Most people would not associate Irish band Microdisney, formed by frontperson Cathal Coughlan and lead guitarist Sean O’Hagan, with US alternative rock group 10,000 Maniacs as kindred spirits when they are so rarely mentioned in the same breath.
But, in a roundabout way, this comparison checks out when their creative trajectory followed a close path. After all, Microdisney and 10,000 Maniacs’ respective debut albums, 1984’s Everybody is Fantastic and 1983’s Secrets of the I Ching, both had a charming yet underproduced jangle soundscape that showed a great amount of promise.
Lyrically, their later content would deeply and eloquently address socio-political issues: Microdisney’s contributions will be explored in due course, but it goes without saying that they compare more than favourably to 10,000 Maniacs’ notions on their 1989 album Blind Man’s Zoo, including the respective effects of industrial pollution and urban decay on Poison in the Well and Dust Bowl.
Microdisney’s approach was different to 10,000 Maniacs original frontperson Natalie Merchant’s earnest dedication to educating people on the state of 1980s western society, but this point still stands.
Then in 1992’s Our Time in Eden, 10,000 Maniacs’ final studio album with Merchant at the helm, the group had climaxed so hard and organically reached such a high artistic peak that it seemed almost impossible for either Merchant or her fellow band members to better that effort and progress musically without parting ways.
It was a perfect yet natural ending — and so much of that applies to Microdisney’s final studio album, 1988’s 39 Minutes, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this month.
Roughly outlining the visionary genesis
However, to truly understand this and why 39 Minutes has aged so gracefully over the past 35 years, context needs to be set by deep diving into Microdisney’s artistry and career as a whole.
Not only was Everybody is Fantastic, released in June 1984, a tad rough around the edges, but it also somewhat resembled an outlier in their discography when few of their recurring lyrical themes and sonic motifs were present on it.
Indeed, while a fine and solid debut album overall, there was generally little sign that Coughlan and O’Hagan worshipped at the altar of Steely Dan by this point, especially their shared sense of acerbic sarcasm with Messrs Becker and Fagen.
In fact, the muddier and skeletal production values of Everybody is Fantastic had more in common with Felt and Pulp’s respective albums, 1982’s Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty and 1983’s It: two other debuts that were sketchier when compared to their future achievements and vision.
This all fitted in a bit too neatly and passively with the post-punk C81 movement. Still, it was clear that Microdisney possessed some really delightful green shoots, with the opening lyric on Sun — “I drink gin like a 1960s wino” — particularly demonstrating a barbed wit that would later typify their Trojan Horse and famed ‘Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove’ persona.
Likewise, in a series of liner notes for Creation Records’ re-issue imprint Re-vola in 1996, label biographer David Cavanagh rightfully pointed out that the early bars of Everybody is Fantastic’s lead single, Dolly, bore noticeable similarity to tracks on Nick Drake’s 1971 album Bryter Layter. This checkmark of classic rock was the other key sign of what was to come.
A classic second album
It was the release of their second studio album, The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, at the end of October 1985 when Coughlan and O’Hagan started to catch the imagination of major label A&R executives and the indie-skewed music press. And it’s easy to see why this is still objectively regarded as Microdisney’s finest album and became the centrepiece of their reunion concerts in 2018, as the artistic progression on display was remarkable.
In terms of both musicianship and slickness, the figurative difference between Everybody is Fantastic and The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is quite simply chalk and cheese, when the latter is frontloaded with nods to the highpoints of 1970s AOR.
The electric piano grooves, banjo solos and brief samples of background noise — key jangles for Steely Dan and train crowds for Microdisney — on album opener Horse Overboard all have shades of Steely Dan’s 1972 single Do It Again, for one. That’s immediately followed by the album’s lead single, Birthday Girl, which resembles the basic keyboard-led melody of John Cale’s 1973 album track Paris 1919 and the jazzier moments of Steely Dan’s Monkey in Your Soul.
Genius, similarly, has a fusion whiff of The Eagles’ 1975 single One of These Nights and Steely Dan’s Barrytown, while the slower tempo and anti-Thatcherite outrage of Past tips its hat towards the corporate misogyny of Steely Dan’s Dirty Work.
Moreover, Coughlan’s deadpan lyricism on The Clock Comes Down the Stairs remains endlessly quotable, whether it is the depression-led character studies of “Feed the birds poisoned bread/In the square beneath my place of birth” on Birthday Girl and “I have slaved and prayed/And so will you, boy/To leave behind a wretched guilty past” on Humane, or the anti-yuppie sentiments of “Your job will go/Your house will go/But they will wave from their video/And the police will be there, as well” on Past and “The English toytown’s looking well/William Blake fans sipping halves of ale/Cruel but profound/They’re all one colour” on Genius.
This alone differentiated Microdisney from their Cherry Red and Rough Trade contemporaries, to the extent of often coming across as a thinking person’s version of The Smiths — both lyrically and sonically — but it was also their nuanced songwriting methods that prevented them from being mere Steely Dan copyists, despite almost liberally borrowing various bits and bobs from their classic rock favourites at times.
Coughlan and O’Hagan’s fierce intelligence meant that they possessed a strong critical faculty, which resulted in an inimitable ability to truly understand their influences and gauge how they should be processed.
Regarding the existence of subversiveness in popular culture, for instance, there was a recognition from both members that Coughlan’s lyrics and O’Hagan’s arrangements shouldn’t exist for the sake of being dissident and rebellious. This was something that organically evolved into Microdisney’s Trojan Horse having substance beyond style, as the original formula, established by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 play The Threepenny Opera, was considered by Coughlan to have severe limitations by 1985.
“I do like a lot of their ideas,” he told Record Mirror journalist Ian Dickson. “The way Brecht and Weill had of grabbing hold of the most banal style of music and using it as a bitter comment about their society was brilliant. But some Camden hobo in 1988 singing sea shanties as a form of subversion is insane.” XTC’s Andy Partridge may well disagree, given the nature of his band’s 1984 single All You Pretty Girls, but Coughlan raised an excellent point in needing to strategise and tailor his malcontent streak.
Resultantly, Coughlan and O’Hagan also had an expert knack of appreciating just how delicate the subversive line could be and how such an attempt could easily fall into disarray when handled with glibness.
While scorning ABC’s post-The Lexicon of Love reinventions, Coughlan added to Record Mirror: “I’d like to string up Martin Fry more than any other person I can think of. It was him, and the three other wankers he was with, who made it acceptable to be a cabaret star and still be ‘subversive’; to go into the Soho Brasserie in your Jean Paul Gaultier suit and think that, somehow, that would be subversive because, basically, you knew you were taking the piss.”
