How Cathal Coughlan and The Fatima Mansions made one of Ireland’s greatest rock songs
The greatest Irish rock song of the 1990s begins with a wrecking-ball riff and a rhythm section that goes off like a lunatic running amok with an angle grinder. Then comes the voice, a howl in the void courtesy of an eccentric Cork man fuelled by rage, dark wit and a suspicion that western Europe was on a fast-track to fascism. “Ciao, Ceausescu,” Cathal Coughlan sings, invoking the memory of Nicolae Ceausescu , the dictator who turned Romania into an Orwellian hellscape only to be executed by his own people as the Iron Curtain crumpled. It’s April 1990, and Coughlan and his band The Fatima Mansions have released Blues for Ceausescu, their bulldozing opus. Over its six minutes the tune clobbers the listener with pounding drums and industrial guitars that shudder and seethe, as furious as an acid bath brought to the boil. But the real pummelling comes courtesy of Coughlan’s lyrics, which anticipate the hollowing-out of western democracy, the rise of the far right and the corruption of the British elite to the point where a despot such as Ceausescu could easily have blended in. “Go to England ... Call yourself King Charles III / Nobody will notice / Nobody will be alarmed / There is no constitution.” “It’s prophesying the rebirth of fascism. Cathal was ahead of the curve,” Aindrías Ó Grúama, the band’s guitarist, says from his home in Germany. “What you could see is the complacency of the West when the Berlin Wall came down, and it was sort of, ‘Oh well, that’s all over now,’” says Nick Allum, the Fatima Mansions drummer, who became professor of research methodology at the University of Essex. “We won it and that’s all fine. And it was kind of saying, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, you know, it’s not over. And, actually, we’re not so great ourselves in the West.’” The two musicians are dialling in to talk about their work with Coughlan as Against Nature, The Fatima Mansions’ first album, from 1989, gets a long-overdue vinyl rerelease. This pressing includes Blues for Ceausescu in all its ranting, scorched-earth glory, following the expanded tracklist that Coughlan compiled for a digital reissue in 2021. The new vinyl version is the first release from Inis Records , the label that Tom Coll , the Fontaines DC drummer, established with Michael Roe, of the Dublin postrock group Adebisi Shank. Coll’s involvement is fitting, as Ó Grúama sees a connecting line between the Mansions and Fontaines DC. “They have similar attitudes,” he says. “They have something to say, and they’re going to say it.” When Coughlan died, in May 2022, at the age of 61, much of the attention at the time focused on his first band, Microdisney , a soft-rock collaboration with Sean O’Hagan championed by Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records, who signed them when they moved from Cork to London. He approvingly described Coughlan as “a little bit scary”; John Peel, the influential BBC DJ, said he would happily listen to Coughlan singing the phone book. Cathal Coughlan obituary: Singer and songwriter who never stopped exploring musical frontiers But the falling apart of Microdisney, in 1988, was not the end of Coughlan’s story. There was another chapter, one in which he sloughed off the slick, tasteful vibes of his first band and pursued a rawer, more furious sound that better expressed the anger burning inside him. With Microdisney, “the medium was getting in the way of the message”, according to Paul McDermott, who as well as being assistant principal of Rathmines College in Dublin is a music historian who explores Against Nature in his podcast To Here Knows When: Great Irish Albums Revisited. “That transition you hear on Against Nature – things like Valley of the Dead Cars or Only Losers Take the Bus – the music is a lot more immediate and in-your-face. It matches the message. The listener had to do a lot more work with his lyrics in Microdisney.” Coughlan had his misgivings about how Microdisney unravelled. “I have many regrets about how that ending came about, and in particular the tunnel vision which fuelled my apocalyptic over-reaction to the band’s circumstances in the final two years,” he told me in 2020. “Compared to situations I’ve been in since then, this was truly survivable stuff. But I just wasn’t grown up, not enough to have perspective.” Those regrets were still knocking around in his head as Against Nature came together. It was made while The Fatima Mansions were still in a Protean shape, according to Allum. “Microdisney broke up in the summer of 1988, and by October or November we were rehearsing. It wasn’t called Fatima Mansions; it was called The Freedom Association. But it was pretty quickly after Microdisney.” They recorded the album on the fly, its patchwork quality reflecting the circumstances in which it came together. Musically, it’s all over the place: there are midtempo ballads that could have fitted on a Microdisney album (The Day I Lost Everything), angry rockers that anticipated Blues for Ceausescu (Only