From Microdisney to Fatima Mansions, Cathal Coughlan's musical career has always offered up the edgy and unconventional. Now he is about to unveil his specially commissioned musical work for Cork's European Capital of Culture celebrations. Brian Boyd finds out why the protagonist of his latest offering is a night manager in a call centre.
In her fascinating book The Art of Taking a Walk the clever-clogs German writer Anke Gleber examines one of the lesser-known phenomena that resulted from European urban modernity - namely, the observing city stroller. This character is often wrongly termed a "boulevardier", who is more a sort of inane bourgeois socialite flitting from one trendy area to another (plenty of these in Dublin). Gleber uses the correct term "flaneur", which describes someone who participates, however passively, in the urban spectacle around them. Baudelaire had a beautiful phrase for the activities of the flaneur, which he called "botanising on the asphalt".
The flaneur, for Gleber, "drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendour and squalor in an age transformed by industrialism". Her book explores the technological changes - street lighting, public transportation, and the emergence of film - that gave new status to the activities of seeing and walking in the modern city.
Flanerie (as it is known) is reclaimed as a "reading" of a city that perceives passers-by, streets and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity.
This culture of flanerie was memorably captured by the writer/philosopher Walter Benjamin in his great unfinished work, the "Arcades" project which was about the city life of Paris in the 19th century, particularly the roofed outdoor arcades which created the city's distinctive street life and facilitated the noble, forgotten art of flanerie.
So when you hear that Cathal Coughlan's specially commissioned musical work for Cork's European Capital Of Culture celebrations is called Flannery's Mounted Head, you know that you'd buy a ticket just in honour of the pun in the title alone.
While Coughlan admits that his work is influenced by Walter Benjamin's "Arcades", this is not a contemporary Leeside version of 19th-century Paris flanerie. It is more "a fearless exploration of the terror built from banal dreams, such as those that litter the margins of Irish consumerism". And for "fearless explorations" of any aspect of Irish socio-political life, you'll find that there's no better man than the ferociously intelligent and redoubtable Coughlan.
Perhaps the most belligerently saturnine presence ever on the Irish music scene, Coughlan, now in his mid-forties and long since based in London, emerged from a late 1970s Cork musical environment that is now fondly remembered as the first "Corkchester". The squalling punk/new wave scene in the city was leavened by an idiosyncratic surreal humour which threw up bands such as the semi-legendary Nun Attax, alongside Stump, Five Go Down To The Sea and Porcelain Tears. It was an intensely creative time in the then barren cultural landscape - even if the line between genius and insanity did get a bit blurred at times.
Onto the heap landed a band called Microdisney. To place them in their proper historical context, you still find a number of people with advanced musical knowledge who will tell you that their The Clock Comes Down The Stairs work is, unequivocally, the best Irish rock album ever released.
Microdisney were anchored by Coughlan and Sean O'Hagan. The former provided a gleeful lyrical malevolence (specialist subject matter: derailed humanity). The latter provided the sweet melodies which worked contrapuntally with the scabrous lyrics. A deal with the prestigious British indie Rough Trade prompted a still splendid collection of music, including the tersely titled We Hate You South African Bastards.
The centre wouldn't hold for Coughlan and O'Hagan. Microdisney disbanded and Coughlan went on to form Fatima Mansions (named after the Dublin flat complex). The Mansions sounded like Public Enemy would have if they were from Cork. Their bawdry lyrical bile was flung with force on top of "you looking at me?" aggressive grunge guitars. At a typical Fatima Mansions gig, you'd wonder if Coughlan would ever make it to the end of a song, such was his vein-throbbing assault on the music.
Following Fatima Mansions, Coughlan flexed his creative muscles with three solo albums, all of which were considerably different in tone from his previous group work. The frenetic musical pace subsided somewhat, allowing Coughlan to roam freely into new territory - that of the mature singer-songwriter more interested in content than form.
Along the way there have also been film soundtracks, a satirical musical side-project called Bubonique (their albums are now collectors items) and, increasingly, more work in musical theatre.
"I had the idea for the song-cycle about Cork that is Flannery's Mounted Head well before the city was designated European City of Culture," says Coughlan. "It came originally from an idea about making a film around the idea of refusal. But this was a time when I had decided not to do a fourth solo album, and had come to a fork in the road. I wanted to do something that wasn't tied to my own biography, something that didn't refer to my own experience. I found myself in Cork - I go back a few times a year - wandering around by the Lee fields just by what is locally known as 'the Madhouse' (an old Victorian asylum, no longer in use) and I was thinking of stuff like the right to roam through these strongly policed retail spaces, thinking about the shopping mall design and what it has done to cities, and thinking about Cork and its buildings. The city used to be a fast-buck town; a lot of money ran through it, but little remained. The only buildings I could think of from the 19th century were the Madhouse, the Cork Savings Bank and then, later, the city hall. So that's the flanerie of it - walking around Cork and taking in the buildings and the changes."