In contrast, and by Coughlan’s self-deprecating admission to Sounds writer Roy Wilkinson, the melancholic lyrical content on The The’s pioneering indie-dance album Soul Mining and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ fellow debut album From Her to Eternity, were other apparent influences during the writing and recording of The Clock Comes Down the Stairs.
Their form of sentimentality gave Coughlan’s work in 1985 an extra layer of light and shade, in that he added compassion and empathy on top of the sardonic commentary, even vis-a-vis the sexual politics of Are You Happy? and Begging Bowl that were ostensibly about embittered break-ups.
“I’m writing from experience, but these things we experience are fairly universal: injustices and oppression of one kind or another,” he told Melody Maker’s Helen Fitzgerald in December 1985. “People from all sorts of backgrounds have the same thing in store for them, really.”
Thus, it’s no surprise that such critical thinking also helped to establish Coughlan as a world class vocalist, resulting in him being the most talented, or at least the most underrated, rock artist of his generation.
Coughlan’s baritone delivery was frequently compared to one specific pop idol, Scott Walker, but he also owned around 200 records by black male artists while Microdisney were active, with the depth and richness of Coughlan’s voice highlighting just how closely he had clearly studied the likes of Lee Dorsey, Curtis Mayfield, Aaron Neville and Bobby Womack.
Like many peerless albums, The Clock Comes Down the Stairs was the result of band members carefully analysing their broad influences and coming up with something that was still individualistic at its core.
It was testament to O’Hagan’s skilful and superlative arrangements that The Clock Comes Down the Stairs wasn’t derivative, despite wearing musical inspirations so heavily on its sleeve that they risked leaving arm burns.
That’s all well and good, of course, but what about their magnum opus, 39 Minutes? All in good time, my friend. The genesis — and thus genius — of 39 Minutes operated in three ways: reverence, hatred and irony.
Transferring to the major leagues
Their previous album, Crooked Mile, saw Microdisney graduate from the inkies and receive a glut of journalistic buzz from youth pop magazines when it was released in January 1987, especially from Record Mirror.
One of its writers, Andy Strickland, proclaimed that they are “my very favourite band”, as “the songs here seem to possess a maturity and confidence that was only hinted at on The Clock Comes Down the Stairs”.
He added in the same issue: “Microdisney are unique. They possess two of the best songwriters in popular music today […] and they have a view of the world that’s refreshing, painfully honest and disturbing. They also make the most thoughtful, precise pop records of the day.”
Meanwhile, reviewing Crooked Mile’s lead single Town to Town, Nancy Culp wrote that Coughlan was “threatening to become a major league poet” and being “smart without being clever-clever”, with Eleanor Levy claiming in a live review that he “could be one of the great showmen of our time [and] he could possibly be the greatest semantic genius that modern popular music has to offer”.
Record Mirror was not in isolation either, as Barry McIlheney of Smash Hits put forward that Microdisney were “one of the more exciting discoveries of the New Year” when giving Crooked Mile eight out of ten.
Coughlan and O’Hagan, however, were disappointed with how Crooked Mile turned out. “It sounds like it was recorded in 1973 — and that’s bad,” O’Hagan told Levy in November 1987. Coughlan added: “I think what it all goes back to is that 1986 was a pretty lazy year for us. We thought we could get away with a lot of things. It’s now abundantly obvious that we couldn’t.”
On the one hand, Coughlan and O’Hagan were being too hard on themselves when, on the surface, there was little wrong with the robust Crooked Mile and there were additional mitigating factors at play.
For starters, Crooked Mile was their major label debut for Virgin Records and, after an impoverished existence with their previous independent label Rough Trade Records, it was most likely their first time with a proper recording budget and a sufficient set-up.
The entirety of Everybody is Fantastic was recorded in just ten days and with the use of drum machines, while the demos to The Clock Comes Down the Stairs were recorded with the latter. A compilation album — 1984’s We Hate You, South African Bastards!, which consisted of Microdisney’s earliest recordings on their friend’s small Irish label Kabuki — was released by Rough Trade under the agreement that the label would fund new instruments for the studio recording of The Clock Comes Down the Stairs.
It’s a minor miracle that those two albums became so impressive, although the fact that Gideon Gaye, the 1994 breakthrough album by O’Hagan’s next band The High Llamas, was recorded for just £2,500 showed how it was possible for Coughlan and O’Hagan to make the most of scant resources.
But, still, their greater ambition on Crooked Mile and subsequent material simply wasn’t viable on Rough Trade. After all, between their stints with Private Stock Records and Chrysalis Records, Blonde had been rejected by Rough Trade for sounding “too commercial” while the recording of Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85 would’ve bankrupted the label if they hadn’t departed for Virgin.
Therefore, getting used to new surroundings would understandably take some time and, to Microdisney’s credit, Crooked Mile sounded far less compromised than other major label debuts at the time.
After signing with CBS and Chrysalis, respectively, The Flaming Mussolinis and Shop Assistants’ 1986 albums, Watching the Film and Shop Assistants, were regarded as “lazy” and “mediocre” disappointments by Record Mirror, with singles from both groups failing to reach any higher than Number 77.
Hurrah!, after co-joining Arista from Kitchenware, also risked stagnation by promising to Record Mirror’s Martin Shaw that “a good 40 percent of our stuff is more laid back” and “we’ll simply be doing our old love songs”.
The Bodines, following their move from Creation to mini-major and forthcoming Warner Bros acquisition Magnet, consciously mixed guitars on their re-issued single Therese with a “tinny” lowness in an ill-fated bid to garner BBC Radio 1’s attention. Its chart peak of Number 76 in March 1987 — the same position as Hurrah’s highest charting single If Love Could Kill— said it all.
Town to Town’s chart high of Number 55 might not look overly impressive to some, but it did at least show how Microdisney were making a better stab at things, in terms of actually impressing new casual listeners and not critically succumbing to a detectable form of major label inferiority.
Regardless, and on the other hand, it’s undeniable that Crooked Mile was retrospectively more of a transitionary album and one of slight consolidation at best. In essence: Coughlan and O’Hagan really doubled down on their 1970s FM rock influences, with much of Crooked Mile sounding like a love letter to country rock and saloon bar blues.
