Passion and Pain

IT WAS like she's written home for it. Pollutant of the airwaves; corrupting influence on the nation's gullible youth; all-round figure of debauch. Mary Coughlan sang Cole Porter's once-banned "Love For Sale" on that sanctuary for the damned, The Late Late Show and the phone lines were rent with apoplectic minders of our morals, saviours of our souls and sundry other miscreants whose idea of a fun night is one spent self-flagellating in front of the TV screen.
Funny thing is, La Coughlan is well-used to such rabid responses to her outpourings, whether musical otherwise. Garrulous and articulate, with a refined sense of the absurd, she plunges in where others fear to tread and guffaws loudly at her detractors.
She knows only too well that the temperatures raised by "Love For Sale" won't have gone astray if they've etched the sentiment in the grey matter of just a few more prospective listeners' skulls. No publicity's bad publicity. Annie Murphy and The Sawdoctors'd vouch for that - and Mary Coughlan's grinning at the madness of it all.
Having been around the block more than once she's launching album no.6 with the requisite battle scars and bruises that come notoriously with the territory. Dumped by Warner's last year hot on the heels of the release of the critically acclaimed "Sentimental Killer", she was left with no option other than to cancel the tour plans, finding the purse way shy of the necessary shileros.
Rumour and strife followed like lemmings to a cliff. Management difficulties; an acquaintance with the bottle that threatened to breach the peace, and a new baby to refocus the attention every twenty seconds or so - Mary Coughlan was rapidly heading down shit creek without a paddle and no sign of a Mountie to the rescue, as she careered off the rocks.
Her riposte is "Love For Sale" - not quite Mary Coughlan Unplugged, but a 'live' album nonetheless, taped over three nights in the Mean Fiddler. Did the disillusioning experience with Warners send her running shy of recording studios and all the exorbitant overkill inherent in virtually every breath taken in such places?
"Demon Records were the ones who showed the most interest after I'd been dropped last year," she explains simply "and they suggested that it was time I did a live album as a sort of interim thing because they had no budget for a major studio album and anyway I was due a live album because I had five 'normal' albums out. I thought that'd be great so we went ahead."
An eclectic mix of blues and jazz with the pens of everyone from Long John Baldry ("A Thrill's A Thrill") to Mr. and Mrs. Costello (Elvis and Cáit) and Jerome Kern ("A Fine Romance") called upon, "Love For Sale" is a cool trawl down clubland, through air muzzied by Gitanes, Vermouth and Dexter Gordon size 11s, but strangely short of the expected sprint through the back catalogue, as befits most live excursions.
Mary Coughlan laughs at the incongruity: "Myself and Eric (Visser, longtime producer and writer) were throwing around which songs we'd use from which albums before the gigs in The Mean Fiddler and Warner Brothers came back and said 'No fucking way - we still own all those albums'. So I wasn't allowed to re-record or re-release any part of my back catalogue in any form until my contract expired.
"So that was why we decided to pick the material that you can hear on 'Love for Sale'. I had been sent some great songs by Jimmy McCarthy, Mark Nevin (ex-Fairground Attraction) and Kirsty MacColl, but I decided to keep them for a future studio recording."
Of the dozen tracks on the album, one is co-penned by Mary herself, along with Antoinette Hensey, "To Love A Man". Virgin territory for Coughlan, does the writing mark a new departure in terms of artistic direction? Is she no longer satisfied with the role of chanteuse?
Again that scurrilous laugh, tickled at the notion of her getting notions. "It was my first time writing," she guffaws, evidently not to enamoured with the preciousness of the form, "and we'll wait and see what the reaction is like! Put the toe in!"
Not shy of gathering together "killer material" for her band, she enlisted the talents of the incomparable Richie (but call me Richard in the Mean Fiddler, boy) Buckley on tenor and soprano saxes and James Delaney on keyboards with Dick Farrelly on guitar, and the duo of Paul Moore and Robbie Casserly on bass and drums - a quintet to be captured on tape wherever the setting, and possibly best aired in the uncluttered environs of the live venue.
"Really," she insists, "you could never do on stage what you do in studio and you could never do in the studio what you do on stage, so I think it's a nice balance. The songs are new and it is a very high standard of recording so I'm happy with it and it's a good kick up the arse for WEA!"