Coughlan says he was "very pleasantly surprised" when he was commissioned to compose the song-cycle for the city's Eurofest activities. Flannery's Mounted Head will be performed on a one-off basis at the city's Fr Matthew Hall on September 16th. While the work is not exactly site-specific, the choice of venue was important to him. "It's an austere place," he says. "A lot of Cork people would have a bad reaction to it simply because it was the place where all the Feis competitions were held. It's the place where, when you were nine years of age, you went to recite your speech and drama. You wouldn't call it a pleasant, Old World theatre by any means, but neither is it a formica/bad lighting fixtures place either. Certainly, I would never have been allowed to play there with Microdisney or Fatima Mansions, but it really suits this work. It's a bit semiological, I suppose. It fits with how different I am now and how different the music is."
His relationship with Cork bleeds into the work. "I'm actually from east Cork, which seemed like ages and ages away from the city, but now is no distance at all. I came from a completely rural background and when I started going to secondary school in the city I was completely intimidated by the place. My only contact with the city centre was getting the train in and going to school, I never fanned out. Later I came to explore areas like Blackrock and Ballintemple and saw how that sort of middle-class life aped places like Schull - that weird residue of English colonial life - but in a very disconnected way. I really felt antagonistic towards the place until I was about 18. Then I became interested in bands and going to certain record shops.
"There was this great scene then - I was really influenced by Nun Attax, they had such a punk aesthetic. They wouldn't ask someone for the time of the day in case it compromised their integrity! And when their bass player left, they got in a cellist instead! But when I started in bandsthe local economy had totally disintegrated and there was nowhere for bands to play. Fortunately, I met Sean O'Hagan."
He says he is aware of the negative press around how Cork has performed as City of Culture. "I heard about the Where's Me Culture? people and thought that was great. You have to understand, though, that it is a very difficult thing for a small population to make a big mark. Not just Cork, but Ireland as a whole, punches above its weight - how many globally successful rock bands can there be from the country? There can be unrealistic expectations. Cork has done very well - remember it is the smallest place ever to be designated City of Culture and the work that has been done there has been done by the people who stuck with the place when it was far from glamorous."
He describes Flannery's Mounted Head as "neither opera nor theatre". The work has been influenced somewhat by his recent work in European theatre.
"This e-mail arrived by chance one day from a company in France (Coughlan has serious cult status in France). One week later I am singing in French with a 15-piece orchestra in Paris in a contemporary opera," he says. "I've always had really good write-ups in France, I think they go for that integration of words and music more than others do," he adds. "As much as I am a fan of the works of Peadar Ó Riada, Christy Moore or, in literature, Frank O'Connor and Tom McCarthy, I also loved Phil Chevron. And it was Chevron talking about Kurt Weil that got me interested in musical theatre."
It's difficult to relate what Flannery's Mounted Head is about, given that it is a musical piece. Coughlan says: "Flannery is a night manager in a call centre. It's set in a time like the present. He lives in a city-state which has risen from the ashes of economic catastrophe. Because it has become quite prosperous the nation state around it is suspicious of it.
"Flannery represses a lot of things. His family get killed in a preventable accident, and this liberates him from the need to work. He becomes a wandering minstrel of aimlessness and comes into contact with a rougher side of where he is from - the underbelly. He is preyed upon over time and comes to realise he is not the good person he once thought he was. When things turn a bit rough socio-economically, the people around him begin to exhibit tribal style behaviour."
Musically, Coughlan says the work will not be that much of a surprise to anyone who is familiar with his solo material. He does add the important caveat, though, that some of the material sounds like "Howlin' Wolf doing the score to a Fellini movie with Status Quo as his backing band". Yes, that old chestnut.
The songs are constructed to work properly in their own right, he says and although the work is, strictly speaking, a one-off performance on September 16th, he is not opposed to a record of the performance coming out at some stage. On the night, he will be joined by the Grand Necropolitan sextet of musicians and there will be live imaging from Rob Flint, who, coincidentally, also works with Sean O'Hagan in the High Llamas. The emerging Irish artist Linda Quinlan will provide an installation which the audience will pass through on their way into the Fr Matthew Hall.
Anybody expecting any misty-eyed nostalgic reflections on Cork will be very let down by the work - this is robust, modern musical theatre from someone who plays musical games without frontiers.
Having been known throughout his career as an angry young man type, who graduated with first-class honours from the University of Iconoclasm and Irreverence, how does Coughlan feel about participating in something so . . . official?
"The thought did cross my mind that I was becoming institutionalised," he says. "People still view me as this enraged young man, and I did give them the ammunition over the years, I did bite the hand that feeds. But this all comes back to my relationship with Cork. The reality of Cork now is a lot more complex than it seemed to be when I lived there.
"I'm not bringing this work to Cork as an anti-statement or an anti-gesture. Neither do I expect the gold watch from the city. I hope it goes well . . . if I can't avoid disgracing myself in Cork, I don't have a hope anywhere."
Flannery's Mounted Head is at Fr Matthew Hall on Friday, September 16th. Tickets are €20 and are available from Ticketmaster. Tel: 0818 719300.
Further information from www.cork2005.ie