Indeed, the heavier accent on balladry and acoustic principles — which included more frequent use of harmonicas, Hammond organs, pedal steel guitars and string arrangements — most resembled Gram Parsons’ 1973 debut solo album GP in places.
Town to Town, meanwhile, could be plausibly described as Big Star’s O My Soul meets Waylon Jennings’ High Time (You Quit Your Lowdown Ways), with a vague likeness of the bassline to Steely Dan’s Everyone’s Gone To The Movies and the guitar solo on Gram Parsons’ I Can’t Drive added for good measure.
Elsewhere: Bullwhip Road and Our Children both had the heart-wrenching manner of Gram Parsons’ Brass Buttons and The Eagles’ Hollywood Waltz, respectively, while Armadillo Man could have easily been regarded as a more uptempo reinterpretation of Steely Dan’s Rose Darling.
The latter could also be said of Steely Dan’s Kings or Parker’s Band, with regards to Big Sleeping House, but it had more of an overworked jauntiness that would foreshadow the BBC Radio 2-friendly Trojan Horse of Paul Heaton’s likeable yet decidedly inferior group The Beautiful South.
That would end up becoming an oft-heard yet slightly inexact comparison when Coughlan was never as facile as Heaton on, say, The Housemartins’ Build or The Beautiful South’s 36D and Oh, Blackpool.
For all of Crooked Mile’s gleaming polish and eloquent maturity, Coughlan and O’Hagan had a point by saying, less than a year on, that it sounded dated and maybe even somewhat incomplete. Enter, 39 Minutes.
Adopting professionalism with exasperation
Microdisney had a habit of self-sabotage by this point: delays in recording Crooked Mile meant that it had missed the final deadline for a crucial pre-winter release which, according to Coughlan when speaking to Strickland in January 1987, was “why it seems we were out of the public eye for a whole year [after The Clock Comes Down the Stairs was released]”.
But, as a standalone piece of art and music, there genuinely wasn’t any plain sign of this on 39 Minutes, as it perennially comes across as a triumphant labour of love from a bunch of powerhouses and workhouses.
From start to finish on 39 Minutes, there was evidently a concerted effort to modernise and toughen up their sound through absorbing a broader range of newer influences. It’s true that the album’s melodically fetching lead single, Singer’s Hampstead Home, owed a certain degree of debt to Jimmy Webb’s 1972 album Letters in both soul and style, but the mantra and material on 39 Minutes was otherwise less 1970s-centric than before.
Microdisney were hitherto influenced by the early works of Steely Dan, namely the run of albums from 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill to 1975’s Katy Lied, but 39 Minutes had more in common with 1980’s Gaucho, thanks to a greater focus on jazzier touches, including special guests The Kick Horns, as well as frequent soul harmonies and cocktail bar-esque synth grooves.
For one, there are slight elements of Time Out of Mind from Gaucho on 39 Minutes’ second single, Gale Force Wind — at least in terms of piano melody. Stylistically, a number of tracks on 39 Minutes — especially High & Dry, Send Herman Home and United Colours — also resemble a spiritual homage of some kind to Donald Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly.
Those three synth-heavy tracks also had a non-ironic affinity of sorts with Bobby Womack and Scritti Politti’s respective 1985 albums, So Many Rivers and Cupid & Psyche 85. That is unsurprising when Coughlan openly loved Womack, while Microdisney were managed by Scritti Politti’s former keyboardist-cum-manager Matthew Kay when they released Crooked Mile.
39 Minutes also marked the first time that the sonic influence of Scott Walker writ large beyond Coughlan’s vocals, with his 1984 album Climate of Hunter being the primary source here. Ambulance for One started off with a basic melody that was not dissimilar to Walker’s Track Five, for instance, before transforming into the avant-garde noise of Walker’s Track Six meets The Fall’s Barmy from their 1985 album This Nation’s Saving Grace.
John Cale’s 1982 album Music for a New Society, one that was just as abstruse as Climate of Hunter, also showed Microdisney’s flair for channelling art-rock more commercially and melodically without losing any of its angular spirit and creative intelligence in the process. This was underlined by the two ballads on 39 Minutes — Bluerings and Soul Boy — perhaps sharing the floaty nature of Cale’s Taking Your Life in Your Hands.
Microdisney, now growing in line with their heroes, were still demonstrating their reverence, but the sheer disdain aimed at sophisti-pop groups, both fledging and leading, highlighted their contradictory feelings on 39 Minutes — with it being an album that simultaneously hated and loved music in equal measure.
A doomed overlapping with sophisti-pop
Any rummage through the glossier press cuttings on Microdisney, during their tenure at Virgin, reveals surprisingly little about their classic rock influences. There were certainly references to this circa 1985 — with one influential fanzine editor refusing to cover Microdisney at all, during the Rough Trade era, due to regarding them as being akin to “the bloody Eagles” — and the indie-skewed inkies did continue to give column inches to such comparisons in a more approving way throughout the Virgin era.
But, within the world of Record Mirror and beyond, Strickland and his peers were acknowledging an R&B soundscape first and foremost when reporting on Microdisney’s releases for Virgin. Q’s Paul Davies, for instance, made namechecks to “Philly Soul”, which was an unfortunate turn of phrase when Record Mirror’s Roger Morton used the exact same words, with added “brash horns”, when reviewing Hue & Cry’s 1987 sophisti-pop album Seduced & Abandoned.
There was a continued endeavour to pigeonhole Hue & Cry as anti-pop and nonconformist intellectuals, who were deemed to be more than disposable fodder for teenage girls. “Pure pop is pure capitalism in the sense that it doesn’t tax anybody’s brain,” frontperson Pat Kane told Record Mirror’s Johnny Dee while attacking Holly Johnson’s 1989 single Americanos.
“Capitalists want the quickest, easiest return for their money as possible and, in pop, that means having pop stars as vacuous and as easily consumable as possible. Un-pure pop is what Hue & Cry are. We’re not easily consumable. We say things and put over political ideas in the midst of pop music. That’s a capitalist’s nightmare.”
New Musical Express’ Alan Jackson even defended the group by writing that much of the band’s live fanbase, at the start of 1988, mainly consisted of 20-something pop followers, which was nothing much different from what other white male group were experiencing at that time.
Likewise, the reportage of fellow Scottish pop-rock band Love & Money was one that could earn unwanted comparisons as to how Microdisney were covered. Much was made in 1988 of how their second album, Strange Kind of Love, was produced by long-time Steely Dan producer Gary Katz.
