LIFE STORY

Alittle over a year ago I spoke to Mary Coughlan about her forthcoming visit to the Port Fairy Folk Festival in 2022 only to find that we weren’t quite ready for international acts. Like so many other musicians, plans had to be put on hold but at least now we are able to talk with some certainty that Coughlan, one of Ireland’s most acclaimed contemporary voices, will be here in March for the festival and other dates. In the intervening year, Coughlan has also been able to organise one of the most exciting recording projects of a career that has seen more than a dozen studio albums since 1985, including an homage to Billie Holiday and the most recent and largely autobiographical album Life Stories. “This has been probably the busiest year I have had for years and years,” says Coughlan of 2022, noting that an especially warm summer allowed her to perform concerts in her garden, broadcast online and also perform benefits for local women’s refuge and addiction services. [Coughlan was also presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the then Mayor of Galway]. “People were in need, dire straits for funds,” says Coughlan. “Then the war came, and we started doing some gigs to raise money for Ukraine. “Then when we opened up it just went insane. It just went completely insane. Now I’m coming back to Australia.” A lot has been made of Coughlan’s battle with her demons; in fact, the publicity even mentions her ‘hitting rock bottom.’ But that was more than quarter of a century ago and I wonder if she ever gets tired of talking about it; after all, the most recent album and the stage play Woman Undone were surely revealing enough. “I do,” says Coughlan emphatically. “In Ireland, I just don’t talk. I don’t even hardly do press anymore because all they ever want to talk about was my past, or my ex-husband’s relationship which just comes up all the time. And I just say no. And even if I don’t do the interviews, they write about them anyway. So, it’s just that people are insatiable for it. It’s so stupid. I wrote the play, wrote the music. We performed it everywhere and put it to bed, and then I moved on.” “There’s such a lot of other stuff going on in my life and the world,” she continues. “I’m doing a really interesting project now. I’ve been working on it for almost two years. I presented it at the Galway International Arts Festival as a work in progress. It’s going to be incredible. That’s all I have to say. I’m 66. It’s going to be like, what do you call it, your [magnum] opus.” Coughlan’s next project involves recording an album of songs written and produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller that Peggy Lee first released on her album Mirrors back in 1975. The album contains the classic ‘Is That All There Is?’, a hit for Lee and a Grammy Award winner back in 1969. A planned album of ‘neo cabaret art songs’ took another six years to reach fruition. Coughlan was given the album years ago by Scottish singersongwriter Dougie MacLean while she was touring New Zealand. Yes, this is an album by the same legendary writing team that penned a slew of hits for Elvis such as ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’, ‘Treat Me Nice’ and ‘King Creole’ (to name just a few) plus dozens of hit songs for other artists including ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Poison Ivy’ and ‘Love Potion No.9’. “They wrote this very dark album about the rise of fascism in New York, in America in 1939, and they were all about the annihilation of old people,” explains Coughlan. “They were writing with Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. They were hoping to do a show of little vignettes of songs, stories.” “They were really good friends of Astor Piazzolla, the tango player from Argentina, composer. So, they wrote the suite of eleven songs that were very, very dark: from sending people to trains in Nazi camps for annihilation, old people, the rise of fascism. They wrote a very, very dark song about the pretend face of how everything is beautiful in America, and apple pie, and honeysuckle, and porch swings. There was this really, really dark underbelly.” While Coughlan might sing one or two songs from the project on her forthcoming tour, she is more likely to highlight material from 2020’s Life Stories with her band consisting of pianist Matt McMahon, bassist Brett Hirst and James Nash on guitar. “It has,” agrees Coughlan when I mention that Life Stories has a variety of musical moods, which will translate really well to the live performance, including the beautiful ‘Family Life’ written by Paul Buchanan for the Blue Nile album Peace At Last in 1996. “I suppose the sad songs are the ones that I’m responsible for. ‘Family Life’, Buchanan wrote that song years ago, and the night my mother was buried 15 years ago, I drove back from her funeral, because I’d been in Galway for about six weeks. My daughter was in the back of the car, and that song came on the radio. I just had to pull over the car and take a minute. So, she bought me the album for Christmas. Mammy was buried the first of November and Claire bought me the album. It’s such an amazing song.”

Mary Coughlan will be appearing at the Port Fairy Folk Festival.