Alternative Hero

HE LOOKS a lot better than he should, that s for sure. Cathal Coughlan may be entering his fifth decade on planet earth, but after experiencing a series of setbacks that encompassed a messy divorce from a record company, a renouncing of alcohol, a failed relationship and more miscellaneous misfortunes than he cares to remember, Ireland s finest living songwriter appears to be in terrific shape these days.
Clear of eye and tanned of tone, Coughlan greets me with a warm handshake in the bar of the Conrad Hotel, and we settle down to talk turkey about his new magnum opus, Black River Falls. Its stately, opulent sound only hints at its long gestation period, which included a mammoth battle to escape the clutches of his hated former label, Radioactive, and enter the welcoming fold of Cooking Vinyl.
Released a month ago to generally glowing reviews, Black River Falls continues Coughlan s move away from what he describes as freewheeling rock the kind of angry, raging, caustic-yet-melodic work that characterised his time as leader of The Fatima Mansions and towards a deeper, more brooding sensibility.
The twelve songs on Black River Falls are slower and more measured, the lyrics denser and less literal than the bile-fests of yore, and the vocal delivery more careful. Coughlan has always been one of Ireland s most technically gifted singers, but on the new album, he surpasses himself.
This becomes even more apparent two nights after our interview, when he plays a superb show at Vicar Street with a three-piece band. Coughlan airs a few old classics during the 80-minute set, at one point introducing Behind The Moon as an old Fatima Mansions cigarette-lighter special , but mostly he concentrates on his post-Mansions work. Sitting at a keyboard throughout, he croons his heart out to stunning effect, backed by a four-piece band.
For The Big Lukewarm (a song which most of the audience are evidently unfamiliar with), Coughlan promises, We re really going to rock out on this one! The first 90 seconds of the song, quiet and pensive, are punctuated by knowing chuckles from the crowd, until it dawns on them that this is no Angel s Delight -style piss-take: this is the way the song s meant to be. The sense of Coughlan and his songwriting ability shifting up a few gears is palpable.
An undeniably powerful record, Black River Falls is significant in that it represents another substantial salvo from an artist whom most of us had given up for dead. Indeed, his current spate of activity is the first meaningful sighting of Coughlan since a couple of Irish shows with his temporary backing band, the Nine Wassies From Bainne, in October of 1997.
Until I started recording the album, not very much had happened since then, Coughlan begins. I was preoccupied with trying to get shot of Radioactive, and I recorded a couple of albums worth of unreleasable material . . . which may be exposed on the World Wide Web before too much longer.
I had a very precise idea of what I wanted Black River Falls to sound like. I didn t want to make another record that people would react to as a finger-pointing exercise, y know? A lot of the humorous stuff just didn t have any meaning for me any more. It was a time in my life when I knew I just wasn t the same person I d been ten years before. I was constantly in environments where I was a stranger having to explain himself. I drifted away from some people, and others died . . .
Also, I couldn t stand London any more, so I was sort of semi-living in San Diego for six months. It s a bizarre place. I knew less about it when I left than I did when I got there. It s where my wife comes from. But there, I found that sunshine can become as much of a thing to avoid as rain, when it s beating down every day. Not a momentous discovery, I m afraid, but it wasn t a very momentous time.
Roughly a year ago, Coughlan commenced the recording sessions for what would be his tenth record of a 16-year career (mini-albums and compilations not included). What s immediately striking about Black River Falls is its sparseness, both lyrically and musically. It s an album that, although generally slow-paced and unhurried, seems desperate to make its point.
The last one was just a big doodle, Coughlan grins, in a reference to what he now describes as his not for profit 1996 solo album, Grand Necropolitan. Whereas with Black River Falls, I came to the realisation that not much of what I d done up to that point communicated emotionally in an ambiguous way with people. That s still what I most want to do. And I was saying basically, I want to clear the decks, and I ve got songs that I think can possibly achieve my goals, but I mustn t get deflected by showing off and compensating.
Quite often that s what I ve done on my sound-collage things: I m compensating for the fact that I m not cool enough or fucking confident enough about some aspects of recording. This time I felt I had to stake everything on the songs and that s what I did.
When he talks of compensating for not being cool enough , is he referring to the numerous amounts of in-jokes on Fatima Mansions records, or tracks like More Smack, Vicar and the infamous 1992 cover of Bryan Adams Everything I Do ?
No, I m talking about adopting musical styles that are alien to me. On the last album, I was definitely putting into practice things that other highly-regarded people were doing, like Paul Schutze, Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis. I was listening to a lot of ambient post-rock stuff and it wasn t really me. Next time I ll probably do something halfway between this record and the last one. But not in terms of trying to be something I m not.