Record Mirror’s Jim Reid praised its lead single and title track as “one of the most assured British pop sets in a long while” and “a record that has the rare confidence of cool restraint and underplayed irony”.
It was also described by Q’s Philip Thomas as an effort from a “melodic and thoughtful [group]” and “a singer [that] is in possession of an almost faultless set of vocal chords”, which “lavished attention on melody and lyrics” for their “small army of devoted fans”.
Vox’s Alastair McKay, meanwhile, equated the album to Bonnie Raitt and John Hiatt by deeming it as “a more mature work which staked a claim to the AOR market with overly smooth production”. He then attempted to overegg the sophistication of Love & Money by immediately commenting on their possessions that included rockabilly clothes, Charles Bukowski books, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain and an Eddie Cochran compilation.
Much like Hue & Cry, they were a band who attacked other groups — including Scottish fellows Hipsway, Orange Juice and Wet Wet Wet — with an unearned vein of arrogance. “I don’t see anything special in the likes of Big Audio Dynamite or The The,” frontperson James Grant told Record Mirror. “I don’t see how [fans] can like bands like that, in preference to us.”
The problem with much of this was how any casual music fan reading such pieces, and not knowing that much about the context at hand, could surely come away with the impression that Microdisney were interchangeable with these divisive bands in some shape or form — what with the contiguity of sharp opinions, sleek production and worldly-wise lyrics, particularly as Kane strained to interviewers his need to write songs with a lyrical “twist”.
Yet, with lyrics that included “She’d spent 35 pounds on one pack of ciggies/Running an errand for him indoors/Then she kept running straight down to Leeds Central” on Hue & Cry’s abysmal Number 15 single Looking for Linda, it was straightforwardly apparent in reality that they were cut from a different cloth to Microdisney and something to get snooty about.
Kane was certainly guilty of speechifying the hypocrisy of 1980s British life without any gravitas or even the most basic form of self-awareness. He essentially had jumped-up yuppie tendencies without realising so; a person who could well be Coughlan’s ultimate musical nemesis.
Even more pertinently, Kane’s tendency to stereotypically wave his hands in the style of gay comic Larry Grayson on stage — which he weakly defended to Dee as “my recognition of the double-sided nature of human sexuality” — was outsmarted by Rack from Crooked Mile, released eight months before the Pet Shop Boys’ album track It Couldn’t Happen Here.
Rack was one of Microdisney’s finest achievements as, while initially conceived by Coughlan as an attack on music industry gatekeeping, it unquestionably also doubled up as one of the decade’s most touching explorations of the HIV-AIDS pandemic.
It opened with direct insight (“I must not do this thing/I’ll wreck my social life/They’ll disinfect my chair/And claim some uncivil rights”), before unleashing Coughlan’s trademark bile and cynicism (“The doctor is a fool/He’s just a callous snob/He had 15 years in a Jesuit school/And now he’s not fit for any job”), and then ending with fluent humanity (“There’s nothing wrong with me/I am just wonderful/I’ve got pop songs to keep me calm/And faithful friends like you/So, if you ever need a view/At my barbed wire rainbow”).
Kane’s sloganeering declarations of “I hope you’re all fully paid-up members of CND after that one!” and “This song is anti-Thatcherite and anti-establishment!” between songs on stage were undermined, too; this time by Smash Hits journalist Sylvia Patterson’s observation that they went hand-in-hand with “dodgy perv statements” to random female attendees.
Love & Money, meanwhile, were actually rather apolitical: 1987’s River of People, which attacked sheep mentalities, was their only single that went anywhere near socio-political commentary, and they openly admitted that their lyrics were almost solely about romantic betrayal, death and sex.
No wonder that Coughlan and O’Hagan’s mutual hatred for these two bands — with O’Hagan telling Levy that “Hue & Cry are the worst” — sonically showed on 39 Minutes. This was their angriest and heaviest-sounding album as, while the smoothness was undeniably slick, it was also batted out hardly with abrasiveness and aggression, rather than just gloss and sheen.
Microdisney were audibly rattled on 39 Minutes and throwing their musical punches from all angles: Coughlan had never curled his lip with such venom until now and, while he didn’t lose his breezy touch on guitar by any means, O’Hagan was also found on forceful, tight and urgent form.
James Compton also merits special praise for his work on keyboards, too, as his moreish synths were so harsh and strident that it was sometimes like Tom Waits crayoning all over Gaucho and The Nightfly with abstract jazz instrumental Dave the Butcher from his 1985 album Swordfishtrombones.
Finally in their element
That leads neatly into 39 Minutes’ third and most crucial element: irony. It also happens to be the album’s trump card, as it allowed Coughlan and O’Hagan’s unmatched analysis of music culture to be flowing at its freest, led by their career-long interest in writing a “likeable melody within a challenging [and discordant chord] structure”.
“All we do is present something, which is basically pretty horrible, namely the world around us, in a reasonably acceptable way,” O’Hagan told Strickland when promoting Crooked Mile.
“We take a certain amount of care and a certain amount of precision over the way we present things, and that’s what separates us from the other bands who have the same intent.
“Obviously, there are other bands who want to write about the same things as Cathal writes about, but they seem to think that, in order to do that, they’ve got to match it with a crude sound. We don’t see any reason in doing that; we’re just playing with the formula. Nothing new, really.”
That was undoubtedly true of Crooked Mile, but 39 Minutes achieved something new by going far beyond Steely Dan’s levels of sarcasm and subversion to reach something that could be considered to be meta-irony.
Another example here was how Melody Maker journalist and future Coughlan collaborator Andrew Mueller put forward the assertion in 1990 that “39 Minutes made the rough live with the smooth and like it with greater effect than anything since [Elvis] Costello’s Imperial Bedroom”.
All fair and true, particularly as 1986’s Blood & Chocolate was another Costello effort that had some resemblance to 39 Minutes: it was arguably Costello’s most abrasive and direct album, after all, while he sneered even more scornfully than usual with lyrics that included: “Like a matador with his pork sword, while we all die of laughter”. The subtle difference, though, was how Costello sonically played it much straighter on Blood & Chocolate, and thus it became more of a conventional rock masterpiece as a result.
Whereas, during the brief promotional campaign for 39 Minutes in April 1988, Coughlan waxed lyrical to Record Mirror about the records that he enjoyed for their kitsch and quasi-novelty value, namely Barry White’s 1987 “it’s so naff, it’s brilliant” album The Right Night & Barry White and the “early ’70s” overindulgence of Spandau Ballet’s 1982 album Diamond.
