While it’s true that nearly 100% of the articles and blog posts that you read—like this here very blog post—about Cathal Coughlan compare his voice to that of Scott Walker’s, would everyone say THAT if it wasn’t true? High praise indeed, but hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.

I was a big fan of Microdisney, the band Coughlan fronted in the 80s—and I did come at them as a Scott Walker fan wanting more of ‘that.’ One of the very, very best bands that Ireland has ever produced, the lush music of Microdisney sounded instantly classic to my ears—like Burt Bacharach’s stuff does—when I first heard it. Songs like “Loftholdingswood,” “Birthday Girl,” “Singer’s Hampstead Home” (allegedly about Boy George), “Are You Happy?” and my favorite by them, “Mrs. Simpson,” have that big, epic, cinemascope thing going on that the voice has no choice but to live up to. Coughlan’s trenchant lyrics were fascinating and emotionally evocative, but still open to interpretation enough that I could make them all about whatever woman I happened to be in love with or whatever was going on in my life at the time.

Admittedly I lost track of his post-Microdisney output until I became obsessed with a song of his called “Witches in the Water” that was part of The North Sea Scrolls, a whimsical alternate history lecture/musical made in collaboration with Luke Haines and Australian journalist/rock critic Andrew Mueller. (I won’t go off on a tangent about this album, but trust me, it’s a minor masterpiece and you really need to hear it. On Spotify and YouTube.)

Have a listen to “Witches in the Water,” and then get back to me. I’ll wait.
 

 
That song has everything, doesn’t it? Separates the boys from the men. I immediately made up for lost time with Fatima Mansions and Coughlan’s solo work, and I am happy to report that for the first time in a decade there will be a new Cathal Coughlan solo album coming out later this year, heralded by the release of this new video—which gets around COVID-19 lockdown music video cliches in a quite creative manner I thought—for the title track, “Song of Co-Aklan.”