As he explains, though, financial constraints meant that trying on and rejecting different genres like a musical clothes-horse wasn t really an option.
I had quite a small budget, so I had to do a lot of juggling, he shrugs. It was just as well I wasn t trying to improvise in the studio. With the vocal performances, you always do, and you have to give the musicians a certain amount of leeway as well. I d like to have given them more, to be honest, but instead it had to be very direct. Things had to get done quickly. Even at that it was hugely stressful. The most stressful record I ve ever done.
Did there come a point where he thought it wouldn t be completed?
Indeed, he shudders. But it was too late to turn back. Heading in to do the mixing, I really wasn t sure if it was gonna get finished. There was business stuff that hadn t been sorted out adequately before the thing started and not the record company, they were fine about letting me do what I wanted. But I had problems with the studio and it got pretty rough.
Coughlan nominates Payday , the recent single, as his favourite song on the album. Unsurprisingly so, for it s up there with the very best things he s written, alongside Purple Window , The Door To Door Inspector and Unbroken Ones . Quite apart from the elegiac sadness of the lyric, it s an exquisitely melodic piece of music, beautifully sung, and it has as much chance of being played on Irish radio as I have of giving John Higgins a sound thrashing down at the local pool hall.
It s a quick song, he says. It just gets there. You know straightaway there s something weird going on. There are only three instruments playing quite sparse parts, but it just kinda gels. And lyrically I think I really managed to get something there.
And it s payday up on Blarney Street/And the mystery returns/To the bookie shops and pharmacies/And the mystery returns/ No whiskey or amphetamines/But the mystery returns/ And you re gone, like a cloud/Left me here to my countdown.
It s about the fact that you get a honeymoon in your life when you re not exposed to death much well, most people aren t, anyway, he explains. Maybe when you were a child you saw your grandparents die. Then when you come to a certain age it s the generation above you. And the feeling of being bereft is like the worst fucking hangover you ve ever had, and you haven t actually done anything to earn it and yet, there it is.
Suddenly the world doesn t make any sense any more, it s like one long speed hangover. That s what it s like to me, anyway. That line about The mystery returns , that s what that means. The story you ve been telling yourself isn t there any more. It s about the collapse of your worldview.
Without doubt, that s a trend running through Coughlan s new album of impermanence, of transience, of leaving as little behind you when you die as you did when you were born.
Yes, and it s certainly something I m pretty haunted by. I don t have children, and when you see the generation above you dying, you realise that (long pause) whatever other people might think of you, there really isn t anything at all being left behind.
Does he ever contemplate mortality in terms of having more of his lifespan behind him than there is left in front of him?
I wouldn t dispute that . . . I don t think about it so much in that light, but yeah, it s an ever-present detail. The fact that lots of things seem like they were yesterday but actually happened 20 years ago. It doesn t really come on you until this stage in your life (Coughlan is in his early 40s). I think your childhood s always special, but when you can remember things you ve done as an adult and they were that long ago, that s fucked, he laughs.
Time seems to go slower when you re a child, doesn t it?
Definitely, definitely. Then everything starts to fly by after a while, and that s . . . just horrible, really. But that s the way it is. Human beings have always had to face this. We live longer, so we contemplate it a bit more, but that s all.
At this stage in his life, and career, Coughlan has left quite a body of work in his wake. Does he feel that most, or even all, of it still stands up to scrutiny today?
I can listen to most of it, he shrugs. Some of the Microdisney stuff gets me down. It brings back memories that I don t really feel too comfortable with, and not even in a challenging way. It s banal: feelings of regret, of not having done things better, of the life I was living at the time. But a lot of the Mansions stuff still sounds good, and even the stuff that doesn t, I remember the fun we had doing it. That means a lot.
I suppose the difference is that there were no personal gripes at the end of the Mansions. It was just a winding-down process. Whereas with Microdisney there was a lot of emotional investment, creative partnerships that went badly wrong, and I regret the way I was behaving towards the end of that.
Is it true all his albums are now deleted, apart from the new one?
Yeah! This appears to amuse Coughlan no end, for some reason. It doesn t piss me off, you have to be sanguine about it. The business doesn t see any use in it, commercially, so that s that. You re right, it s surprising some of the things that do get reissued, but it s very difficult for business people to make any money doing that, so they don t bother with 98% of what s out there.
Today, Coughlan claims that his relationship with Ireland is virtually dead , and that he draws on it less and less in terms of his songwriting.
The time I played shows in October 1997 was the longest I ve been here for years, and it was only ten days, he says. Without wanting to sound like a fucking martyr, I had a lot of money trouble and it just wasn t possible to get here much, the last couple of years. I had to focus on making up the deficits I d created for myself. It is quite important to me to come here.