Coughlan’s love of “weird” Arabic pop to “wind people up” found its way onto No, I Can’t Say (Thank You for Speaking to Me, Mustapha), a B-side to Gale Force Wind, but it was the aforementioned albums that sincerely spawned an atmosphere of mischief and playfulness on 39 Minutes.
One specific highlight was the anti-royalist album track Send Herman Home, where Coughlan’s distorted opening gambit, “They flailed me about the flanks with a stainless steel tennis racket”, was soon followed by backing vocals from Londonbeat of I’ve Been Thinking About You fame.
Londonbeat later appeared as session vocalists on Shakespears Sister’s 1989 album Sacred Heart, which revealed how far Microdisney were keeping tongues in their cheeks; even more so by a single-minded determination to dementedly credit Londonbeat as the Fabulous Golden Showers.
Then, when the song couldn’t possibly get more unpatriotic, in came a tap-dancing solo that was juxtaposed with Coughlan’s overdubbed cry of “I am a reasonable man/The buttermilk of Beelzebub”. George Byrne of Irish magazine Hot Press inevitably declared Send Herman Home as “arguably the best song Microdisney have ever recorded”.
This was an inspired moment of off-the-cuff spontaneity and near-the-knuckle humour that finally matched the fiercer and devil may cry edge of their renowned live concerts and BBC Radio sessions. For perhaps the first time in a recording studio, Mueller’s retrospective comparison in the 1995 mini-book Unknown Pleasures: 20 Great Lost Albums Rediscovered, that Microdisney were equivalent to a Steely Dan tribute band fronted by characters from Reservoir Dogs, was something that finally checked out.
There were hitherto a few glimpses of such warped eccentricities — the last 50 seconds of Genius from The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, for instance, consisted of Coughlan saying “I am God: I bring you an instant picnic” and then repeatedly chanting “Picnic”—but that was more of an anomaly on Microdisney’s previous albums. Whereas, throughout 39 Minutes, humorous production touches were more cohesively integrated with the lyrics to form a more focused and fully realised artistic persona.
While it could also be argued that Crooked Mile slotted into the indie-pop scenery a little too comfortably in 1987, as the rootsiness of its overproduction gave the album a slightly uptight sound at times, 39 Minutes instead relaxes far more with looser production, which gave more room for ideas to fully breathe and engage with catchier bite.
Morton rightly pointed out that the likes of Hue & Cry couldn’t unwind enough to comes across as distinctive, so 39 Minutes distinctly sounds like a response to this: a sonic commentary on the state of pop music that simultaneously mocks the sophisti-pop scene and shows those bands how it should be done, while paying deepest respect to its superior forerunners.
Such an effortless yet refined abstraction was most likely intentional when O’Hagan explained to Strickland in January 1987 that the group had a moral appreciation yet musical aversion to artists, most notably the left-wing activist Billy Bragg, as “if you’re dogmatic in both politics and art, it probably means you’re pretty boring in what you’re doing”.
Coughlan added that there was a need “to get to these things across through other means” and, while O’Hagan did concede that “a certain apolitical attitude with a weird direction does make for good results lyrically”, Coughlan’s lyrics went far, far beyond this sentiment.
Subsequently, 39 Minutes, this time lyrically, again demonstrated a creative apex and stronger artistic identity. The only retrospective blemish on The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is how Coughlan’s words on London classism and privilege, from the perspective of an Irish migrant, had its limitations.
Horse Overboard, with its surreal final verse of “Can we sleep alone?/My wife is a horse/Poor old sailor boy/Beached for evermore”, was blatantly the result of Coughlan and O’Hagan trying to stave off waves of boredom and poverty, following the recording of Everybody is Fantastic, by habitually taking LSD for nine months.
Humane, meanwhile, appeared to be an autobiographical song about Coughlan’s deteriorating relationship with his father, with a line that included: “If they kick you out, you’ll join the Army/We won’t let you lie around this house.” When speaking to Fitzgerald in 1985, Coughlan explained: “My father hated the music I played. When I dropped out of college, he knew I’d never get a proper job. We have little left to talk about.”
The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is still a masterwork, with its anti-yuppie and anti-Thatcherite manifesto being delivered so contemptuously yet thoughtfully, but the insularity and reclusiveness that occasionally surrounds it indicated that Coughlan was lyrically punching below his lofty weight at times and had more to contribute in future. A gifted wordsmith was always there, but more life experiences were needed to observe a world that went beyond an impoverished existence and very liberal values.
To its credit, Crooked Mile eagerly broadened Coughlan’s lyrical ideas beyond domestic affairs: Bullwhip Road appeared to comment on the political situation in South Africa, with its references to cypress trees (“Maybe he learned to love prison bars and pain/Seems like we’ll never know/So take him away in your wagon of grey/Past the fights in the streets to the shade of the cypress tree”), and Hey Hey, Sam was confirmed in 1987 to be a caustic tale of a secret service agent (“The Anglo Saxons make their love/In frogman suits and boxing gloves/These electrodes sure are fine”).
But, much like the music on Crooked Mile, this skirted around the boundaries of transition. Coughlan’s work was more sophisticated and subtle here, but paring down both the lyrics and the sound meant that Crooked Mile was generally a less combative and immediate affair.
The anti-yuppie barbs were as imaginative as ever, but it was evident that some of Coughlan’s most restrained and straightlaced lyrics of his career appeared on the likes of Our Children (“You get your lunch in the street/You are young, you are poor/And you can’t even do as you’re told”) and Mrs Simpson (“She may have gone/Back to her husband/But I don’t really care”).
Peeping through the fame game
These experiences — of writing, recording and then promoting Crooked Mile — meant such niggles had completely subsided on 39 Minutes, though.
Crooked Mile was an album of many firsts for Microdisney, after all. Lenny Kaye, of the Patti Smith Group, produced Crooked Mile, in the same year when the Kaye-produced Solitude Standing by Suzanne Vega was released.
The band also recorded their first ever bona fide promo video, which resulted in Town to Town being named ‘best video of the week’ by BBC One’s flagship show for children, Saturday Superstore.
They later supported U2 at the Birmingham NEC Arena in August 1987 — more than six years after they were booted out of the Irish leg of U2’s Boy tour at various colleges and small venues, when Coughlan was overheard saying “the U2 boy wanks and sniffs glue” during a soundcheck.
