Iron Fist in Velvet Glove
the story of MICRODISNEY (Part 3)
an oral history by Paul McDermott
Chapter 9— Crooked Mile
If James Joyce had discovered punk rock, that’s Cathal Coughlan — Ronnie Gurr
Cathal Coughlan — It’s crazy to let business dominate your creative life, it is the abetter of creativity but it is not its route, and it can be its killer. For that reason I think that maybe it’s a good thing that the business has been taken out of music even though far fewer people will be able to do it in a particular vein. A vein that I’ve come through and anybody I respect pretty much has come through. However there are times when it just kind of takes over your life because you make mistakes and we had made a big mistake in not keeping books. There was this monstrous terror under the bed, which was beginning to develop actual form, we hadn’t ever done a tax return and we had had the letter [from the Inland Revenue].
Sean O’Hagan — Rough Trade offered us a deal but I think it wasn’t the greatest, I have to say that I don’t know if they had the belief in us or not, I don’t know, I’ve no idea. The experience of boxing the records for The Smiths, and not being The Smiths possibly might have had an influence. Various record companies chased us so at this stage we needed to get proper management so we meet Matthew Kay and Rob Warr.
Cathal Coughlan — It became plain that we had to find some cash from somewhere, because to be honest even though The Clock… was doing pretty well, as I recall it was only just about able to recoup all the money we had spent doing things we probably shouldn’t have done, like the In the World EP and various other recording things that didn’t work out. It was about mopping that up so some money needed to come from somewhere to deal with this. To basically hire accountants and keep us out of bankruptcy.
Jon Fell — Sean and Cathal were really ambitious, they worked really hard, they thought about playing, performing and writing, particularly writing, and producing all the time, all their waking hours and they wanted people to hear it. We had built up this following, there was a really strong live following and the record had done OK. Rough Trade’s accounting processes meant that we didn’t really realise anything much from that but that’s how the business was then. There wasn’t really that much enthusiasm from Rough Trade, it wasn’t like, “This record’s done really well, now we’re going to do a great follow up.”
Cathal Coughlan — Matthew Kay had been a member of Scritti during the strictly anarcho period, the Carol Street days.* He was a positive influence, it was good having him around. [Laughing] But the particular business strategy was probably not optimal for people with our personalities. There was major label interest in us and that of course appeared to us like the thing that was going to solve all our problems. We needed quite a bit [of money] in order to cope with what this [tax bill] was looking like being. It didn’t eventually get sorted out until 1989, which was a further five years, by which time we’d split up and moved on. It was like having a leech attached to you, some sort of implant in your cardiovascular system that goes off every so often.
*Scritti Politti’s squat at 1 Carol Street in Camden.
Tom Fenner — Moving from an Indie to a major matters to people, usually record obsessives or music obsessives. I think it certainly meant more in the 80s, than it does now. But if you were in a band in the 80s you could actually make the transfer from an Indie to a major label and get paid a living. For the first time you could eat properly and rent a house so these were actually quite significant things. Obviously it was quite an expensive act to sign a band and pay the four or five members enough so they had a living wage, could buy new equipment and everything else. Still at that time it was relatively common. Every band followed that path, The Smiths did, they were propped up by Warners’ money, and they were just on Rough Trade in the UK and signed to Warners Publishing and Warners ostensibly elsewhere.
Richard Boon — There’s always a disappointment to a degree when a band leaves a label, no one was relieved that they’d gone. [Laughing] “Those Paddys are outta the warehouse now,” it was nothing like that. It’s always a frustration, it had been earlier with Scritti Politti. Rough Trade Records had put a lot of resources into trying to make Green Gartside a pop star which didn’t really quite work and he went to Virgin as well. There was a period where very small Indies were like A&R for the larger Indies and things that were on the larger Indies became the A&R resource for majors.
Cathal Coughlan — There was one time where we found ourselves in a meeting with Dave Robinson [Stiff Records]. By this stage he was running the amalgamated Stiff/ZTT/Island. The meeting was set up by his second-in-command who was this ex-Guardsman, his first name was Nick [Stewart], he really knew his horses. Summoned to a meeting, OK we’re going. We go in the room and the first thing we see is the jovial face of “Hello, Dave Robinson” [laughing] baseball bat on the wall, the whole thing but it was in St Peter’s Square in the heart of boho Island Records: Richard and Linda Thompson; Witchseason; Free; Bob Marley.* That was an interesting meeting, but it sadly didn’t result in anything else.
