FATIMA MANSIONS

FATIMA MANSIONS (The Tivoli, Dublin)

In a sense I feel like this is an obituary I’m writing. What else am I to think? Watching the Fatima Mansions on stage tonight just going through the motions on auto-pilot certainly felt like the end.

It’s never been Cathal Coughlan’s style to let it linger – indeed, letting people know that they’re past their sell-by date has always been one of his favourite activities both on and off the records and this is why it is such a shame to see the man, whose main mission as everybody’s favourite Anti-Christ was to Keep Music Evil, just doing what he did tonight: flogging a dead pony.

And he knew it too: his near-legendary between-song banter was kept to a bare minimum and the fact that he did a measly one-song encore was a tell-tale sign that he has thrown in the towel and when he took his bow at the end, there was a palpable air of resignation about him, apologetic even, as if he was bowing out for good.

In retrospect, this isn’t all that surprising when you think back to his interview in the last issue of Hot Press, which showed a very different Cathal Coughlan to the one normally portrayed. Things really must have been bad : never in seventy times seven papal decrees did I think that he, of all people, who seemed to be able to walk on water and still get home in time to dish out the loaves and fishes, would be reduced to the broken, shattered individual that he described in that interview.

I’ve said it before but I still hold that Microdisney were one of the best groups to which Ireland ever gave birth and although he probably wouldn’t agree with such genuflections, I can’t see why he wouldn’t radically change direction again now as he did when he baptised the Fatima Mansions five years ago.

This is why I am so disappointed – I’ve seen Coughlan and his many Mansions on four previous occasions and each time he looked like he was going to demolish the whole country and all its problems with it in one unholy grind of the axe but at the Tivoli tonight, he seemed to give up the ghost and bury the hatchet . . . in himself.

• Nicholas G Kelly