Coughlan and O’Hagan were now being interviewed by many periodicals, too — ranging from girl teen weekly Jackie, to broadsheet newspaper The Independent — while Coughlan even wore his best yellow cardigan on BBC One’s daytime magazine programme, The Tom O’Connor Roadshow.
Coughlan still protested against Margaret Thatcher’s anti-austerity measures on the likes of Bluerings (“Your neck is cheap elastic beneath the brain of lead/Thanks for the lies and poison/‘Nothing is true’, you say/The road to honest happiness ploughs right through yellow scum like you”) and Gale Force Wind (“I saw a dead man in the street today/And he’ll stay there because he never paid/He was a stranger who would not go home/Blinded by sun on the streets of gold”), but many of Coughlan’s pin-sharp shots on 39 Minutes were now aimed at those from the socio-cultural spectrum.
Their time at Virgin so far, and being on the fringes of mainstream alternative rock, might have been small fry to some artists, but it categorically made all the difference, as those experiences seemed to give Coughlan an impetus to confidently and directly snapshot the overindulgences of 1980s British culture and media with morbid curiosity.
No limits and mercy were shown in Coughlan’s most diverse range of subjects yet: Benetton’s advertising executives on United Colours (“Keep yourself bland/So folks can understand/United Colours: do the trick/United Colours: proud and thick”), the movie industry on Herr Direktor (“Oh, but Americans are really great/They don’t resent success/And they love the English filmic art/Which is the very best”) and fame-hungry musicians who’d happily sell their integrity to intrusive journalists for free publicity and more hits on the Boy George-inspired Singer’s Hampstead Home (“He’s crawling home to his golden bath/Drags his face on the gravel path/He only had blank lines to say/But he said them in a witty and stylish way”).
There were glimpses of this on Crooked Mile, as And He Descended into Hell made a few oblique remarks on pop stars making knee-jerk and sensationalist political statements, but 39 Minutes marked the first time when the lighter and more showbiz-oriented elements of socio-political culture was consistently explored within a single Microdisney album.
And the best thing about this was how Coughlan embraced the best of both worlds and ran with the opportunity: 39 Minutes possessed the broader and nuanced subject matter of his political commentary on Crooked Mile, but also the more accessible and animated turn of phrase that was so often found on The Clock Comes Down the Stairs.
Send Herman Home’s acute insight on British imperialism and racism (“We’ve got a job for Churchill, Nelson/And good old Chichester Clark/To show the white man's bite is fiercer/Than the blackest bark”) was sandwiched between career-best scoffs at yuppies on Ambulance for One (“What pretty shapes big lines make/Have you met my friend?/He says his name is Tim/Take him home and kill him”) and High & Dry (“Mondays, I go clubbing/Just outside of Leipzig in a pin striped suit/And a bunch of roses/Strolling through the vestry being beaten up/By those English beer-boys, Soho tea-boys/I forgive them all because they are really into what they do”) that reached cut-throat and inspired levels of absurd irrelevance.
Alas, such brilliance spelt by the beginning of the end, but unlike 10,000 Maniacs — unsurprisingly when Our Time in Eden managed Top 35 placings in both the UK and the US — much of this was enforced by external forces.
An overly crowded marketplace
Microdisney were unlucky enough to be signed to Virgin at a time when major labels were still getting to grips with how to understand, never mind sell, alternative rock bands. Strickland claimed in January 1987 that such labels were dismissive of Microdisney’s Rough Trade labelmates Jazzateers, as “the guitars are too loud”, while Go! Discs publicly complained to Record Mirror a year earlier that majors refused to show any interest in a co-release deal for Billy Bragg’s Top 10 album Talking with the Taxman About Poetry when “they couldn’t see any hit singles — and that was it”.
Equally out of time was the fact that many of Microdisney’s Irish peers were viewing music from a very different perspective, and thus they never quite fitted into this commercially burgeoning movement. “The Bothy Band are unusual in the sense that they’ve introduced harmonies; a thing unheard of in a lot of Irish music,” explained Coughlan to Record Mirror.
“I hate Irish cabaret music, which is why I detest The Pogues. I also hate The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers. Their style of music is this trivial sing-song crap, which I always find embarrassing: a forced conviviality.”
Hothouse Flowers, who were jointly inspired by the personal lyricism of The Waterboys’ 1985 album This Is the Sea and the corporate ambition of U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree, also focused on rootsy singalongs and traditional Irish influences — this time in the form of Gaelic culture.
Their two Top 5 albums, 1988’s People and 1990’s Home, could even be regarded as anti-Microdisney albums: their 1970s rock motifs included acoustic guitars, bodhráns, fiddles and mandolins, but a hopeful and mellow form of evangelism, with occasional use of gospel choirs, wasn’t a million miles away from the spiritual undertones of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and was amiably written without any irony.
Virgin labelmate Feargal Sharkey, from Northern Ireland, didn’t write about his nation’s political troubles until the 1988 album track Blue Days, as he told Record Mirror’s Ian Dickson that politics in pop music was something that he had reservations about.
He explained: “It’s difficult to say something coherent and constructive in a 1,000 page book, never mind trying to do it in the space of the average pop song, which is what — 50 [or] 100 words? That’s a fairly outrageous synopsis to attempt; to try to compress 400 years of history into three and a half verses and a chorus.”
Prefab Sprout, meanwhile, were arguably the only other indie-friendly and inkie-credible group that expressed a musical debt to Steely Dan: for one, their mid-period 1990 effort, the Number 35 single Carnival 2000, had samba-inspired soundscapes in the nature of Steely Dan’s I Got the News.
The diverse range of musical heroes, from frontperson Paddy McAloon, were also relatively comparable to Microdisney in the form of Elvis Presley’s soul backing group The Jordanaires, George Gershwin, Hall & Oates, Michael Jackson, Prince, Stephen Sondheim and Jimmy Webb.
The musical paradox from McAloon had broad similarities, too: deceptively gentle melodies and playfully accomplished musicianship that co-existed with poetic lyricism and fiercely intelligent opinions on music history.
Overall, though, McAloon viewed Steely Dan and his other inspirations with a particular degree of caution when it came to integrating them with his artistry. “I have all their records, they were brilliant; it was only The Nightfly [that] I didn’t like,” he told German pop magazine Spex in 1988.
“I think I’m the only person in the world to say that would be a record I’d say is too smooth — all those session musicians. For example, this is a part of our own style: we make use of our limitations. We’re not virtuosos and, although we might think some things are well played, we’re all — apart from [drummer] Neil [Conti] — amateurs. We’re fans; that’s what counts.”
