Everybody Is Fantastic

Thursday morning 8.15, lying in the bath, trying to soak myself awake. Somebody knocks on the door. Oh God, I've only just got in, what is it?

"The postman brought a record for you. I'm leaving it outside the door". Leap out of the bath, towel-less, rip open door, can it be…? Fumble, fumble, open package. Yes, eureka, it's arrived at last… fantastic!

Perhaps some of you haven't heard of Microdisney. Some facts for you: 1. They are two: Cathal Coughlan, vocals and Sean O'Hagan, guitar. 2. They hail from Cork. 3. They live in London. 4. In 1982 they released a single called 'Hello Rascals'. Which is fantastic!

"For optimum listening pleasure, please listen to the record at least four times", the sleeve notes instruct us. This turns out to be a VERY important instruction. The thirteen songs on Everybody Is Fantastic do not 'leap off the vinyl' or 'clamour for your attention'. Microdisney music takes you over by infiltration rather than by direct attack. Quiet, but quite wonderful: do give it a little time.

Cathal's vocals and lyrics are the most immediate features of this mediate music. His voice is deep, unpretentious and soulful. Lyrically he is an impressionist, a new-wave Vincent Van Gogh. He takes scraps of conversations and lives and blows them up until the bizarre, hurting potential of the everyday is fully realised. Cathal, like Paddy MacAloon, seems to talk nonsense, but somehow one always understands exactly what is being felt. Try: "Like the book she came with me/On a train, through the hills/In her bed I awakened/Windows small, blackish sky/(And they told us were decent/They forgot they spoke to monsters)". Or how about: "Stood in the Sunday rain/Was a still escalator/Lading to empty shops where nobody looked, and his hair got wet and he scratched his head/He'd just never wanted half enough"? How absurd How crazed! How true! How fantastic!

Is the gentle, sparse music to be merely an aural backdrop for this marvellous idiot's words and singing? There is nothing as initially intoxicating as "Hello Rascals" here. Microdisney's hooks, never obvious, seem at first to have disappeared altogether. On repeated listenings, however, snatches of melodic excitement emerge and grow. And grow. I have played this record perhaps fifteen times: right now, I am particularly thrilled by 'Dolly', 'This Liberal Love' and 'A Few Kisses'. Who knows what I may find in another fifteen plays? True love? Desolation? Or, perhaps, just Cathal and Sean, standing at the end of the tunnel, laughing at me for taking so long to understand?

In case you haven't yet got the message, I think that Everybody Is Fantastic – is fantastic!