Losers Take the Bus) and playful pop influenced by Erasure and Pet Shop Boys (13th Century Boy). But it’s the articulate, heartfelt anger that is the record’s most striking aspect. Rage had long fuelled Coughlan’s songwriting. He had grown up in modest circumstances in Glounthaune, an upper-middle-class village outside Cork city distinguished by its cluster of huge gated houses; as a bursary student at the blue-blooded Presentation College, he was a have-not in a world of haves. Later, studying at University College Cork, he bridled against the stifling conservatism of 1980s Ireland. That outsider’s perspective is the defining quality of Against Nature. McDermott points to the lyrics. “You Won’t Get Me Home, that’s about Aids. The way he says, ‘They put a wall up around the town to keep her plague within,’ he said that was about how people were treated when they had Aids. “The other one that is really obvious is Bishop of Babel, all about immigration and London. There’s that gorgeous line, ‘We don’t talk the same, so we don’t talk at all’ – the Irish in London.” Sean O’Hagan: ‘That lovely, beautiful humanity I had with Cathal Coughlan in those later years was amazing’ By this time The Fatima Mansions had found their definitive sound: explosive, confrontational and with righteous anger sweating from its pores. In other words, the opposite of Microdisney’s polish. In this they were drawing on Coughlan’s growing fascination with industrial groups such as Ministry, Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle – and their credo that it was better to leave an audience shocked and outraged than indifferent. Coughlan certainly wanted to get away from Microdisney, according to Ó Grúama. “He wanted everything to be stripped down. Try and do everything as quickly as possible, live if possible – and a lot noisier. I didn’t realise how much more guitar he wanted. And that became more and more apparent. A year [after Against Nature] we recorded Blues for Ceausescu, which became the hallmark of the Mansions sound.” Coughlan’s refusal to compromise was never more obvious than in May 1992, when The Fatima Mansions were invited to open for U2 on the European leg of their Zoo TV tour. This led to a flashpoint that, to Coughlan’s lasting frustration, would catalyse the idea of him as the perpetually splenetic crackpot of 1990s indie. The trouble unfolded over two nights in Milan. On the first, the band were heckled by an aggressive crowd. On the second, Coughlan took his revenge: he walked onstage wearing the strip of FC Barcelona – a calculated provocation given that the Spanish team had defeated the Italian side Sampdoria in the final of the European Cup 24 hours earlier. With boos ringing out, he said something rude about the pope before miming a gesture with a shampoo bottle shaped like the Virgin Mary. There was uproar, though U2, by all accounts, saw the funny side. (Rumours that their friend Gavin Friday had secured the bottle for the U2 archive have, alas, been debunked.) “They all seemed to be quite amused. It was a no-win situation,” Coughlan later said. “There were two nights. On the first night we nearly got wiped out. On the second night we decided to wipe them out.” The furore didn’t do the Mansions any harm in the short term: that September they went top 10 in the UK when their trip-hop-tinged, surprisingly tuneful cover of Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It for You was released as a double A-side with Manic Street Preachers ’ take on Suicide Is Painless, the theme from the Korean War-set TV series Mash. They would go on to release four more albums before Coughlan stepped away, creatively exhausted and burned out by tensions with the group’s record label. “There was nothing and nobody like them, which was clearly how they preferred it. But it did kind of mean that nobody really knew what to do with them or make of them,” said the journalist Andrew Mueller, who in the 1990s had prominently championed Coughlan in the pages of Melody Maker. “As was the case with Microdisney, however, people are still talking about them, while very much not doing so about many of their better-selling contemporaries.” “I didn’t think it would be listened to 30 years down the road. But here we are. Against Nature is now 38 years ago,” Ó Grúama says. “That’s a bloody long time for music to last, especially in pop.” Blues for Ceausescu has proved especially enduring. Nearly 40 years on, its warning that the end of the cold war did not mean the end of history reads as chillingly prescient. It stands as a testament to Coughlan, an artist who had more to say about the state of the world than almost any other songwriter of his generation. “It was basically saying that something felt really wrong about the triumphalism expressed by the western cold warriors on the demise of communist hegemony in eastern Europe,” Coughlan told me in an email in May 2020, 21 months before Russia invaded Ukraine . “I truly believe that we’re still living with ever-growing echoes of that.” Against Nature is reissued by Inis Records on Friday, October 9th