A
Almodis
Guest
"As part of the ‘Cork 2005 – City of Culture’, Cathal Coughlan has been commissioned to produce a song cycle and performance entitled ‘Flannery's Mounted Head.’ ...With asides pillaged randomly from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished ‘Arcades’ project, and savagely satirical, ‘Flannery's Mounted Head’ is a fearless exploration of the terror built from banal dreams, such as those that litter the margins of Irish consumerism."
From http://www.eastbelfastobserver.com/observer/more.php?id=P864_0_9_0_C
What do you need in order to be one of the greatest musicians in the history of the popular culture? It helps to have a great voice. John Peel once said of the Corkonian legend Cathal Coughlan that he could listen to him “sing the phone book” and indeed Coughlan’s natural baritone is a wonder to behold, but proficiency or even virtuosity is not enough to make any musician a genius. Combined however with mordant wit, perhaps it is.
One of the most astonishing effects of hearing Coughlan’s records is how quickly it renders so much other popular music frankly unlistenable. The aural and intellectual feast on offer shows most of the rest of today’s music up as the pale chimera it really is.
His trenchant critique has blasted its way across two decades of musical history, and that’s not just the opinion of a snobbish indie proselytiser or amateur musicologist. That barometer of all that is cool in the United States, Rolling Stone magazine, had the following to offer on ‘The Sky’s Awful Blue’, Coughlan’s most recent solo effort; “Fit to burst with righteous rage he unleashes what is possibly the finest vocal performance of his career. Considering he's among the truly great singers of our generation, that's saying something.”
Or as the man himself announced, “I'm like Wittgenstein after a brain transplant from an orangutan". Quite so. Or at least he was in the 1980s as the frontman of Microdisney. Today he’s more like an appearance of Wittgenstein on MTV Unplugged, but such wasted verbiage is just derelict journalism run rampant whereas Coughlan is a true original.
“I think it's truer now than ever before that unless an artist is definable in terms of 'like X crossed with Y, but on drug Z', he or she is screwed. Even if you want to sell 5,000 records and not 5 million, it's exactly the same thing. It didn't use to be like that – it was just about permitted to mess with people's expectations, as long as you weren't expecting to get rich with that attitude.”
Much has been made in recent editions of theWeek about whether or not aspiring musicians must leave for London if they want to make it. The verdict is still an open one, if leaning towards leaving, but what about back in the 1980s when Coughlan left – was it a decision based on pure economic need or did he want to leave for artistic reasons?
“Things appeared to be changing for the worse. The economy was in catastrophic decline, and the response of the entire adult population appeared to be one of retreat into mumbo-jumbo – statues of the Virgin Mary began to shake and weep throughout the country; there was a completely unnecessary 'never-never-ever' referendum on abortion, which was in any case illegal already.
“The dominance of the whole cultural consciousness of the country by the time-capsule West Brits of Dublin appeared unshakeable – my experience of the place was that it was where most of the handful of people who appreciated what we were doing could be found, but where the business treated us most like unwashed barbarians.
“Britain was where it was easy to stick out an indie record and get it to a few thousand people and fortunately we'd connected with the few people who could help us, the main one being a Dubliner – contradictions within contradictions. So London it was.”
Microdisney were a Trojan horse in the pop world, offering angry attacks on establishmentarianism disguised atop foot-tapping pop-ism. But it was not to be. If Coughlan was Wittgenstein, then perhaps the part of pop-orangutan was played by his more radio-friendly band-mate Sean O’Hagan (now of High Llamas). In the words of the errant Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, “Microdisney are an MOR-band who make sardonic humorous records about torture, corruption and human misery.”
Many Irish musicians look toward the UK as the land of milk and honey – clearly it isn't, but historical circumstance and sheer demographics should make it a better place to operate from than Ireland. Is this still the case?
“If you're of the age I was when I emigrated probably not – if you're marketable. Microdisney wasn't then, and would be far, far less so today.
“There are successful groups and individuals who live in Dublin, for example, but I sometimes wonder if they could survive in the expensive working environment which Dublin's become, or the ethics-free marketplace it's always been, without substantial multi-national backing. And if you can't get by without that, your work had better be commercial.”
Uncommerical or otherwise, Coughlan’s next vehicle would not be so coy in delivering its cynicism. Prefiguring the real end of the 1980s – even of the twentieth century – with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact countries in 1989, Coughlan abandoned the pop musings of Microdisney for an altogether more visceral – and ambitious – musical experience, the Fatima Mansions
Despite Coughlan’s self-destructive honesty, the Fatima Mansions achieved remarkable success – all the more remarkable given that in true Maoist fashion, the arbiters of public taste have written the band out of rock and roll history. Ironically the ‘difficult’ Mansions achieved far greater recognition than the MOR Microdisney ever managed.
