I just read the sad news that the great Irish vocalist Cathal Coughlan has died. The frontman of both Microdisney and Fatima Mansions was 61 and died in the hospital after what was described only as a long illness. He was one of the very finest vocalists of his generation.
I am a really huge fan of his music. Microdisney’s “Mrs. Simpson” is a desert island disc for me, and his unjustly ignored solo record Black River Falls is one of my top favorite albums of all time. (It’s the album I wish Scott Walker had made instead of Tilt. Yes, it’s really that good and you should go stream it now.)
During the course of the past few years, I’d become friendly with Cathal over email. Not that long ago I sent him a copy of Nico and Phillippe Garrel’s film La Cicatrice Intérieure, which he seemed highly amused by. We were planning to meet up in London in late Summer. Now that will never happen. I’m glad I got to tell him how much I love his music.
The world of music has lost a truly great talent. RIP Cathal Coughlan.
“Black River Falls”
“Payday”
“Witches in the Water”
“Are You Happy?”
“Mrs. Simpson”
“Singer’s Hampstead Home”
Microdisney on ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ in 1985, doing two of their best songs, “Loftholdingswood” and “Birthday Girl.”
Telefís—the Irish Gaelic word for television, pronounced Tele-feesh—is the name of a new musical collaboration between Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions) and producer/musician Jacknife Lee (who’s worked with everyone from Taylor Swift and Christina Aguilera to REM, U2, and Modest Mouse). The pair are aiming to update the synthpop duo paradigm with an album titled a hAon, which translates as “the first” or “#1” in, you guessed it, Gaelic. After February 11 you can stream the album at all the usual places, and the vinyl version will be in record stores on March 4. They’ve also been churning out videos at a rapid clip which you can sample at the Telefís YouTube channel.
Prior to the release of the album, Telefís teamed up with Jah Wobble for a series of collaborations. Their latest is a dub version of their earlier alliance, “Falun Gong Dancer.” I asked Cathal Coughlan for a statement about the video and this is what he sent me:
Near Dublin, the Capital City of the Irish Empire, a select group of religious tyrants are gathering together in a specially-constructed TV studio to create a media presentation which will end the Permissive Society of the 1960’s for once and for all. Meanwhile, in distant London, a group of smartly-dressed working emigrants from the Irish mainland assembles in order to socialize in a convivial environment. This is a place where they will not be derided for their manners and speech, which while both are imbued with a grace and elegance, are not shared in common with the majority of the host city’s population. An outbreak of set-dancing occurs, sending the dance floor into a controlled and courtly frenzy.
The music filling the space is the “Donkey’s Gudge Dub” version of the song “Falun Gong Dancer,” by the Irish expatriate group Telefís, a version heavily featuring the bass stylings of Jah Wobble, himself a son of the Irish diaspora in London. Jah Wobble is one of the most distinctive instrumental voices to have emerged in this neck of the woods since the punk era, a ferment which drew him into highly distinctive work with Public Image Ltd., the Invaders of the Heart, and a host of diverse and adventurous projects.
In fact, coincidentally, given the title of the tune, the dancers in London soon take a break from the dance and enjoy a psychotropic snack in the form of “donkey’s gudge” cake, a strange concoction originating in the homeland, on this occasion fortified with some of the mind-bending fungi which grow on nearby Hampstead Heath. After this, the dance assumes a supernatural glow, and the dancers are watched jealously via a Russian satellite link by the theocrats in Ireland.
Composure is retained by all, but Jesus the lights look peculiar, and why is that man’s elbow in three places at once? His elbow is the Holy Trinity, of course!
The debut Telefís album “a hAon” (“the first”) will be released on February 11, 2022. The vinyl version of a hAon will be released on March 4. Preorder here.
After a decade of relative silence, Cathal Coughlan returns later this month with a terrific new album, Song of Co-Aklan on Damian O’Neill’s Dimple Discs label (O’Neill was the lead guitarist for the Undertones, and played bass in That Petrol Emotion.) It feels like there’s a deserving buzz around the upcoming release—and Coughlan’s return—as no doubt inspired, in part, by the well-received Microdisney reunion shows of a few years back. It’s about time. He’s earned it.
The loosely conceptual album is, to an extent, based around the cut-up, quaquaversal persona of “Co-Aklan” who is more than happy to explain to you why everything feels so fucking crazy these days. It’s an extremely high quality piece of work that should appeal to intelligent people with sophisticated taste in song. (That might even include you, dear reader.) The record features his longtime backing band the Necropolitan String Quartet, augmented by Luke Haines (Auteurs/Black Box Recorder), Sean O’Hagan (Microdisney/High Llamas), Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti), Aindrías Ó Gruama (Fatima Mansions), Cory Gray (The Delines) and Dublin-based singer-songwriter Eileen Gogan.
