MARY COUGHLAN: “Love Me or Leave Me, The Best Of Mary Couglan” (East West)

Mary Coughlan never quite fitted. The reasons are many but the basic truth is that her talents weren’t slimline and easily stylized. Mythmakers saw only the gardenia in Billie Holliday’s hair and forgot Lady Day was originally a country girl. A decade ago, The Face promoted Sade as the ideal and jazz and torch singers got stereotyped as vampish urban sophisticates, a process that didn’t help Coughlan whose art concerns kitchen-sink dramas as much as supperclub seduction.

It wasn’t just a superficial problem of image but a basic difference of attitude. Coughlan empowered women and threatened all those men who only wanted to be flattered. But her originality was also musically confounding since her treatment of jazz and blues was always tinged by her Galway background. Mary Coughlan might cite Billie Holliday as her primary inspiration but she was also an artistic cousin of Dolores Keane and her Blues were always Green.

Love Me Or Leave Me doesn’t present this best of her Warners’ work in chronological order, an approach that confirms just how difficult record companies, record producers and musicians found it to frame her. Its defects are rarely due to her singing or the choice of songs. Instead any irritating inconsistencies reside in the arrangements which are sometimes too tied to the past to find her a future.

You can hear it in the collection’s first song, ‘Ancient Rain’. Jimmy McCarthy’s song is densely imaged and Coughlan responds to its mysterious drama but the rhythm section flags and never really locks into the song, a blemish that robs the recording of its full potential drama.

Similar problems recur elsewhere. ‘Ride On’ has an undanceable, intrusive drum pattern and is only instrumentally rescued by Davy Spillane’s sweltering pipes solo; ‘Ice Cream Man’ has clichéd female back-up vocals and so forth. Coughlan’s Irish male musicians weren’t always as sophisticated as they liked to think.

Such incompatabilities forced her later London recordings. On the songs gifted her by Mark Nevin and Pete Glenister - ‘A Leaf From A Tree’, ‘Red Ribbon’, ‘Invisible To You’ and ‘Man Of The World’ – her singing is more playful and the arrangements more coherent and sympathetic but Coughlan was playing romance and light comedy when this actress was and, of course, still is capable of more demanding roles.

So it’s her earliest recordings that work best. There’s no self-conscious interference, no mistaken ploys to second-guess the market and the musicians remain properly though sympathetically anonymous. Songs like ‘Double Cross’, ‘Delaney’s Gone Back On The Wine’ and ‘The Beach’ breached rural taboos in their candid acceptance of sensuality and infidelity and Coughlan’s refusal to be cast as either an object or a victim or a comfortably bland or sentimentally neutered role-model.

This was an Ireland where people got pissed, fell in love and hate and women could always get caught in the crossfire of the conflict between sex and marriage. It says something about Irish rock and its generally male practicioners that these songs have been so rarely bettered.

For Coughlan is also a very easy storyteller. A later Johnny Mulhern song, ‘Francis Of Assisi’ is barbed yet sweetly mocking and songs like that and Molly McAnailly-Burke’s ‘Sunday Mornings’, a parable of woman’s fate in and out of marriage, confirm the peculiarities of her career. Coughlan may have been touted as a jazz singer but, in terms of her crucial Irish female audience, she was almost a radical country singer, a politically-conscious Patsy Cline, fighting for her own independence not the hand of a Sugar Daddy.

After all, when it came to standards, it was she who wanted to be ‘Seduced’, a track that’s successful exactly because she’s only accompanied by a double bass. ‘Nobody’s Business’ and ‘I Can Get Along Without You Very Well’ sustain this determination to live and love on her own terms and another defect of the track-listing is that it contradicts her defiance by closing with Johnny Duhan’s ‘Whiskey Didn’t Kill The Pain’. Her reading may be angry but this is the lyric that flirts most with maudlin martyrdom, which makes it an inappropriate finale.

And while it lists the songwriters, Love Me Or Leave Me is bereft of any other information regarding the musicians or her albums. (P.S. to WEA: Elvis Presley didn’t write ‘Heartbreak Hotel’)

Nowadays, we enthuse about A Woman’s Heart, Eleanor McEvoy and Dolores O’Riordan. Love Me Or Leave Me should be a timely reminder that Mary Coughlan, with Sinead O’Connor, had the determination and originality of attitude to first fight for the space in which they now flourish.

• Bill Graham