Have the about-turns of her career left Coughlan feeling bitter, bothered or bewildered - or none of the above? Can a woman who has her reputation for hauling around a steel coat of armour still feel the slings and arrows of the industry, or is she buffeted by a particularly thick skin?
"Ara," she offers dismissively, "as Jake Riviera (Elvis' manager and maitre d' of Demon Records) said to me last week, 'there's no point in you feeling bitter about these things, Mary. It's always amazed me why success has never really knocked loudly on your door, but it's comin', and when it comes, open the door and don't say: where the fuck have you been?, say: oh, come in, I've been waiting graciously!.' So I think that'll be my new motto in life!
"One thing's for sure though, it's made me very wary of those people (record companies).I'll never believe any of them again. I've been fairly shit on."
And what of the virtual Casey-like silence that surrounded the release of last year's "Sentimental Killer"? Alarm bells must have sounded chez Coughlan when it came time to push hard but no-one was pushing.
"I said to WEA: "Are you not putting up posters? and they said 'Oh, we don't believe in putting up posters any more'! Then I rang up London and said, 'what the fuck's going on? and they said, 'well, we don't think that there are any hits on the album'. I said that it was never intended that there be hits on it. People buy my albums, they don't buy singles. So six weeks after the release date, after getting back from doing fifteen gigs in England, I saw nothing around here to let people know about the album and at that point I was dropped."
At the time things looked distinctly bleak, with little prospect of recovery in a recession - and obsession-dominated - market. Now Mary's looking on the bright side, but back then . . .
"Well, I'm glad to be rid of them now," she confirms, "but last August I was fucked. I had just had Clare, my youngest; I recorded the album when I was six months pregnant. Sure Jesus, they had tours of Australia, New Zealand, Japan . . . Fuck - all gone with the wind. I didn't know what to do.
"The building society got wind of the record company and what it was doing, so it said: 'put the house up for sale'. So I ended up in court with them."
All of this sounds like an incredibly naive Mary Coughlan embarking on a roller coaster ride that she hadn't bargained for, but surely the fact that she didn't start singing professionally until the grand old age of twenty-nine, after she'd raised three kids and written with zest on the joys of home birth must've meant that she was a tad more worldly-wise than your common or garden emerging talent? Or did it?
She ruefully recalls the massive pitfalls, nay, chasms, she plunged into as she progressed along the road to somewhere. "I seem to have been naive, looking back now. I never questioned where money went or where it didn't go. I never actually got paid for any gig or movie I ever did. It all went into a fund, The Mary Coughlan Fund, and when the fund ran out the house was sold to pay for the debts - so I was completely stupid.
"I had a house and three kids to be thinking about. So the bank took the house for the tour that had been organised, at the record company's insistence that I use big English musicians, almost to the detriment of my friendship with Eric and a lot of my musician friends in Ireland. I did all that and they dropped me like a ton of bricks. Anyway sure, fuck it!"
"WEA said basically, that for 'Uncertain Pleasures', if I did one song of their choosing, I could then include one of my own choice, so I should have known at that stage that this was trouble. They spent #200,000 doing the album and video and it bombed. They left me back to my own devices then for 'Sentimental Killer' and I think now, looking back on it, that they probably had it in their heads to get rid of me.
"They thought, let her do this album, if it's successful, it's successful and if it's not, we'll just get rid of her. So they let me do it on the cheap in Ireland, which we did, and it sold 75,000 copies on its own merit, with no push."
Rumours of a Napoleonic retreat inside a bottle were not without foundation. When all fruit fails, welcome haws, or hops even.
"When the whole album thing went sour I got totally pissed off - and pissed," she admits. "I was very much going through the motions for a long time, and whenever I got totally broke, I'd be thrown into Midnight At The Olympia which was totally soul-destroying, because I still had some pride left in work and going in to play to 1,200 sloshed people at 1 o'clock in the morning took every last bit of anything out of me, you know.
"But I had to do it - I had no house. After living in the lap of luxury in Howth I was now living in the middle of a housing estate in Portmarnock - and pregnant! So I was having a great time! So it was basically hell, I'd say, for about two years."