I asked Cathal some questions via email.
The obvious question, why ten years between albums?
Well, it certainly wasn’t a plan, at least not in the way it’s turned out now. After the Rancho Tetrahedron album, for which I’d really knocked myself out and from which I received little/no response, I thought the actual format had perhaps had its day. I really enjoyed doing The North Sea Scrolls, but that was more in the nature of a documented live show, which had the added attraction that, on stage, I could just be a sideman on Luke Haines’ songs, for a good part of it.
I was lucky that people in Ireland and France, mainly, offered me the chance to perform in various live shows after that, where my contribution was mainly that of vocalist. That’s what I most enjoy doing, especially when the musicians are really good, and there isn’t any stress for me outside my own contribution. Also, a couple of those productions, one in tribute to WB Yeats and the other to Bertolt Brecht, got me immersed in high-quality and radical work made by others, which I also really enjoy, when kicked into having to do it. It carried no baggage of concern about Silicon Valley, or the post-2010 young-versus-old columnist ‘wars’, etc..
Around 2016, I realised I was amassing quite a bit of material (including some unused songs I’d written for the Yeats show), and felt that it was time to really give the writing some energy, to perhaps make some digital EP’s. But the material came quite easily, and I resolved to play it live, first. Things developed from there.
Does this feel like a comeback for you? There seems to be a lot of buzz around this album, and I’ve noticed that you’re doing a lot of promotion and interviews.
It’s a strange thing, I’m doing more promotion than at any time in decades. But we’re all existing in this bizarre flux, which even predates the pandemic. So there’s no clear quid-pro-quo in this, for me. I’m glad that a lot of people will have heard about the record, because I thought I was making a record which might deserve a hearing but probably wouldn’t get one. But who knows where this will lead? The old rules do not apply.
The barriers, if you will, between your last album, in the form of a CD that had to be manufactured and wrapped in cellophane and shipped someplace, and the intended audience actually finding it don’t exist anymore. It was The North Sea Scrolls that got me interested to find out what you’d been up to, and I could just dial up Black River Falls on TIDAL without even having to walk across the room. It’s piped into people’s homes now—your music, I mean—so now it’s a matter of convincing people to click play, which is still a hard enough task in an attention economy isn’t it?
It’s in another dimension entirely, to be honest. Things were well on their way to the present dispensation in 2009/10, but for one reason or other, it wasn’t possible to achieve any purchase on social media, etc. I’m looking on the streaming services as a set of social networks, whose contribution is purely promotional, and can potentially get the music heard in ways that other avenues can’t, especially without playing live. You’re of course right that the ease of global access is there as never before, as long as listeners know they might like to hear the music.
I may be kidding myself about that mental model, but there’s no other way of remaining motivated, that I know of, when the future need to survive inevitably heaves into view. I’m glad some people still buy physical media, is all I’ll say! I’ll still purchase anything I’ve come across on streaming services, that I like, even if as just a download, which I know is a dying format…
Was Song of Co-Aklan recorded before the pandemic, or in the midst of it?
Before and in the midst. A bunch of the songs were performed live in 2019, and I had intended that to be stage 1 in the rollout of Co-Aklan, hideous golem of post-globalisation retrenchment.
But various personal stuff intervened, and more live work was off the agenda, so I began recording (at a very convivial studio also used by people I admire, like Charles Hayward and Daniel O’Sullivan—run by Frank Byng, himself a very fine drummer who has played with the above, as well as with Kev Hopper’s group Prescott, and many others).
Through some freak of luck, despite my stop-go work pattern, Nick Allum got all his drum tracks down, some guitar, some bass and cello were done, and a few mixes had been completed, before the pandemic really kicked in. I also got Sean O’Hagan’s parts on a couple of the songs done.
Things got weirder after that, but it was clear that an old-school ‘album’ was at hand…
Did you do it (or any of it) remotely over the Internet, or were you always in a studio?
Well, it then became a mixture, in effect. James and Audrey (guitar/cello) recorded a number of their parts remotely. Rhodri Marsden recorded a lot of his signature Zeuhl bass guitar remotely, and some bassoon (me to RM: “I want this to sound like Henry Cow playing ‘The Laughing Gnome,’ can we do that?”). And then there was Cory Gray in Portland, and Eileen Gogan in Dublin.
