On the night of the July 7 bombings last year, Cathal Coughlan caught a bus from Kilburn in north London to the east of the city, where he lives. That morning, one of the Underground bombs had been detonated near his local station. As he travelled home, he was still unsettled.
“A guy on the bus got into a row with an African woman, a fundamentalist Christian,” says Coughlan. “She was telling him that belief in Allah was wrong. He became incensed, saying that it was okay to bomb anything in the West because of what’s happening in Palestine and Kashmir. That argument ended when she got off the bus.
“Then he started haranguing people, shouting, ‘I’m Al-Qaeda, I’m Al-Qaeda’. And nobody said a word. This on the night of the bombings. They didn’t even make eye contact, much less ring the police. And that’s London. You can piss on us and nobody lifts a finger. That’s not tolerance, it’s stupidity. Want to commit genocide? Come to London.”
Although he has lived in London since the early 1980s, when he and Sean O’Hagan moved there from Cork in an effort to advance their band, Microdisney, Coughlan’s attitude towards London has been wary at best. The Fatima Mansions, the band he formed after Microdisney, brimmed with the uniquely savage indignation of the alienated exile; but Coughlan’s relationship with the city entered another phase with the advent of Islamic terrorism.
“The last few years here have influenced me immeasurably," he says. “The seventh of July was a real kick in the head. It wasn’t so much the bombing as the denial afterwards. London cons itself that it is multicultural. It’s not. It’s multiethnic, multi-faith, but not multicultural. London is the place where the melting pot came to die.”
Coughlan had been in Kilburn working on Flannery’s Mounted Head, which he performed in Cork last year as part of European Capital of Culture celebrations, and which he is bringing to Dublin later this month. In the Flannery song-cycle — which he has now released in album form as Foburg — a man wanders around a shopping mall transformed from a disused mental asylum into one of the highly policed retail spaces with which Coughlan is fascinated.
Although it has points of contact with Coughlan’s history — he based the mall, for example, on Cork’s long-abandoned Eglinton asylum — the more significant resemblance is with an alienated man wandering around a bewildering space in a state of perpetual bafflement and spiritual isolation.
“I use alienation a great deal in the work that I do,” he says, sitting in a cafe in another highly policed retail space, the vast ‘shopping experience’ that surrounds Canary Wharf Tube station. “You could say that Flannery is Bertie (from the 1991 album Bertie’s Brochures) in a shopping centre.
The alienation goes beyond work. I don’t feel at home anywhere. That feels like a form of denial. And it causes a lot of problems in my life. I think it’s about having accepted something a long time ago without necessarily having realised it. And in the conscious part of my mind, there’s the concern: don’t make a show of yourself, don’t cling to any belief that you’ll regain whatever you had when you were a kid.”
Born into a middle-class family in rural east Cork, Coughlan attended school in Cork city, though in neither place did he feel he fitted in, his family regarded as blow-ins by locals. Within his family, he experienced a sometimes difficult relationship with his father, now dead. “We had reached a pretty harmonious stage before he died. I think I understood him. I think he accepted that he basically didn’t understand me.”
He studied medicine before throwing himself into the punk tide that washed over Cork at the beginning of the 1980s. “A lot of things would be different had I not walked away from the middle-class path I was on in Cork,” he says. “A lot of things are insecure for me, even after a decade of being a bit more pragmatic. There will be no gold watch for me when I’m 65. But that’s okay.”
Beginning as a duo with a primitive drum machine, Microdisney had few reference points within Irish rock, the Radiators’ Ghostown album the main one. Nevertheless, from a standing start, they produced within five years the greatest Irish rock album of all, their third, The Clock Comes Down the Stairs — O’Hagan’s melodic, West Coast twinkling contrasting with Coughlan’s implacably angry meditation on the issueless predicament of existence.
“Looking back, I realise I was incredibly anxious the whole time,” he says. “I was in a constant state of taking the piss out of everything. It came from an ironic acceptance that we were in a perilous situation, and it was all a joke anyway. We had our teeth into something good, certainly. We didn’t have much confidence, but we had that. If I hadn’t done that album, I wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had. I’m grateful for that, but it doesn’t impinge in any other way. I just think the drums are too loud.”
Signed by Virgin from Rough Trade, they fought their way through another two albums as the incompatibility of their musical interests became untenable. “I wish that Microdisney had ended differently,” says Coughlan. “I did a lot of stupid shit for the last couple of years of the band. But you have to remember who you were at that time, and how you responded to things, and it’s not the way I’d respond now. I’m a lot better at bringing things out in the open now if they’re causing me concern, because life is too short.”
The Fatima Mansions liberated the full force of Coughlan’s fury, their five albums, released between 1989 and 1995, splenetic but sonorous, hardening into a combination of crooning and industrial noise that became the band’s signature style. During this time, Coughlan’s already indulgent lifestyle — “I did bits of speed, when it was around, and acid, but I was never a dependent of any substance” — became more so following the break-up of a long-term relationship, which cast a long shadow over his life.
“I don’t think you ever really get over things that have been dominant in your life, and it’s futile to pretend otherwise,” says Coughlan, who has since married. “But you can have a different life, just by accepting that things have changed, and you can do right by the people who are now part of your life. Some things in the world you can fix and some things you can’t, and you just have to accept that.”
Though Coughlan cleaned up his lifestyle, stopping drinking and starting exercise regimes that he has continued, the Fatima Mansions became mired in a dispute with their record label, tying the singer up in legal wrangling that continued until the beginning of the decade. “It had a very deadening effect,” he says. “It was a complete sense of limbo. And things were rough personally. My father was dying. I was close to clinical depression for much of the time.”
Finally, a corporate takeover kicked the log jam free, and the following few years saw a stream of solo work released on two albums, Coughlan’s writing and singing now noticeably a shade darker, though he says that recent years have not been blighted by a recurrence of his depression.
“I don’t allow myself the luxury of slumping anymore,” he says. “I just can’t afford to. I have to work my way through things as fast as possible. I’m very protective of the work, to the exclusion of quality of life, and I pay the price for that every day. It can cause a lot of frustration and anger. I don’t really have a way of dealing with that. It gets channelled into the work or inflicted on transgressors in my immediate orbit.”
He had begun work on Flannery before the Cork commission materialised, taking as one point of departure Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which celebrated the flaneur, the urban figure who wanders without purpose or direction, subverting both topography and economics. “His leisurely appearance is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists,” as Benjamin put it.
Edmund White’s book about Paris, The Flaneur, was another influence on the Flannery project, particularly in the way it wanders from one subject to the next, focusing on small human dramas and compressing a lot of detail into brief episodes before moving on.
“The flaneur by his nature is a refusenik,” says Coughlan. “He refuses to make use of the built environment in the manner for which it was designed. He is also refusing to get a job. And that is always of interest to me. I treated Benjamin as an I Ching. I wasn’t investigating the liminality of consumerism, I was writing pop songs.”
Though different in style to Coughlan’s previous work — whereas his recent albums were akin to the Climate of Hunter album recorded by his hero, Scott Walker, Flannery/Foburg is out there with Walker’s challenging Tilt — the new work continues to explore a subject he has mined for more than 20 years, his ambivalence towards it still undiminished. “I keep going back to that tension between the schooled artist, the non-schooled artist and the person who isn’t an artist at all,” he says. “Most of humanity is not comprised of artists. And that is not a bad thing.”
Foburg is on Beneath Records
Flannery’s Mounted Head, Vicar St, Dublin, November 26