*In 1973 22 St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith became the headquarters of Island Records.
Sean O’Hagan — I remember doing some big shows, Boston Arms was a big, packed show, That Petrol Emotion might have played with us and there were loads of A&R men, every company was there. Everybody wanted to sign us, labels were after us, there was a battle but Virgin came in with a very, very strong deal and they really want the band.
Cathal Coughlan — Rob Warr, Matthew’s business partner, was Scritti’s actual day-to-day manager and he also managed ABC and Heaven 17 and there was a particular modus operandi. It involved bidding wars and it nvolved trying to get as much cash in as possible, it wasn’t ideal for us and it involved a lot of deliberation before a record could be made. It also involved the sense that doing gigs was a bit infra dignitatem [beneath one’s dignity], it was not the thing that people would be doing in the future, it had essentially died on its ass. Guitars? “OK, if you insist.” [Laughing] The idea of doing another college tour, or doing a quick EP after The Clock…, all of which were muted, was like, “No, you’re got to start demoing for the next record.”
Sean O’Hagan — At that time Scritti Politti were hanging out in New York with Miles Davis, which was just, “Wow.” Things get serious, a big manager. Madness’ management wanted to do it but we end up going with Rob Warr and Matthew Kay and they’ve got a great relationship with Virgin. Suddenly we were meeting Simon Draper and all these guys. Simon Draper had just done the Scott Walker record, Climate of Hunter [Virgin Records, 1984].* [Laughing] Weirdly we’re getting closer and closer to our heroes, which is kind of strange.
*Richard Branson’s second cousin Simon Draper ran Virgin Records on a day-to-day basis. ‘Shaping the ’70s: Simon Draper and the Story of Virgin Records’ by Simon Reynolds charts Draper’s time with the company.
Cathal Coughlan — Cupid & Psyche 85 [Virgin Records, 1985] had ‘Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Fanklin)’ and ‘Perfect Way’ and all of this. When I look at that stuff I feel nothing but glad for Green because he achieved what he was setting out to achieve and it got him into the room with all sorts of amazing people and amazing things happened. But not everybody has that in them. That is not a nostrum that you can dole out willy-nilly to just anybody who just happened to be in the post-punk world and that was essentially what happened to us, and we let it happen. There followed a period of: “Let’s get a portastudio.” “OK.” “Let’s just do our five days a week.” We were productive, we were actually productive, there was no dicking around, other than the fact that this was in essence a kind of institutionalised dicking around [laughing] in my view.
Ronnie Gurr — I was aware of the very earliest singles that John Peel was playing. We used to have a fantastic set up in the A&R department in Virgin at Vernon Yard where we had a self-timing Nakamichi double cassette deck. It was the A&R junior’s job to put a C120 into that and set the timer for 10 o’clock every night to record Radio 1 for The John Peel Show. The Scottish Music Centre have taken all of my old tapes and they’re archiving them. I’ve got a collection of C120s which is just John Peel shows. I joined Virgin in 1982 so prior to that I would have been listening to the Peel show anyway but from ’82 we would have been listening to Peel at Virgin and would have been aware of Microdisney. They always stood out for me. The earlier stuff was obviously harsher and more abrasive and experimental I suppose.
Robert Forster — This is a generalisation but both bands were essentially album bands I thought, which might have worked more in the mid 70s, it might have worked more in the late 60s, but it didn’t work all that well in the mid 80s in London. As soon as you were signed to a label, that was above just one person running a label, there was a lot of money about and there was a lot of labels and there was a lot of, “We’re going to make you a star,” type people around or, “If you use that producer it’s going to potentially be really good for your profile,” and at the same time bands like Microdisney and The Go-Betweens were struggling to survive and so it was something of a deal with the devil. I don’t know if they’d see it that way but that’s the way it was for us and the way I sort of perceive it to be with Microdisney too.
Ronnie Gurr — Everyone who thinks that Richard Branson ran Virgin Records is under an illusion because it was his cousin Simon who effectively signed Tubular Bells back in 1973 and developed the company. Richard did sign The Sex Pistols but Simon basically was the guy who had the taste and who ultimately signed off on signing bands. [Laughing] Simon Draper is actually South African so can you imagine me having to take a band who had an album called, We Hate You South African Bastards! to Simon. [Laughing] So that was an interesting meeting, placing Microdisney albums on Simon Draper’s desk, but to be fair to him he obviously didn’t hold that against them because he did ultimately sign off on signing them to Virgin.
