When Microdisney burst on to the post-punk Cork scene, their gigs entered mythology - but then things went horribly wrong, former band member Seán O'Hagan tells Tony Clayton-Lea
Many are called but few are chosen. So it was with Cork's Microdisney. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Microdisney belonged to that select bunch of Cork post-punk bands which showed - by example as much as by execution - how to grasp the nettles of distinction and merit. Like most other Cork-based bands of that era (typically Nun Attax and, by association, Five Go Down to the Sea), Microdisney were nutters on the lam. In lead singer and lyricist Cathal Coughlan they had a frontman of exceptional energy and anger, a fiercely intelligent and embittered member of the Cork music mafia.
Yet Microdisney also had Seán O'Hagan, who, perhaps rather more obviously, was the Molton Brown hand soap to Coughlan's Swarfega. While Coughlan dished out the bile in crude if strategically directed dollops, O'Hagan was content to drift silently in the background decorating the singer's words with swirls of interesting melodies.
As is the case with so many Irish bands of that period, Microdisney have been all but forgotten. Their gigs at Cork's Arcadia venue have gone down in local history, while Coughlan's onstage outbursts - part pit-bull terrier and part spittle-flecked terror - have attained virtually mythical status. A move to London in the mid-1980s, following the band signing to Virgin Records, proved disastrous, leaving the band members floundering, in personal disarray and - in particular Coughlan and O'Hagan - eager never to speak to each other again.
The core members have long since made up, and as the years have passed Coughlan and O'Hagan have developed (and have had widely recognised) their individual skills in, respectively, Fatima Mansions and The High Llamas, as well as equally acclaimed solo work. Yet still Microdisney crop up in the lists of the long-ago-and-far-away items we loved and irretrievably lost. Another attempt to cast the band as a must-have accessory for not only the remains of the post-punk generation but the new breed of Joy Division/Interpol fan has recently been launched - Daunt Square to Elsewhere: Anthology 1982-88, a two-CD retrospective cataloguing the band's high points from Patrick Street to Ladbroke Grove.
"I'm able to look back at the songwriting in a fairly isolated way," says O'Hagan. "I can view the way Cathal and I wrote and claim that the songs certainly have a sense of space and uniqueness, which is what we were trying to achieve at the time." O'Hagan is aware of the confidence-equals-arrogance equation that occurs when artists talk overly positively about their work. Yet the distance of some 25 years fails to quell his sense of pride. "When I listen to some of the early tunes, for instance, I think that occasionally there are odd moments in there, and that they're constructed in a really odd way. But something odd is something good, I think." The oddness, he implies, may have come from Cork; or it may have been the deliberately eclectic direction the band decided to take, the individualistic strands and twists that would remove Microdisney away from the norm.
"What we tried to do was to introduce a sense of harmony and melody but also a sense of the strange within that. And the latter in particular was in Cathal's lyrics. We were sold on the idea that we didn't want to work with riffs. On one hand we were listening to Scott Walker, and on the other we were listening to Willie Nelson. We didn't want to kowtow to either - we wanted to pull the two together and to add a sort of post-apocalyptic bizarre."
THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, Microdisney have been justifiably regarded as one of the best Irish bands that got away, while at least two of their albums (1985's The Clock Comes Down the Stairs and 1987's Crooked Mile) regularly crop up in the "Best Irish Albums of all Time" lists. Does O'Hagan think they were as good as people say? "I've no idea. Certainly at the end when Cathal went off and pursued stuff with Fatima Mansions, and I went off and didn't do much at all - eventually managing to find a voice with the High Llamas - it was no secret that we were pursuing our respective strengths. Immediately after the band it was possibly a relief for both of us to find our own individual voices. It is then that you think you're doing your great work, making records you're really happy with.
"I certainly look back at the naivete of the likes of the early albums and yes, some of the tunes are twee but they were twee in almost a ghostly way. I don't know how or why we did it, but we did. We were almost crossing Brian Eno with John Barry, which was great because we knew that music had got a little bit dumb and we wanted to drag it into our own space.
"We had a real thirst to pursue melody. Over in England it was Southern Death Cult, yet there we were with strange little waltzing organs, finger-picked guitars and imagery from west Cork. It must have been pretty strange for people to have latched on to that. And then, of course, when we moved from Cork to London, the imagery mutated into the imagery of wasted London. We were skint, living in Ladbroke Grove, trying to reconcile the big gap between what we wanted and what we had at the time."
The gap, it was soon discovered, was just too wide to bridge. Microdisney eventually split up for reasons too ostensibly banal to detail - the usual casual victims of insidious internal bickering and pernicious music industry expectations.
"There was an unsaid thing that we kept dear to us," reveals O'Hagan, "and that was, whatever else anyone did, we were not going to play the game in the traditional way. If we were going to do television, for instance, we would try to undermine the appearance in some way. It was almost political in that we weren't going to lie down and just put on the suits - which we did once, but in an ironic way." And then there were the T-shirts, except when the T-shirts display the words "Microdisney Are Shit" you can safely bet that the record company will not take too kindly to having a normally fail-safe marketing tool shafted from the get-go. O'Hagan now suggests that perhaps the band took the anti-industry stance a step too far.
'WHEN YOU HAVE that attitude, it's almost like you have a slow disease that destroys you. You get to a stage where you ask yourselves, are we going to carry on like this or are we going to settle down a bit. In the end, there was no meeting of the two ideas. You couldn't try to be sort of weirdly iconoclastic while actually taking the money. I really do believe that Cathal and I did our best work in the first five years, and it was probably unsaid that if we wanted to pursue our goals artistically then perhaps we'd have to pursue them individually. So, yes, there was anger and frustration, but the intrinsic reason Microdisney existed seemed to disappear by the end of the 1980s."
The release of the retrospective might see a spike in profile for the band, if not the two members most closely associated with it. If luck prevails, there might even be a flurry of interest from fortysomething advertising executives in trying to make sure that O'Hagan and Coughlan receive a burst of royalties from the use of one of their more radio-friendly tunes on a television ad. Luck and Microdisney, however, were rarely on speaking terms, so there's no optimism on anyone's part that this will change.
"When myself and Cathal were in our late teens," recalls O'Hagan, "we were trying - without perhaps realising it - to make pop music with an avant-garde edge. We knew that pop music could be important, could be unusual - as unusual as Good Vibrations and any number of other fantastic songs. We wanted to know whether pop music could make people think.
"Is there a legacy? Well, I'm certain that the music has filtered down through the years, which is great because it means that it still speaks to people. The fact that you can create avant-garde pop music is great - and there's a good bit of it around if you listen hard enough. You just have to look around, find your own space, step into that space and make it your own."
Daunt Square to Elsewhere: Anthology 1982-88 is on release through Castle Music