The sourest occupational hazard of them all then, sidled its way past the minders to pickle a few brain cells when the going got tough. Hunter S. reckoned that "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro". Coughlan certainly knows the difference now between the professional and the social when it comes to choosing and leaning on the bottle.
"I'm off the drink now. I can't drink. Well, I know I could drink normally for a few weeks, have a bottle of wine here, a bottle of wine there. A pint here and a pint there, but it's happened to me a few times and it fuckin' creeps up on you . . . and you lose your clear-headedness then. I was completely drink-free for a long time and when Clare was a couple of months old it deteriorated very quickly. I was completely devastated and really depressed so I went on the piss last August.
"The tendency is to have a good few jars and really forget about it. I found myself in the situation where I was drinking to anaesthetise myself from pain, which is a fairly fuckin' natural thing to do I suppose. I couldn't fuckin' handle it, and I don't think a lot of people realise how dependant on these people you get and what I was going through."
GRAND PLAN
And what if it were all to happen again, if the prophet of doom were to grimace in Mary Coughlan's direction a second time round does she figure that she'd handle it differently or would she fear a return trip?
"FUCK!!", is her gut response to this morbid insistence on dwelling on the underbelly of it all. "I'm back at the start. I've just done a sell-out concert in Belgium to 3,500 people, so I know I can do that whenever I want to in Germany, Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia."
So despite the lack of a runaway success with the last album in Ireland, Coughlan isn't going to lose much sleep wringing her hands in defeat. Her absence from "A Woman's Heart" (album/tour) hasn't furrowed her brow none either.
"People who buy that album don't want to hear about women in laundries washing priests' underwear while they're pregnant and who probably got them there in the first place! And they don't want to hear songs about how my land is bogged down in religious tradition.
"I have a great many ardent fans in Ireland. There are also a great many who think I should fuck off and go live elsewhere. But I only answer questions tht I'm asked and I'm a firm believer that people needn't listen to me if they don't want to. They can turn off the radio or not read the paper. Let them make up their own minds."
Talk of priests' underwear couldn't possibly pass without a reference to the derring do of her own local pastor, surely a story ripe for harvesting by the Coughlan scythe, at least in person, if not on record? The latest Sawdoctors ode with their meatiest catchcry to date: "Off with the mitre and up with the nightie!" amuses her no end but fails to ignite a creative urge of distinction.
Now that things have been stripped bare, with Coughlan booking her own gigs, writing out her lyrics for the benefit of her avid Japanese fans (!) and generally doubling as her own dogsbody amid the mayhem of the record launch, is she worried that the commerce might overrule the music?
Is there a possibility that she might lose sight of what she was meant to be doing from the beginning, singing, and become a super-PR operator in the meantime? She doubts it.
"I would never be of the opinion that singers have to have a bevy of people around them so that they can perform," she says. "Like in 'Spinal Tap' - 'Like, you know, don't bother me with that shit. I've got to sing!' I'm not precious about it."
And does "Love For Sale" mark a new departure? A parting of the ways for Mary Coughlan and Trouble. Does she envisage plain sailing from here on?
"I'm reluctant to say it," she offers tentatively, "but I feel it in my bones. I've had such encouragement from people in the business. Neil Jordan is a great friend and he was pulling out al the stops for me when he was in L.A. - giving out my tapes at the Oscars even! So my name is being circulated big time. We'll just have to wait and see what happens."
Finally, I wonder whether she considers the possibility of predestination in all of what's happened to her over the last eight years? After all, the album covers the blues, the beat-up bagged-out downers from Ella Fitzgerald and Sam Cooke and Co., none of whom are strangers to the darker side of the moon. Perhaps there lurks somewhere a grand plan marked Coughlan with a circuitous route for maximum impact?
Surprisingly, she nods in agreement. "Definitely, yeah, all of it. Being a Taurean I'm not supposed to believe in all that because Taureans are very down to earth, but how could it all have happened? How could a woman of twenty-nine be a housewife in Galway in August and sing in the Olympia in Dublin for six nights in a row the following May or June? I've also done a fair amount to destroy myself in the past while as well, and it hasn't worked!
"So . . . I don't know what's going on, but someone somewhere must like me! Fate must have a hand. I used to believe that I had to take control for myself, that I was the master of where I was going, but I don't think that any more."