Not only did the band achieve a number-one single by way of a double A-side split with the Manic Street Preachers, but they got rave reviews, lauded in the press on both sides of the Atlantic by publications including Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the NME, the Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday, the Irish Times and the Irish Echo.
Time Magazine even commented that the group captured “rock's old outlaw image by overthrowing the sugarcoated commercialism prevalent on the pop charts today” – and that was back when Britney Timberlake, or whatever s/he’s called, was knee-high to a six-foot tall rat. By the time 1992 rolled around Coughlan had insinuated his way onto the support slot for U2 on their Zoo TV tour. In Milan he outdid himself with the stage announcement: “I'd like to thank the Vatican for destroying my home country", before defiling a virgin-Mary shaped artefact. Perhaps unsurprisingly a riot ensued.
Not the first time, nor the last, that Coughlan would attack organised religion in general or the Catholic church in particular – clearly being born in Ireland is where the similarities with Bono end. While the U2 frontman was trading ocular sartorial tips with the pontiff, Coughlan was interfacing with catechism in an altogether different way. The song, ‘Popemobile to Paraguay’, with its references to angels with both wings on the right, is, in the man’s own words, a little ditty about “collaboration between the Croatian Nazi Party and the Vatican after the second World War which allowed Nazi leaders safe passage to South America” whilst ‘Play That Funky Music, Irish Guy’ was a collaboration with comedian Sean Hughes about an imagined night of passion with disgraced bishop Eamonn Casey. Back in the day it was all lapped up by the press, notably in the Irish Times.
Are other Irish acts, notably U2, an albatross around the necks of less well-known musicians? Is 'Irishness' itself something to be avoided in favour of a more universal standpoint?
“It's not something I really consider. Being an Irish artist is no longer the stigma it was in the UK – or even especially worthy of remark. As long as I don't have to contend with the crap there used to be, right up to the early 90's, I just get on with what I've got. My Irish cultural and social background is very important to my work, but awareness of who's up and who's down in the world's perception of Ireland is nothing to me.
Although – the tendency of UK musicians to look upon the world as consisting entirely of the UK ('the workshop') and the US ('the market'), plus 'foreign', is appalling, and I don't share it at all. For example, many of my most rewarding creative partnerships in recent years have been with French and German people.”
Coughlan, now in his early-forties, has successfully carved out a space on the fringes of popular music which allows him to continue recording and performing his auscultatory musings. Few can match his stature, and though he’s had his moments in the limelight, so far as the record-buying pubic are concerned, he remains something of an unknown quantity. Would it have been easier if his music was dumber?
“I don't see it in those terms – my regrets include the fact that I didn't work harder when there was quite a lot to play for; that I allowed myself to become tied to one view of the situations I was in, and to allow that view to pin me down. Dumber? When I hear some of my old stuff, I don't think that would be possible...
“It's certainly confusing, that work – lots of mixed messages, sometimes no decipherable message at all. But that's what I was like as a person then, and that's what I thought I should put across. No use in regretting that, but I think it didn't help in getting things accepted by a wider audience.”
Is the music industry getting worse as the quality of the output would suggest?
“I really don't know. The insistence on revivals as the mainstay of what we once called 'rock' music is revolting, for sure, as is the inexplicable persistence of 'dance music' according to a blueprint designed in 1989.
“It's hard to imagine an easy way forward when the field is dominated by a group of multinationals which, for a long time, has been at least as committed to selling back catalogue – which often requires no payment at all to be made to the musicians – as to developing new.
“I think we need a new way of looking at non-academic music, which does not relate much to Elvis, the Beatles, or even the Sex Pistols. What's 50 years of mindless commodification compared to the preceding 100,000 years of human culture?”
Since 1996 Coughlan has been recoding solo material. In light of that last remark I don’t feel much like comparing his work to anyone else’s. ‘Black River Falls’ and ‘The Sky’s Awful Blue’ are available in shops now.