Ditto, when speaking to The Guardian’s Mark Cooper in 1988, he added: “I’m not awfully fond of irony. I think it’s probably a sign of decay. A song like Enchanted on [Prefab Sprout’s 1988 album From Langley Park to Memphis] is about finding something to be excited about, year after year.”
By that point in time, McAloon was expressing an interest in writing simple pop songs, albeit with a bittersweet tinge still clearly existing, about a broad range of contemporary US myths, as well as deemphasising the importance of cerebral and complex melodies to music journalists.
The idea of developing a music persona was also being dismissed by McAloon but, if there was one, a bookish and eccentric yet modest and quietly-spoken pop obsessive genius was arguably most at play here.
And despite uncompromising tendencies, namely a reluctance to tour, he was an unashamed populist at heart and willing to play the industry game in a way that was never natural to Microdisney, including recording B-sides that were often superlative to Microdisney’s tendency to doodle with them.
Prefab Sprout weren’t inferior to Microdisney — 1985’s Steve McQueen is very much a stone cold classic, in fact — but they were two different bands.
Basically, even if the two lead singles on From Langley Park to Memphis — Cars & Girls and their Number 7 follow-up The King of Rock ’n’ Roll — respectively parodied Bruce Springsteen’s militant fans and shared the discordant nature of 39 Minutes’ synths, Prefab Sprout’s overall sound in 1988 was borne from an earnest warmth for pop music as an art medium.
A backlash to end it all?
What also didn’t help was how Virgin appeared to be in poor A&R shape by 1988, given the commercial and creative decline of many established bands on their roster, ranging from The Human League to Public Image Ltd.
XTC did manage to avert such an artistic slump, albeit with sales that were excessively dismal: their finest album, 1984's The Big Express, sold around 15,000 copies in the UK, despite an estimated £75,000 spent on recording the album and another £33,000 splurged on the video promo to the lead single All You Pretty Girls.
The domestic performance of the band’s follow-up, 1986's Skylarking, wasn’t considerably better, after it became the group’s lowest ever charting studio album at Number 90 and was outsold by their quasi-novelty album Psonic Psunspot, released as part of their Dukes Of Stratosphear spin-off.
Soho of Hippychick fame, who described themselves as “mutant rock” and “robo-pop”, were newbies that soon clashed with Virgin executives over being handed ill-suited producers and a bubblegum pop image that went against their indie-dance stylings. Thus, Piece of You became their highest charting Virgin single, peaking at Number 80 in March 1988, the same month when Gale Force Wind struggled its way up to a Number 98 peak.
Shortly after Crooked Mile’s release, Levy predicted that, while Microdisney had “carved out a neat little niche for them on the leftfield of mainstream pop”, reaching “mass recognition depends very much [on] their determination and Virgin Records’ patience”.
This did not bode well when Microdisney were already starting at Virgin from a fairly low consumer base, with Cavanagh estimating that The Clock Comes Down the Stairs had posted combined sales of no more than 10,000 copies in the UK and Ireland by the time they had signed to Virgin.
Throughout the early months of 1987, and during the release campaign for Crooked Mile, the band were in loggerheads with Virgin over how to follow the modest but ultimately encouraging success of Town to Town, due to the band’s dogged belief that “we didn’t have the right song to follow [it]”.
Town to Town was not succeded by a second single and, according to Levy in November 1987, this “resulted in Microdisney virtually disappearing from the wild and wacky world of pop, [with] all the headway they’d made in the months after Christmas been virtually wasted and, ten months later, they’re having to start again [with the new release of Singer’s Hampstead Home]”. Coughlan retrospectively told Q’s John Aizlewood in 1992 that “we didn’t push as hard as we could in Microdisney and we paid the price”.
But, while there is some truth in this, it can also be legitimately said that Microdisney creatively did all they could to reverse the self-inflicted damage upon releasing 39 Minutes, as they had figuratively thrown the kitchen sink into its recording and were now firing on all cylinders.
The failure of Singer’s Hampstead Home to reach the Top 100 maybe said a little more about Virgin and the record industry as a whole than Microdisney. As there was little more that they could realistically do by that point, their fate was partly left at the hands of British music journalists.
Unfortunately, certain ones were unkind, with Melody Maker’s David Stubbs decrying 39 Minutes as “wooden and austere”, before adding that “it’s horrible, frankly, [and] I get nothing from this, whatsoever”.
His colleague, Ian Gittins, openly seconded this view during the 39 Minutes tour by stating how “Microdisney are too clever for their own good”, with “a lack of edge” and “fussy tunes” that are “miles too sedate and settled”.
Record Mirror’s Tony Beard, in a remarkable U-turn from the magazine’s hitherto rave coverage, completely misunderstood the Trojan Horse concept of Microdisney and was dismissive of the group in December 1987.
He complained their “anaemic” and “plodding” live performance showed how “all traces of bitterness are needlessly smothered by a saccharine overdose, ensuring a warm welcome on the nation’s coffee tables, [and Microdisney are] currently stuck in the void between bland yuppie fodder and [left-wing street punk band] Redskins’ radicalism”. He added: “Honestly, if this is the next big thing, then I’m hanging up my notepad.”
In a three-star review, Q’s Paul Davies was more giving and tolerant, describing 39 Minutes as “potent stuff” and comparing Coughlan favourably to Kevin Rowland from Dexys Midnight Runners, but it paled in comparison to the four-star photo spread on the same page for Nanci Griffith’s Nashville-inspired album Little Love Affairs.
Of all people, even Strickland’s enthusiasm was dimming slightly, with his four-star review and focus on 39 Minutes’ “smooth […] white boy soul” being less fanboyish than his nine out of ten review for Crooked Mile. There was a realistic possibility that Microdisney were no longer his absolute favourites and were just one of many bands that he really enjoyed.
One saving grace did come from Max Bell of Number One, though, who awarded Singer’s Hampstead Home with a five-star ‘single of the week’ award in November 1987. But the review said more about Boy George than Microdisney and, if Record Mirror was the more enlightened and mature brother that preferred Bomb The Bass and Voice Of The Beehive to Smash Hits’ more favoured A-ha and Kylie Minogue in 1988, then Number One was Smash Hits’ brattier and shallower kid sister that stanned Brother Beyond.
Consequently, and not long after being dropped by Virgin, New Musical Express reported in July 1988 that Microdisney had split due to strained internal differences and a desire to work on individual projects.
