Like Dinsdale Piranha in the old Monty Python sketch, Cathal Coughlan uses sarcasm. Sometimes with a sledgehammer, elsewhere with a stiletto - but he never stoops to the tender, poisoned compliments of polished English irony. Cathal Coughlan is no member of the loyal opposition.
Indeed Viva Dead Ponies, the second F.M. album, conclusively proves just how the demise of Mirodisney has liberated Coughlan, unleashing a savage anger that sometimes flickered in the old partnership's live work but which was generally submerged in their records' in-jokes. The result is a ferocious purgative of an album, entirely in keeping with the creed scrawled on the bottom of the inner sleeve, 'Keep Music Evil'. For once, an artist has written an album that acknowledges and dramatises hatred instead of aestheticizing it at a safe and falsely Brechtian distance.
Yet like Blondie, Fatima Mansions are also a group. With Andrias O'Gruama's guitar leading the charge of the awkward squad, their playing's precursors' occasional leanings to poker-faced whimsy. Again like Blondie, the keyboards also count, for Nick Bunker most defines their sound as he cruelly twists the hit of the knife into the firm belly (but flabby mind) of pop.
Far beyond the hyperbole of most reviewer's rhetoric, Fatima Mansions really do summon up the repressed hate-filled nightmares behind the dreams of poppy love. All the familiar keyboard cliches of the dancefloor get warped in Fatima Mansions' festival of folly. 'Thursday' could be the Hitman and Cher, 'You're A Rose' is a malicious transmutation of Bros, 'Broken Radio No. 1' rides in one of those slippery and baby-oiled lurve man keyboard intros and 'Mr. Baby' is a grim anticipation of a trendy future when Motown finally meets the Folk Mass crows.
Fatima Mansions are long past the point of merely acknowledging that the lunatics are running the asylum. Instead their revenge has the derelicts taking over the disco, all the alchos in the early houses, the King's Cross hookers plotting a New Orleans theme-park on the Small Business Expansion Scheme and the citizens of Cardboard City wrapped up in their blankets of style magazines, all freed to change places with the glitteratti.
Teachers always say this isn't constructive criticism and indeed there are moments like the opening 'Angel's Delight' when Coughlan's anger gets unmoored and his abuse unfocused. But for all the appearances of strident nihilism on 'Viva Dead Ponies', he's actually a moralist whose music has fallen into the gutter between appearance and reality. For, as the rancorous 'Chemical Cosh' shows, he really just can't forgive the mindless, all-nonsense hedonism of stockbrokers on E, the people who put the narc in narcissism.
But outside the gilded discos, this is a dank nocturnal world, almost exclusively populated by social predators and carnivores. The ballad of 'The Door-To-Door Inspector' is almost East European in its oblique allegory, a portrait perhaps of a shabby, middle-aged poll tax-collector turned into authority's bad conscience of nightmares. 'Look What I Stole For Us, Darling' is almost medieval. London squatters scavenging in a 'Mad Max' scenario that's taken literally not symbolically while Jesus or somebody who thinks he's Jesus - the distinction is blurred beyond redemption - sells frozen food in a Brouch End corner shop.
There's some Irish tangents. 'Mr. Baby' is anti-clerical, 'Broken Radio No. 1' includes scenes from a childhood scrapbook, the melody of 'The White Knuckle Express' tampers with sean-nos and 'A Pack Of Lies' seems to observe the emigrant cattle-ships and the customs cowsheds of Holyhead as some smoke and sweat-filled anteroom to a soiled, fraudulent heaven. But mostly Coughlan's Irishness expresses itself as a rage against English complacency and the maxim of 'Broken Radio No. 1': *Murder the past and all who sail in it*.
It hardly needs underlining that this is a remarkable album, whose richness makes it not only the best Irish album of this year but a headine for the decade. Finally, the arts pundits have recognised Van Morrison, let's trust if hardly hope they won't wait till 2000 AD to catch up with the 13th century boy.