Cathal Coughlan has a new album out on his own label and, as he tells Tony Clayton-Lea, it is a major relief being his own boss
MHe stands alone in the pantheon of disgruntled Irish shruggers - a saturnine but proud mixture of Samuel Beckett, Nick Cave and Scott Walker. Yet Cathal Coughlan - formerly of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, two of the best, most disaffected Irish rock bands of the past 20 years - takes his status with a piller of salt. London-based for over half of his life (he's in his early 40s), he has the sound of the world-weary in his voice, a notion of regret blending with a small shining light of optimism, the one almost cancelling out the other.
With a new album, The Sky's Awful Blue (you are meant to note the double meaning), on his own label, Coughlan has stepped back from whatever brink he could have tipped over some years ago. Then, business and personal matters couldn't have been any worse - relationship and record company problems conspired to dice'n'slice his world outlook. We decide to let the sleeping black dogs of his personal life alone, but wonder if he's surprised that he is now able to release records as and when he wishes.
"It struck me that if you can't derive material benefit from making music on a low level," he says, "then you might as well own the work, so yes, it is a major relief being my own boss. Nothing could ever be as debilitating or discouraging as the experience of not being able to work at all."
A reliance on structure lies at the core of what Coughlan does. He sees this "almost traditional" work ethic - his avoidance of abstraction, his preference for narrative - as being the major difference between him and many other artists. "I have lyrics and a narrative that are either highly structured or chronological. Most people avoid that nowadays - it's been out of favour since 1975! But it's part of what I am, the tradition I come from insofar as I come from any tradition at all. It's the culture that I come from and the older I get the more I lean on it. I'm quite conscious of it, and people comment on it, but I'm not self-conscious about it - it's something I'm quite happy to do. I'm a singer, and to me being a singer is engaging people with your view of the world through the medium of your voice. There are numerous ways to do that, and what I do is the way I think I do best."
An Irishman abroad who has had an uneasy relationship with his native Cork for decades, Coughlan finds it virtually impossible to set aside his naturally developed prejudices. He visits his home just outside Cork about two/three times a year - "not for as long as I would like or as would be significant" - yet finds his nagging thoughts about it somewhat embarrassing, despite the fact that "there is still part of me that never really left". So many of the landscapes that run through his mind while it's concentrating on something different are places in Cork, he says. He doesn't think he'll ever go back for all sorts of reasons - certainly, he stresses, not out of spite for the place, but simply because life moves on in other parts of the world. Does he ponder on it more often than he should? Quite a lot, he admits. In his usual doleful, ironic manner, he remarks it may be down to the fact that he has never been connected to a community since he left Cork in the early 1980s.
"I felt an outsider when I was there, but I've felt much more of an outsider since. When I started secondary school, I started seeing Cork as a metropolis, coming from a village of about 70 people. The place I grew up in wasn't very hospitable for a number of reasons that I won't go into, yet all the significant adolescent and young adult things happened to me in Cork. On the whole, it's not one of the world's most beautiful cities by any stretch of the imagination, but there are specific locations there that are burned in my mind and that I have to visit whenever I go back."
Coughlan's new album is a slow burner, fusing moral turpitude with a righteous, reasoned sense of rage at the corruption foisted upon us by a highly politicised new world order. Even the CD title has, says Coughlan, "a duality of intent". On the one hand, he offers, we have a situation where people in the industrialised world have been suckered into believing they're living in some kind of smug utopia that other people envy. "At the same time," he continues, "we have the awfulness of the sky on September 11th, where planes came out of the sunshine - the idea that what we're told to expect is the natural order of things actually turning cancerous and coming back to bite us."
When he isn't busy rattling the cages of normalcy, Coughlan is creating music; in the past 12 months he has recorded The Sky's Awful Blue, written the soundtrack for Johnny Gogan's recently released film, The Mapmaker, and made his theatrical debut by way of a singing role in French composer François Ribac's contemporary opera Qui Est Fou? "It was a step in the unknown," he says of the latter. "I was asked to go to France for two months on spec, and it turned out to be such a rewarding thing - for the first time in ages I was able to perform without having to worry about the actual management of the show; unbelievably relaxing, even though I had a lot of work to do and had to sing partly in French."
It was also an important step for Coughlan in that it gave him an opportunity to focus on his voice - which has developed into a beautifully sonorous instrument over the years - and turned his head away from the usual music industry procedure of the album/tour/album syndrome.
"The way the music business is now is that it's not extending the luxury to many of us of even doing that anymore. There has to be something better than just being regarded as a crap version of Ronan Keating - the idea that everybody who's making music must be judged solely on his or her commercial success, which has become very prevalent." This is not because people have become more hostile or nasty, reckons Coughlan, but because so much of life is now cosily commodified.
Everyone, he claims, now has to look to his or her survival. "It seems that everything is now run by the stock market in the way it wasn't even 10 years ago. The lowest common denominator has become absolutely everything. And anything that takes me out of what, for want of a better phrase, we call the pop business - theatre, movie soundtracks - is great. It gets me to collaborate with people from different disciplines. I keep learning, and that's crucial."
A MEASURE of nostalgia is called for amidst Coughlan's current activities of record label owner, soundtrack composer and contemporary opera singer: when he looks back at the Microdisney years, what does he think - pride or regret? "It's a mixture of everything," he relates. "I'm glad we got as far as we did and that we made at least one album that meant a lot to the people from the same background as us. But I wished I'd worked a lot harder. Looking back, compared to the way I'm living now, it seems there was an awful lot of time spent messing about; not confronting what had to be done and being too much a prisoner of the environment, especially in London, where there was that complete insistence of the album/tour/album nonsense. In hindsight, nothing ever really gelled sufficiently to make it seem as if it was worth our while being governed by that work ethic. It was not as productive as it could have been by a long, long way."
Beneath Music - Coughlan's recently founded record label - is "going okay", yet he is under no illusions that he's sitting on a fortune. In a genuine, warm touch of symmetry he appreciates perhaps more than he lets on, the same person who released early 1980s Microdisney singles (on the Kabuki label) distributes his new album in the UK. Despite the nice touch of serendipity, however, he knows he's hardly going to compete with the Will Youngs of this world.
"Everything is chain store-focused and that makes things very difficult," concedes Coughlan."Quite simply, I am not at the top of the pecking order."
The Sky's Awful Blue is on Beneath Music