Coughlan says he won t be returning to Ireland on a permanent basis because I couldn t see myself being able to do music here, economically.
But what about Ireland s tax laws for artists?
That only matters if you re making money! (laughs) It isn t like Charlie McCreevy s gonna write me a cheque to make a record with!
Whenever he returns to this country, what are the things that strike him immediately?
The fact that people aren t afraid of each other. In London, you have strangers sitting side by side on a bus or whatever, and it s very regimented. People are much more at ease with each other here. But I m well versed enough in Ireland to know that beneath that superficial thing, there is still a residue of unease with the identity of the place which, if anything, is becoming more fractured for some people, as the affluence increases.
It s interesting to know what the 1991-1992 model of Cathal Coughlan, who was then writing material of a psychopathically angry hue, would have made of present-day Ireland. Certainly, in a cultural bubble increasingly overpopulated by ubiquitous media swine, It Boys, mobile phone entrepreneurs, useless boy bands and Celtic Tiger fuckpigs, we could do with someone as scabrous and vitriolic a songwriter as him to take them down a peg or two.
It is the Eighties! exclaims Coughlan. It really seems like the same thing I used to write about with Microdisney, 12 years ago, during Thatcher s zenith. There s a grain of truth in the idea that this is Ireland finally catching up on the rest of Europe. To whatever use it s being put, there is money here that wasn t actually there before. But it s always horrible when you see people who have got reasonable jobs and can t afford places to live because it s got so completely out of control.
And they re doing all the same ould crap as they did in England, like building onto Dublin for no good reason really. Centralising things here further is a bad idea for Dublin, and for the rest of the country and always was. It seems like rank folly, but people will always take things if they re offered to them . . .
But, from Coughlan s own comments, Ireland still seems like a better place to be than his own locale in the East End of London. Indeed, in a previous interview, he made references to living alongside people who question their own existences every day of their lives .
It s a funny place, it really is, he sighs. When we moved in, there was no other housing in the area that had been built after 1930. It was, and is, in a chronic state of disrepair. You see a lot of elderly people who ve just come there to die, and a lot of young people who don t understand the society outside their block, really. It s very strange.
But it s not without its optimistic side, as well. There s a lot of Bengali youth getting into the arts and doing really good stuff. But there aren t jobs there to suit the majority yet, and I don t know if that ll change. It seems like every country in the western world has now decided it can t deal with poverty, it can only corral it. So you create a zone where it sits and festers.
Although Coughlan has had to forego his traditional jogging route since moving to the East End (he used to run through the streets of Dulwich wearing his LILLEY & PORTILLO S PISSING AND FISTING PARLOUR t-shirt to annoy the Conservative-voting locals), he still sticks to a regimen of sorts, having been off the beer since the mid-1990s.
I don t go running for an adrenaline rush, or for competition. I do it to stop feeling the way I always felt, which was over-energetic in the wrong way. I actually prefer long walks, like most songwriters, but I don t have the time, or the scenery (laughs). I prefer to use my time on more tangible things, like recording, or tending to my website.
Ah yes, his website. Split into several categories including some incomprehensible screeds about BritArt and West Ham fans, a lyrics section and something called Web news make millions with me! it can be located at (yep) www.cathalcoughlan.com. Coughlan explains that he d been putting the project on the long finger for months, until he saw that the finished CD booklet for Black River Falls inadvertently contained the site s address, thereby forcing his hand.
What s currently up there is only the first bit of it, he says. I ve got to do loads more. I ve been collecting links. (laughs) Oh yes! Things like ask jesus.com and mymiserablelife.com. Do you know tvgohome.com? It s like a pisstake of the Radio Times. It s solid gold stuff really misanthropic and nasty. Unfortunately, I believe the site s now been taken over by Loaded, so it s all downhill from here.
I ve been using computers for years, musically, but I m not messianic about the fucking things. I do believe that they re just part of the next stage of globalisation.
Further plans for Coughlan include a soundtrack for a movie titled Piece Of Earth ( It s about the Border. It s got a strong story and I think it s going to be really good ), and, if we re good, a couple more Irish shows before the end of the year. In the meantime, treat yourself to one of the albums of the year, superbly written and sung by a man who, on all available evidence, seems able to do this sort of stuff for fun. It s #14.99 or thereabouts, and you ll find it under C .
Cathal Coughlan plays the Fleadh at Finsbury Park in London on June 10th. His website can be found at http://www.cathalcoughlan.com. Black River Falls is out now on Cooking Vinyl.