I wasn’t sure whether I could produce actual mixes for myself, outside of a studio, with no pro engineer, so that’s where a lot of time went, but I’m glad I persevered with that. I can actually be quite methodical with sound, I was astonished to find! The ceaseless skittishness of yore has…altered a bit, if not departed. One song does have an atonal trap coda, with a robot singing aspirational multi-level marketing gibberish.
I’m someone for whom how music “sounds” is a big part of the enjoyment, and I appreciated the title track’s staticky white noises that come in about a minute into the song, and that killer lead bass line played by Luke Haines. There’s a lot of air around each instrument, and your voice. Now that you have the home recording skills under your belt, do you intend to be more prolific moving forward? Another barrier removed, right? You just need a laptop.
I’m hopeful that it will, but as always, it can break out into some fairly basic deciders, such as (big one): do I need live drums on this, and what does the drummer need to hear in order to give a good performance? Since the album was finished, I’ve been getting a bit synthy with some new solo stuff, but it’s important to retain the ‘pro-noise’ disposition there, the way I hear it in current work by Gazelle Twin or older work by This Heat or Suicide, all of which still inspires me. It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but electronics can sound antiseptic, and unless that’s your actual schtick and intention, today’s technology does mean you have no excuse for ending up there unintentionally.
The “Song of Co-Aklan” chorus is a pretty ideal combo for me - the guitars jangle like The Byrds, while alongside that the synths crackle like a post-air raid fire. You can’t really plan for these things.
I’ve read that Co-Aklan is meant to be an alter ego, how so?
Well, when contemplating releasing recorded music again, I was once more reminded that tagging records with my limited-feasibility birth name has always (since 2000) felt a bit sappy and by-rote, though I’m far from being ashamed of my family or where we originate. So I decided to start a process. Then, a friend of mine did this chaotic cut-up on one of my old song lyrics, using online translation and re-translation, and out popped Co-Aklan.
I thought - perfect! It’s phonetic from the off, it isn’t pretending to be a Latin word for ‘trustworthy money’ or some neoliberal liturgical shit like that, and could readily be transliterated into other alphabets in order to secure new markets. Had one the slightest interest in that kind of thing.
A lot of the songs relate to shaky, misremembered and contested identities, and the fear and rage which can result from them, so Co-Aklan and his advent provide that resonance, on a semi-conscious level, though semantically, it’s just another trading name.
Will you keep using the Co-Aklan moniker?
Yes, I will gradually ramp up its usage in the coming couple of years. I think Cristabel Christo’s and Greg Dunn’s totemic cover image for this album give me the ideal platform for saying, “Look, here he is, and he’s staying for a while.” Like the ‘pagan idol’ on a Martin Denny sleeve, only he sings! Wish I’d done this sooner, but it’s taken years of limbo to get this confident, weirdly.
Front cover painting by Cristabel Christo, based in part on photos by Gregory Dunn/Stoneybutter.
What else have you been up to during the COVID-19 lockdown?
Hiberno-theocratic synth-pop is a genre all but shunned by the modern world of arts and culture, and hence it’s in this zone that Grammy-winning producer/musician Jacknife Lee and I have chosen to celebrate our being back in regular contact. We first became acquainted under the generous umbrella of Dublin punk/arts magazine Vox in the early 1980s. The monochrome consciousness and ethics of the Ireland we both grew up in has been hitched to a stark and sometimes intentionally degraded electronic palette to produce an effect which is often poignant but sometimes brutal. Forward to the hit parade! in short. The collaboration was masses of fun. Never in recent memory have I dared reference Thomas Leer’s 1978 single “Private Plane,” only to have the respondent say, “That’s the first single I owned”
Other than the Telefís album and the various monochrome pagain things we’re hatching for that, I’ve been working as part of a collective effort on a project called Bring Your Own Hammer, wherein musicians with Irish links have teamed up with a group of historians to create musical work based on the historical record of crimes and other lowlights which occurred in the Irish diaspora, mainly in Britain and the US, mainly in the 19th century. It’s going really well, and one thing I’m working on is a collaborative track with Sean O’Hagan. Probably a vinyl release next year, and some online work around that.
Also, there’s been the recurrent episodic search for new spaces in and around our small house in which to “film” myself for each next video extravaganza - sometimes in a robe, wearing one boxing glove, sometimes bouncing lamely around outside the shed. Looks like the SoCA album will have given rise to FIVE videos, before we call a halt. they vary from the sketchy to the conceptual to the beautiful. We’re of course not talking glossy 80s epics here, but it’s a strange realisation for me!
Preparatory work for the next Co-Aklan instalment and the second Telefís album are also in hand.
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.”