As part of the ‘Cork 2005 – City of Culture’, Cathal Coughlan has been commissioned to produce a song cycle and performance entitled ‘Flannery's Mounted Head.’ Taking inspiration from the history of the institutions of Coughlan’s native Cork, it tells the story of Flannery, a credit controller who finds the answer to his need for transcendence in the inhalation of petroleum fumes, in the person of a mysterious young woman and in his long journey to express his 'messianic' side. With asides pillaged randomly from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished ‘Arcades’ project, and savagely satirical, ‘Flannery's Mounted Head’ is a fearless exploration of the terror built from banal dreams, such as those that litter the margins of Irish consumerism.
http://www.eastbelfastobserver.com/observer/more.php?id=P864_0_9_0_C
From http://www.eastbelfastobserver.com/observer/more.php?id=P864_0_9_0_C
What do you need in order to be one of the greatest musicians in the history of the popular culture? It helps to have a great voice. John Peel once said of the Corkonian legend Cathal Coughlan that he could listen to him “sing the phone book” and indeed Coughlan’s natural baritone is a wonder to behold, but proficiency or even virtuosity is not enough to make any musician a genius. Combined however with mordant wit, perhaps it is.
One of the most astonishing effects of hearing Coughlan’s records is how quickly it renders so much other popular music frankly unlistenable. The aural and intellectual feast on offer shows most of the rest of today’s music up as the pale chimera it really is.
His trenchant critique has blasted its way across two decades of musical history, and that’s not just the opinion of a snobbish indie proselytiser or amateur musicologist. That barometer of all that is cool in the United States, Rolling Stone magazine, had the following to offer on ‘The Sky’s Awful Blue’, Coughlan’s most recent solo effort; “Fit to burst with righteous rage he unleashes what is possibly the finest vocal performance of his career. Considering he's among the truly great singers of our generation, that's saying something.”
Or as the man himself announced, “I'm like Wittgenstein after a brain transplant from an orangutan". Quite so. Or at least he was in the 1980s as the frontman of Microdisney. Today he’s more like an appearance of Wittgenstein on MTV Unplugged, but such wasted verbiage is just derelict journalism run rampant whereas Coughlan is a true original.
“I think it's truer now than ever before that unless an artist is definable in terms of 'like X crossed with Y, but on drug Z', he or she is screwed. Even if you want to sell 5,000 records and not 5 million, it's exactly the same thing. It didn't use to be like that – it was just about permitted to mess with people's expectations, as long as you weren't expecting to get rich with that attitude.”
Much has been made in recent editions of theWeek about whether or not aspiring musicians must leave for London if they want to make it. The verdict is still an open one, if leaning towards leaving, but what about back in the 1980s when Coughlan left – was it a decision based on pure economic need or did he want to leave for artistic reasons?
“Things appeared to be changing for the worse. The economy was in catastrophic decline, and the response of the entire adult population appeared to be one of retreat into mumbo-jumbo – statues of the Virgin Mary began to shake and weep throughout the country; there was a completely unnecessary 'never-never-ever' referendum on abortion, which was in any case illegal already.
“The dominance of the whole cultural consciousness of the country by the time-capsule West Brits of Dublin appeared unshakeable – my experience of the place was that it was where most of the handful of people who appreciated what we were doing could be found, but where the business treated us most like unwashed barbarians.
“Britain was where it was easy to stick out an indie record and get it to a few thousand people and fortunately we'd connected with the few people who could help us, the main one being a Dubliner – contradictions within contradictions. So London it was.”
Microdisney were a Trojan horse in the pop world, offering angry attacks on establishmentarianism disguised atop foot-tapping pop-ism. But it was not to be. If Coughlan was Wittgenstein, then perhaps the part of pop-orangutan was played by his more radio-friendly band-mate Sean O’Hagan (now of High Llamas). In the words of the errant Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, “Microdisney are an MOR-band who make sardonic humorous records about torture, corruption and human misery.”
Many Irish musicians look toward the UK as the land of milk and honey – clearly it isn't, but historical circumstance and sheer demographics should make it a better place to operate from than Ireland. Is this still the case?
“If you're of the age I was when I emigrated probably not – if you're marketable. Microdisney wasn't then, and would be far, far less so today.
“There are successful groups and individuals who live in Dublin, for example, but I sometimes wonder if they could survive in the expensive working environment which Dublin's become, or the ethics-free marketplace it's always been, without substantial multi-national backing. And if you can't get by without that, your work had better be commercial.”
Uncommerical or otherwise, Coughlan’s next vehicle would not be so coy in delivering its cynicism. Prefiguring the real end of the 1980s – even of the twentieth century – with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact countries in 1989, Coughlan abandoned the pop musings of Microdisney for an altogether more visceral – and ambitious – musical experience, the Fatima Mansions
Despite Coughlan’s self-destructive honesty, the Fatima Mansions achieved remarkable success – all the more remarkable given that in true Maoist fashion, the arbiters of public taste have written the band out of rock and roll history. Ironically the ‘difficult’ Mansions achieved far greater recognition than the MOR Microdisney ever managed.
