TAKING CONTROL

THE house where Mary Coughlan lives in Bray, Co Wicklow, is strewn with the detritus of young children and the fall-out of her past successes. Award plaques hailing her early brilliance adorn the walls of the hall, but it's the baby, a boy, suckling at her breast that draws admiring glances.

At the time of this interview, Coughlan and a video crew have just returned from a freezing film shoot in the Sally Gap. While there is no obvious chart-oriented singles material on her new album, After The Fall, Coughlan and the record company nevertheless decided to go for an "atmospheric" choice. Henry Purcell's When I Am Laid In Earth (Dido's Lament) has been given the chilly, Gothic treatment, which is probably why Coughlan looks deathly pale and distinctly vampiric. It could, of course, be a subtle nod to the latter-day film work of the previous owner of the house (Neil Jordan), but she appears to be too cold to seriously consider any such connection.

Coughlan is now firmly back in the public eye, having gone through hell and high water from the beginning of the 1990s to that point in February 1994 when she checked herself into the Rutland Centre to cure herself of alcoholism. The firsts half of this decade has seen her embrace and finally conquer the white knuckle ride of a lifetime. Anyone with half an eye on the tabloid newspapers will have read about Coughlan's stiff brushes with the law and insurance companies, and her running battle with the bottle. While some of those close to her chose not to run away when she needed them the most, the public must surely still have a distorted view of her.

"I know some people think I'm a fierce hard woman, afraid of nothing or nobody. I also reckon they think I'm very wealthy. I was in a supermarket recently and I was accosted by a woman who said it was all very well for me, putting anything I liked into my trolley, not having to be worrying about paying bills. Little did she know I'm not a hard woman. I'm too soft."

What of the past five years, then, when her every (wrong) move was plastered all over the Irish print media? With one personal disaster following another, did it ever seem as if the downward spiral would stop?

Apparently not.

"The beginning of the end started five years ago, notes Coughlan, stepping gingerly around possibly sensitive legal issues. "My previous record label, Warners, wanted me to appeal to a younger, bigger audience with an album released in 1990, Uncertain Pleasures, something I wasn't happy with. I could have seen it was the beginning of the end if I had been clever enough. But I played their game. I recorded the songs they wanted me to, I didn't use my long-time producer, Erik Visser, and I used an English band. I complied with all their wishes because my manager said they would pull the money and that would be the end of me.

"After a while, I became terribly depressed and really f**ked up. The guilt of leaving the kids (Coughlan had three at this time, two teenagers, Aoife and Eoin, and a young daughter, Clare) and everything became all too much for me. I let myself pine away for all I had lost."

The final straw was when Coughlan had her house remortgaged to finance a tour of Scandinavia. The tour lost £80,000 Coughlan's car and house were repossessed. "I didn't have a tosser. Nobody - and I mean nobody, management nor record company - offered to help, or would help even when they were asked. I went a bit a lower after that hence The Rutland Centre."

Coughlan says she learned from her time in the centre that, given her family and personal background, her life couldn't have turned out any other way. She took great solace from this, clawing back self-esteem that had long since scurried away.

"I felt like a maggot. I'd lost everything in terms of home life and self-respect. I'd drink socially, and then I'd come home, drank two bottles of vodka, alone in a room, and collapse. But being in the Rutland meant that I was sufficiently far away from drink to make choices and decisions. Day by day, it got better. I decided not to drink or sink any further and die, but to make a new start. That took time to listen to all the shite without caving in.

Coughlan's new album, her eighth, is a thematic record influenced by the first track, Woman Undone (written by Thom Moore and Oleg Grebyonkin), and by the book Out Of The Garden: Women Writers On The Bible. Both song and book draw parallels on the traditional use of the Bible to keep women in their place. By commissioning songs from a range of Irish songwriters (Jimmy McCarthy, Johnny Mulhern, Paul Doran, and Antoinett Hensey), and by consciously picking up on words and lyrics that fitted into the record's specific theme (Dorothy Parker's poem Dilemma, Marc Almond's Saint Judy, the traditional song Nobody, and Henry Purcell's When I Am Laid In Earth), Coughlan has created a boldly inventive piece of work that is as much a catharsis for her as it is for the listener. She agrees that there are no happy songs on the album. A deliberate choice?

"Well, it's semi-autobiographical," she says. "And all the songs are completely personal. Runaway Teddy [co-written by Coughlan and Johnny Mulhern] is my favourite, about a woman who has been abused and who stalks her ex-lover. I have done that, I'm ashamed to say. All of the songs, the domestic violence business know it all. I'll leave it at that."

As well as the thread of bruised female experience, running through the album is Coughlan's blues-burnished voice, at one moment a whisper, another a guttural cry. It's obvious she knows and sings these songs instinctively, and receives some form of personal salvation through them.

"Really sad songs appealed to me even as a child - I got a feeling of great release. And that feeling has obviously intensified as I've got older, primarily because I've been able to analyse why I'm feeling a particular way. When I sing live, something terrible might have been happening in my personal life - not necessarily with men. But you'd be in a bad mood, and on stage you'd hit on the song that would make you feel even worse, and then I'd get the passion to make everyone in the audience feel really shite! Then they'd all feel pathetic! It really works - collective therapy."

COUGHLAN begins a tour of Britain from March 11th. Her record label has big plans for her, as has Coughlan herself over the next eight months, during which time she will work After The Fall in Europe, the Far East, and America. It's a crucial time in her career, and she knows it.

"I hope it works," says Coughlan with a grim smile. "Huge stardom won't come to me, and I certainly don't want it. But I've come to expect, and so have the kids, a level of comfort. I can't imagine going back to being without it. I've always worked sufficiently, even if I was in an awful state, to have a home, to provide for my kids.

"The past 12 years? I reflect on them a lot. My stumbling block was never to make decisions that would be good for me or the kids. I lost sight of myself when I gave control to other people. It's hard to take control of your life, because no one trusts you, and you don't even trust yourself. The past 12 years has been a learning experience, but it could have been the death of me, too.

"I remember when I was at school in Galway, the nuns used to say they'd beat the temper and the spirit out of me. Various people have tried to knock it out of me over the years. It nearly went. My anger has kept me going through all these years. It's time to let go of it now, and grow up a bit. It's certainly time to do that, isn't it.