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Artists > A - C > Coughlan, Cathal

 
:: Black River Falls  Ref: COOKCD126
 
 
 
Black River Falls

Price:   £7.99

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Poetic and pure, a challenge to our intelligence rather than an insult - NME 7/10

Born at an embarassing distance from the golden present era, in Cork, pretension capital of the Irish Republic, Cathal Coughlan took his first tuneless steps towards involvement in popular music in 1980.

A meeting with a UK-raised musician, Sean O'Hagan, while drunk and obnoxious at a party, led the formation of Microdisney, which made five albums, The Clock Comes Down The Stairs (Rough Trade 1995) was to prove to be their only well-remembered release. After later mediocre work released by Virgin failed to generate mainstream-acceptable levels of sales, they split up in 1988.

In early 1989 he began performing his new songs with the Fatima Mansions, whose evolving lineup consisted entirely of new musicians. The release in 1990 on Kitchenware Records of the Viva Dead Ponies album began a habit of incessant live work which was to characterise the group's rise. In all, they were to release four albums, and several EP's, several of them in conjunction with Radioactive Records, a division of fabulous Universal Music.

The nature of this music was a great deal more diverse than that of Microdisney, with melody being used as and when it was necessary, as opposed to being the reason for the music's existence. The lyrical content became more explicitly violent, and its delivery more emphatic and humorous by turns. There were, nonetheless, melodic moments, which were a drastic improvement on Coughlan's scant musical contributions to the earlier group, but which tended to be ignored by virtue of the storm of noise which raged elsewhere in the repertoire, most notably on the six-minute single Blues For Ceausescu.

The Fatima Mansions' brushes with the mainstream music world were prominent and amusing, including as they did a porno-trip-hop version of a Bryan Adams song which ended up on the B-side of a Manic Street Preachers/Sony Music top 10 hit, and various compromise-ridden live engagements which ended in confrontation. These were, however, mere brushes, though the group was heard and liked by more people than Coughlan's first group.

So commercial retribution raised its head. Radioactive’s anger at losing money resulted in the imposition of an inappropriate outside producer for the group’s final album Lost In The Former West (the group's least popular release), a near-lethal two-month US tour in 1994, and, finally, a refusal to allow Coughlan into a studio or out of his contract until he had written a certifiable hit.

The latter measure was to result in the regretful though amicable dissolution of the group, and a contractually-sealed silence from Coughlan which was broken thereafter only by the 1996 not-for-profit album Grand Necropolitan. After the anti-climax of the latter release, Coughlan began dividing his time between East London, West Cork, and California, working on musical, film and Internet projects.

In mid-1999, shorn at last of his contractual woes, he began recording, in London, an album for the independent UK label Cooking Vinyl. The album features 12 powerful new Coughlan compositions, and musical contributions from friends new and old, some of them recorded in Dublin, Paris and San Francisco.
 


 


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