Songs and Sonnets: My Encounter with Cathal Coughlan.
I can remember hearing the Irish singer/songwriter Cathal Coughlan for the first time in 1987. Microdisney, the band he formed with guitarist Sean O Hagan had just released a superb single called Town to Town which BBC Radio 1 would not stop playing. It was a fantastic song all about the aftermath of Nuclear war, burying the hatchet with an ex lover and helping to reap the dead harvest together. The lyric was haunting, the strings sublime and the voice of the singer, full of rage and beauty was fantastic. It was a blessed, artistic statement and as far as you could get lyrically from ‘I Should Be So Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky’. It made listening way more interesting to my ears than the saccharine, aural cotton candy that was on offer in the singles charts in 1987, thanks mostly to the Stock Aiken and Waterman factory. Their formulaic, soulless creations were the epitome of commercialized banality. This on the other hand was a real artistic voice and I was hooked.
Cathal was fiercely bright from a scholarly background in Cork, and had a deep compassion for people on the fringes of society and an even more ferocious distain for their subjugators, all of which came out in the often acerbic, confrontational and occasionally hilarious words he wrote. I learned more about the human condition and all of its complexities and injustices from listening to his lyrics than any teacher could have taught me at the time. He even studied for a degree in medicine, but dropped out due to being - by his own admission “pretty fucking terrible” He was rebellious and compassionate in equal measure and it fascinated me.
My brother had the cassette of the album Crooked Mile from which the song Town to Town was lifted and we bought the next album entitled 39 minutes. We both loved the song Singers Hampstead Home and we played it to death. It was like The Beach Boys with jangly guitars. stunning melody and harmonies and a cynical yet amusing lyric.
Town to Town and Singers Hampstead Home will always be number one records In my chart. Listen to the chorus of each song. It’s as good as pop music gets. How those two singles alone could slip through the cracks was beyond me at the time and must have driven Cathal and the rest of Microdisney to the brink of despair and despondency. Virgin records kept pushing the band, but to no avail. They released one final, glorious single entitled Gale Force Wind which I duly went out and bought on 12” single.
Microdisney had made a handful of great albums, they were press darlings and I loved them and have never grown tired of listening to them. Their classic 1985 album on Rough Trade - The Clock Comes Down The Stairs (a euphemism for death) and the two albums that followed on Virgin are some of my most listened to albums. Really gorgeous stuff for my teenage ears. I’m still listening all these years later.
Legendary DJ John Peel, famous for the iconic Peel sessions once brilliantly described Microdisney as ‘A barbed wire rainbow’ and said that he could listen to Cathal Coughlan ‘sing the phone book’. I had to agree and I proceeded to buy anything with the bands name on the front cover. Every 7” and 12” single and B side and every album was bought and studied and worn out by the record players stylus. I even loved the band name which was an Oxymoron and as paradoxical as the songs themselves which were a mesmerizing blend of serenity and turmoil. Sean O Hagan’s peaceful, melodic instrumentation lulled the senses while the emotional incongruity of Cathals lyrics created the captivating tension.
Microdisney eventually fell apart in 1988 during one final disastrous show at the Dominion theatre in London. The concert was filmed and there is some footage of it on YouTube which shows a band in an absolute unmitigated, free fall meltdown. Cathal regretted the way the band had ended and would later say that “I acted like a complete dick” and “we had a bunker mentality”. The chance would come for the band to make amends and celebrate their legacy with dignity in 2018 when they were asked to reform and play a handful of shows in Dublin, London and their hometown of Cork, but that’s another story.
Cathal moved on and formed the blisteringly powerful, and even more confrontational Fatima Mansions. I saw them live in ‘91 and it was quite intense. Like Punk circa 1977 on steroids. This music was not for the faint hearted and could be truly angry with songs such as Viva Dead Ponies, Only Losers Take The Bus and Blues For Ceausescu. Yet there were always moments of great beauty with songs such as Pack Of Lies, The Day I lost Everything, Bishop Of Babel and the gorgeous Wilderness On Time. Back then as I listened as a young kid I knew this was the work of a lyrical genius and perhaps even a troubled soul. His lyrics made me think deeply, I tried to figure them out as I listened. They haunted me. Microdisney’s 1985 single Birthday Girl still haunts me to this day.
After all these years of loving the songs and voice of Cathal Coughlan I decided that I should get in touch with him during the Covid pandemic in October 2020 and see if we could write together. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the greatest artists and singers in the world, from the sublime Sia and people like Marc Almond who is another brilliant lyricist, but I had never worked with Cathal.
We exchanged emails, arranged a chat on Zoom and found we had much in common musically. We both loved Prefab Sprout, Scritti Politti, Robert Wyatt, Talk Talk etc. After our chat I said I would send him some music which I did. Cathal loved it and got to working on it straight away. What he sent back was gorgeous, haunting and as thought provoking as ever. He made my piano chords even more strange, sad, melancholy, romantic and mournful. I told him how much I loved it and he was pleased.
We arranged another catch up on Zoom and had a wonderful, hour long conversation about the music we loved and where we could go next with the songwriting. He told me that he had greatly enjoyed our conversation and I felt the same. It was inspiring. We both loved Talk Talk, especially their album Spirit Of Eden, so I said I would do something with the kind of vibe of Talk Talk’s sublime 1991 single I believe In You. A song both Cathal and I thought was fantastic.
I wrote the new piece of music, sent it to him and he loved it. He said he already had ideas for it and as soon as he was back from a holiday in Wales he would get the lyric finished and put a vocal down and send me the files. He did that and I was once again thrilled and inspired with what I was hearing. I told him that I thought his voice had never sounded better on these two songs we’d written and that I loved the film noir atmosphere of the new lyrics
We had planned to write a third song in the new year of 2022 so that we could make what we were doing ‘a thing’. An ep would make it more than a single, but less daunting than an album, for now anyway. I loved his words and I loved his latest solo album entitled Song Of Co Aklan. He was on form and back to his melodic and lyrical best. I couldn’t wait to write the next song together.
He emailed me in January 2022 and asked if I was still amenable to the idea of working on a third song. I started getting piano chords and ideas together ready to send to him, but in early February he emailed one final time to say that it would have to wait. He apologized for the delay which blows me away when I now think about what he was dealing with at that time.
Life is precious and the connections we make with one another even more so. Cathal passed away on May the 18th 2022 after a long illness and left a void in my musical heart. He was such a great thinker. He made me think everytime I heard one of his songs. It’s hard to lose great thinkers when they seem so few and far between.
We never got the chance to finish the third song, but the two songs we did write and record together I still cherish. I wish I could call him up and tell him how great I think they are.
Thank you Cathal, for the lyrical inspiration.