back and it would make me go, ‘f**king hell – that’s amazing’.

"It kept on upping the ante. Our families all noticed we were doing something that was exciting each other. We were altered by it. I’m so grateful that happened at a time in his life where, had he not had it, I don’t know what his experience would have been like.”