Worse still, and unlike The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, 39 Minutes has never been properly reassessed by critics, with the exception of Mueller. And, quite frankly, it remains languished on a table with other superlative yet immediately misunderstood albums, such as Elvis Costello & the Brodsky Quartet’s The Juliet Letters, Curve’s Doppelgänger and R.E.M.’s Monster. The fuller legacy of 39 Minutes, though, was what happened next.
A prolonged imprint left
As hinted at before, this went hand-in-hand with Merchant’s new direction and venture after leaving 10,000 Maniacs. Because, while a handful of tracks from her 1995 solo debut album Tigerlily, most notably Beloved Wife and Jealousy, skirted a little more closely to the stricter template of 10,000 Maniacs, Tigerlily departed hugely from Our Time in Eden’s polished Fleetwood Mac-type sheen to a minimal and sparser piano-influenced sound that propounded a more expansive and personal form of artistry.
In its own idiosyncratic and untypical way, the same applied to Coughlan’s The Fatima Mansions and O’Hagan’s The High Llamas. Both artists were, of course, still unlikely bedfellows in terms of reference points, with the first track on O’Hagan’s first solo album, 1990's imaginatively titled High Llamas, paying tribute to Perry Como.
In 1992, Coughlan added to Aizlewood: “We do seem to attract a lot of obsessives. The other day I got a computer printout saying ‘kill the pigs’ [referencing The Fatima Mansions’ anti-police song Angel’s Delight, which remarked on incidents of necklacing in South Africa, with its lyric ‘burn, motherfucker, burn’]. I’ll bet Perry Como has them, too, though.” And there were a few signs of Microdisney’s sonic touches on their early material.
Only Losers Take the Bus, the lead single from The Fatima Mansions’ 1989 debut mini-album Against Nature, launched a fury of rockabilly towards Margaret Thatcher’s infamously reputed quip in 1986 that male bus users over the age of 25 years were failures in life. Additionally, the Monday Club Carol fragment on the mini-album closer, Big Madness/Monday Club Carol, decided to go a tad Dutch with John Cale’s Antarctica Starts Here.
But while their first full-length album, 1990’s Viva Dead Ponies, continued to glimpse into British and London classism through the prism of an Irish migrant, this became a more streamlined process, where the foaming indignation was retained but the Trojan Horse and irony were ditched.
Instead, it was Coughlan’s polymathic tendencies that took centre stage in a practically unlimited and unprecedented fashion, with Viva Dead Ponies genre-hopping through synth-pop homages, electronic interludes, operatic showtunes from hell, melodic FM rock, baroque art-pop, melodramatic baritone balladry and, most significantly, regular bursts of industrial metal, almost akin to Big Black or Chrome being fronted by Scott Walker.
Later albums would focus on Coughlan gleefully reinterpreting his beloved Ministry and Swans hard fuzz recordings, which had been amassed during his Microdisney days, on top of even more unexpected curveballs, such as Q’s Matt Snow writing in his review of 1992’s Valhalla Avenue that “Purple Window owes its tune to The Associates’ 1982 exotic tragedy titled No”.
Lyrically, too, the signs were that Coughlan had now grown out of Microdisney, with his Fatima Mansions output squarely launching a series of blowouts on international relations and organised religion, whether it was the terrorism-themed Smiling or Jesus being reincarnated as a chilling Islamic shopkeeper from Crouch End on the title track to Viva Dead Ponies.
Simply put: “Go to England, baby raper, false economist/Call yourself King Charles III/Nobody will notice/Nobody will be alarmed/There is no constitution” from Blues for Ceaușescu and “Though surrounded by diseases, I stood tall and kept my health/I could have been important, if I’d been somebody else/The moral of this story is: this land’s a victim farm/Don’t you ever feed a beggar here, he’ll eat your fucking arm” from A Pack of Lies would not have been heard on any Microdisney track and were also lyrics that Nick Cave would have metaphorically killed for in 1990.
This commitment to musical development and diversity also applied to O’Hagan. It’s fair to say that the gentler and milder-mannered High Llamas were a tad more related to Microdisney than The Fatima Mansions — what with their banjo and vox organ arrangements on 1995’s Steely Dan-esque single Checking In, Checking Out. But their 1994 breakthrough album, Gideon Gaye, saw O’Hagan venture into 1960s pop standards territory in a way that wasn’t even periodically distinct on any of Microdisney’s albums.
Burt Bacharach, Gene Clark, Ennio Morricone, Rodgers & Hammerstein and Van Dyke Parks were now just as intrinsic to The High Llamas’ identity and soundscape as John Cale, Steely Dan and Jimmy Webb, after all.
Gideon Gaye also very directly and warmly pastiched several Beach Boys albums, ranging from Surf’s Up to Holland, whereas none of Microdisney’s songs were truly marked with such blatant sprinkles from Brian Wilson’s most arcane and avant-garde Beach Boys era of the early 1970s, with the possible exception of the delightfully wonky instrumental break on Rack.
But here was an album that boasted three-part harmonies; a rotating string section that included violin, viola and cello players; a nine-minute flute solo by Marcel Corientes on Track Goes By; outtakes and experimental 45-second interludes; and an esoteric quasi-conceptual lyrical theme about a collie and a goat, reflecting O’Hagan’s personal obsession with animals.
O’Hagan’s newest group earned approval from Bacharach, as well as being publicly courted by A&M founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, who were now running Almo Sounds. Love frontperson Arthur Lee also personally invited them to become his backing group for a London concert in 1994.
There was a further stylistic movement on their fourth album as a group, 1998’s Cold & Bouncy, which was subjectively their most cohesive and consistently enjoyable LP, where lounge pop influences were now joined by Brazilian bossa nova, Charles Mingus-esque brass, Serge Gainsbourg-type European movie scores and a penchant for electronic experimentation, no doubt gained from O’Hagan’s part-time member status with Stereolab.
The High Llamas have since released six well-received studio albums, while Coughlan unveiled his most acclaimed solo album, Song of Co-Aklan, in March 2021, before sadly passing away in May 2022. It’s obvious, at least to this writer, that 39 Minutes abruptly shifting musical gears to a more uninhibited sound gave Coughlan and O’Hagan the confidence to test their eclecticism in a way that their previous albums weren’t able to foreshadow.
No matter how Microdisney ended, that remains the definitive upshot of 39 Minutes and is one of many reasons why it should be heralded as one of the best albums of its time. Every one of those 39 minutes was a joy, for sure.