Cathal Coughlan & The Grand Necropolitan Quartet

In a rational world, Cathal Coughlan’s new album, The Sky’s Awful Blue, would already be omnipresent on the nation’s airwaves, his face would adorn the covers of our music magazines, and Pat Kenny would long since have subjected our hero to a Late, Late Show tribute.

Life being what it is, however, tonight’s gig is one of three that may well constitute the entire promotional tour for the album, and the new songs will receive minimal airplay, as there will be no singles, these being too indulgent an expense for an artist who is finally releasing his material on his own label, Beneath Music.

Tonight Coughlan is relaxed, urbane, in better voice than ever; the Grand Necropolitan Quartet are as tight and imaginative an ensemble as one could wish for; and the set list might better be described as an inventory of songwriting glories.

Who else, for instance, could neglect to play as beloved a work as ‘Bertie’s Brochures’, and still hold his audience in thrall? The trio of songs from Black River Falls, ‘The Ghost of Limehouse Cut’, ‘Payday’ and ‘Officer Material’, probably stand as the strongest from Coughlan’s back pages, but the new tunes, notably ‘White’s Academy’, ‘Denial Of The Right To Dream’ and ‘A Drunken Hangman’, are as powerful as anything he has written to date.

A Coughlan gig would not, of course, be a proper occasion without its moment of madness, and tonight’s comes in the form of a monologue delivered over a discordant Grand Necropolitan free-for-all: Coughlan, possessed by some damned spirit, rants, “I will not go down that gravel road/I WILL NOT GO DOWN THAT FUCKING GRAVEL ROAD!”. As unnerving as his performance is, I can’t help but be struck by the reaction of an elderly couple in front of me, who cheer and punch the air in their enthusiasm.

There are times when Coughlan recalls other songwriting greats, from Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Scott Walker and Jacques Brel. However, in its troubled marriage of caustic and acoustic, his music rightfully belongs in a category all its own. File under: uneasy listening. But essential.