Jon Fell — Things didn’t change that much, we didn’t have a close hands-on relationship with Virgin. Ronnie Gurr, was our A&R man at Virgin, Ronnie was really enthusiastic and whatever it was about the band that made him want to sign it — he didn’t want to change it or interfere with it. The company came up with various suggestions for a producer. I can’t remember where Lenny Kaye’s name originally came from, he had had recent massive success with the first Suzanne Vega album [Suzanne Vega, A&M, 1995], which sounded OK. The main change from Rough Trade to Virgin is that obviously the major wants a producer who they think has got some chance of making something that’s quite marketable. The funny thing about that is that Lenny is just so not a music business career producer. It’s not his main thing and it never was his main thing. When we met him and worked with him I think that we knew that it was going to be a pretty easy process because Lenny was a very, very easy-going guy. He had some good ideas about arranging, he was really enthusiastic about what we thought were the strong points of the band.
Ronnie Gurr — There’s a good Scottish word — “Thrawn”. Bitter and twisted, I suppose. I think “Thrawn” actually means crooked or perverse. Somebody who’ll sometimes take an opposing view, stubborn or obstinate. I think the original meaning is twisted, distorted or misshapen. You’d call somebody “Thrawn” if they’re stubborn or obstinate. In my dealing with him I never found him that way, I always found him charming, but I think the perception of Cathal if you just studied his lyrics is that this is the work of someone who could quite justifiably be described as [laughing] “Thrawn”. If James Joyce had discovered punk rock — that’s Cathal Coughlan. I thought that’s what made them interesting. The contrast of those lyrics with Sean’s amazing melodic sense, as a counterpoint — it was brilliant, I don’t think there was anybody doing that. That’s what made them interesting, that’s why I wanted to work with them.
Sean O’Hagan — They [Virgin] suggest Lenny Kaye. We knew exactly who he was. Craig Leon was suggested. In the end we met Lenny and we liked him and we thought he was a nice guy. They’re flying a producer over, he came to London for a chat and we said, “Yeah we’re going to do it.” Poor old Jamie Lane, things had moved on but Bill Gill was still the engineer. Jamie must have felt awful. We go to Jam Studios, Tollington Park, Decca’s old studio, a fantastic place. Lenny is brought over with his family, his wife and kids and he’s living in a flat in Portland Place and he’s very happy. We rehearse, we do pre-production and then we go into the studio. I remember it being a really good time. He was such an historian, we’d talk about music so much, the history of music, all sorts of things. Everything was contextualised in an historical way. I was obsessed with Robbie Robertson at the time. Again, you see, people weren’t obsessed with Robbie Robertson and that idea of playing and trying to get the guitar to have that kind of Robbie Robertson or Richard Thompson thing, it’s very nice for me because suddenly he was like, “We’re going to make this really work.”
Cathal Coughlan — But the great thing about Crooked Mile was working with Lenny Kaye. Lenny Kaye to me is one of the patron saints of popular music post-beat group. He has been there and being doing stuff at many points along the way. He was a mentor to me in ways that he didn’t even know, that weren’t even really manifested on the record that we made but have served me in good stead ever since. As one of many things it was he who got me into Michael Ondaatje, I never would have heard of Michael Ondaatje because [laughing] I was still not getting past the first four pages of The Observer.
Tom Fenner — His background as well, the Nuggets stuff, the journalism, Patti Smith and what have you, he’s not just a one trick pony. He’s just generally a really nice bloke and we have this sort of conductor who’s just positive about everything and leads you by the hand through the processes and just makes it enjoyable.
Sean O’Hagan — I’ve no idea if Virgin liked what they were hearing, I’d say probably not. At the time their hits are with people like Danny Wilson and Crowed House, and I think they wanted us to be that, that’s what they want. They don’t really want politics or anger. Ronnie’s very supportive. Ronnie’s possibly protecting us from the label, I think that’s probably what was going on.
Jon Fell — It was a long period between the two records, so a lot of songs were written in that time so the songs on Crooked Mile are pretty good, I think really, really strong. We had played them all live for a long time. I think that Crooked Mile is a great collection of songs, my personal opinion is that it’s not a great sounding record and it’s hard again to pinpoint exactly why that happened.