Not only did the band achieve a number-one single by way of a double A-side split with the Manic Street Preachers, but they got rave reviews, lauded in the press on both sides of the Atlantic by publications including Rolling Stone, the New York Times, the NME, the Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday, the Irish Times and the Irish Echo.
Time Magazine even commented that the group captured “rock's old outlaw image by overthrowing the sugarcoated commercialism prevalent on the pop charts today” – and that was back when Britney Timberlake, or whatever s/he’s called, was knee-high to a six-foot tall rat. By the time 1992 rolled around Coughlan had insinuated his way onto the support slot for U2 on their Zoo TV tour. In Milan he outdid himself with the stage announcement: “I'd like to thank the Vatican for destroying my home country", before defiling a virgin-Mary shaped artefact. Perhaps unsurprisingly a riot ensued.
Not the first time, nor the last, that Coughlan would attack organised religion in general or the Catholic church in particular – clearly being born in Ireland is where the similarities with Bono end. While the U2 frontman was trading ocular sartorial tips with the pontiff, Coughlan was interfacing with catechism in an altogether different way. The song, ‘Popemobile to Paraguay’, with its references to angels with both wings on the right, is, in the man’s own words, a little ditty about “collaboration between the Croatian Nazi Party and the Vatican after the second World War which allowed Nazi leaders safe passage to South America” whilst ‘Play That Funky Music, Irish Guy’ was a collaboration with comedian Sean Hughes about an imagined night of passion with disgraced bishop Eamonn Casey. Back in the day it was all lapped up by the press, notably in the Irish Times.
Are other Irish acts, notably U2, an albatross around the necks of less well-known musicians? Is 'Irishness' itself something to be avoided in favour of a more universal standpoint?
“It's not something I really consider. Being an Irish artist is no longer the stigma it was in the UK – or even especially worthy of remark. As long as I don't have to contend with the crap there used to be, right up to the early 90's, I just get on with what I've got. My Irish cultural and social background is very important to my work, but awareness of who's up and who's down in the world's perception of Ireland is nothing to me.
Although – the tendency of UK musicians to look upon the world as consisting entirely of the UK ('the workshop') and the US ('the market'), plus 'foreign', is appalling, and I don't share it at all. For example, many of my most rewarding creative partnerships in recent years have been with French and German people.”
Coughlan, now in his early-forties, has successfully carved out a space on the fringes of popular music which allows him to continue recording and performing his auscultatory musings. Few can match his stature, and though he’s had his moments in the limelight, so far as the record-buying pubic are concerned, he remains something of an unknown quantity. Would it have been easier if his music was dumber?
“I don't see it in those terms – my regrets include the fact that I didn't work harder when there was quite a lot to play for; that I allowed myself to become tied to one view of the situations I was in, and to allow that view to pin me down. Dumber? When I hear some of my old stuff, I don't think that would be possible...
“It's certainly confusing, that work – lots of mixed messages, sometimes no decipherable message at all. But that's what I was like as a person then, and that's what I thought I should put across. No use in regretting that, but I think it didn't help in getting things accepted by a wider audience.”
Is the music industry getting worse as the quality of the output would suggest?
“I really don't know. The insistence on revivals as the mainstay of what we once called 'rock' music is revolting, for sure, as is the inexplicable persistence of 'dance music' according to a blueprint designed in 1989.
“It's hard to imagine an easy way forward when the field is dominated by a group of multinationals which, for a long time, has been at least as committed to selling back catalogue – which often requires no payment at all to be made to the musicians – as to developing new.
“I think we need a new way of looking at non-academic music, which does not relate much to Elvis, the Beatles, or even the Sex Pistols. What's 50 years of mindless commodification compared to the preceding 100,000 years of human culture?”
Since 1996 Coughlan has been recoding solo material. In light of that last remark I don’t feel much like comparing his work to anyone else’s. ‘Black River Falls’ and ‘The Sky’s Awful Blue’ are available in shops now.
As part of the ‘Cork 2005 – City of Culture’, Cathal Coughlan has been commissioned to produce a song cycle and performance entitled ‘Flannery's Mounted Head.’ Taking inspiration from the history of the institutions of Coughlan’s native Cork, it tells the story of Flannery, a credit controller who finds the answer to his need for transcendence in the inhalation of petroleum fumes, in the person of a mysterious young woman and in his long journey to express his 'messianic' side. With asides pillaged randomly from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished ‘Arcades’ project, and savagely satirical, ‘Flannery's Mounted Head’ is a fearless exploration of the terror built from banal dreams, such as those that litter the margins of Irish consumerism.
http://www.eastbelfastobserver.com/observer/more.php?id=P864_0_9_0_C