Sean O’Hagan — I’m obsessed with The Band’s first couple of records and Northern Lights-Southern Cross [Capital Records, 1975]. I’m also obsessed with Alex Chilton. Big Star wasn’t really on the radar at all. Big Star was important to us right from the beginning because Stan Erraught and Steve Ryan [The Stars of Heaven] basically said Big Star is where it’s at and we were obsessed with Big Star. Big Star is really important but the other thing is that myself and Cathal were listening to a lot of soul. You know how Crooked Mile feels like a rock and roll record in a way? You know what we were listening to? Bobby Womack, loads of Bobby Womack. We wanted to have a kind of an electro thing with 808s [Roland TR-808] playing and we were listening to The Brothers Johnson. Virgin were, “No, no, no, you’re white boys, it’s rock and roll, we’re not going to get involved in any soul music here.” It was really weird, we were so into The Impressions, Curtis Mayfield, that thing that Bill Graham had sort of laid with us. We were always drawn to that so the demos for Crooked Mile sounded like electro. It only survived on one song, ‘Give Me All of Your Clothes’. Lenny was very good, he was very persuasive, he was doing the record company’s job in a studio I think really, he made that happen. I did want to get that R&B guitar style thing going. Mark Pringle was really pushing this, saying “You guys can do this, you guys can do this.” But no, we were a rock and roll band, so rather than having something that sounded like Bobby Womack we end up with stuff like ‘Mrs. Simpson’. ‘Mrs. Simpson’ is very much white music, isn’t it? You know it ain’t Black music and that’s where it ends. Which is great, it’s fine but we did have this ambition to explore Bobby Womack. We were obsessed with him. The Poet [Motown, 1981] was a record that we just devoured. Nobody knows that about Microdisney, do they? We loved our Black music, absolutely.
Jon Fell — ‘Town to Town’, I love that record, I think it’s a great single it really makes me smile and we had a fantastic time making it and we had a fun time making the video is well, which I thought was brilliant. There was a thought that some momentum would happen from ‘Town to Town’.
Cathal Coughlan — I think ‘Town to Town’ the song and the record we made of it hit the mark, unfortunately it was an album driven period and there were no other business levers to pull. We got touring at least in the UK, we were let off the leash enough for that and that was helpful for the longer haul.
Tom Fenner — There were certain false dawns as well, when ‘Town to Town’ came out it received very good radio play and its chart position was mid 40s but that was seen as too high by the BPI and I think they knocked it down about 20 places.* If they hadn’t done that we’d have got on Top of the Pops and then that would have changed things a little maybe.
*‘Town to Town’ had a five week chart run in the UK Singles Chart. It reached №55 on 28 Febuary 1987.
Ronnie Gurr — You’re gotta remember around that period that chart was king. You did double packs and 12" singles and 7"s and cassette copies, you could do up to five formats, so you tried to do all five formats to maximise your position. The video was them driving around London on the back of a truck — I don’t think it was the most expensive video of the age, but certainly money was invested, it wasn’t a Michael Jackson video by any means — obviously there was a marketing commitment that went into them. I think the thing with Virgin was that we didn’t write bands off.
Sean O’Hagan — ‘Town to Town’ is not a hit, but weirdly it’s a massive radio hit. It’s A-listed on Radio 1. The weird thing is it’s in the shops and we come back to Dublin as a band with a big noise, so that’s very weird coming back to Ireland a few years later. Virgin create a barge and we’re in the middle of the Liffey doing a set, which would have sounded awful, we’re playing and I think we probably sounded like a transistor radio.* It’s a terrible idea. Then at the end of that, the opening of the Virgin Megastore, we’re there [laughing] with a big massive Microdisney spread.
*Dublin’s Virgin Megastore opened on 05 December, 1986. An RTÉ News report from the day (“Some had come to see superstar Madonna, but there was no Madonna, instead the Richard Branson roadshow provided live music from a float on the Liffey.”) features footage of Microdisney playing from a barge on the River Liffey.
Cathal Coughlan — Ireland appeared to be changing demographically, but in terms of the media and the establishment it was absolutely the same — that was completely dependable. You could always go back and have a laugh with all these completely irreverent, psychedelic-type people, but you could depend on the fact that there was no reflection of that in the media, except that it couldn’t cope with the population as it actually was. I think that was how we managed to rationalise an experience like that [playing from a barge on the River Liffey] to ourselves whereas others might have found it just depressing — “Are things really so bad that we’re doing this.”
Tom Fenner — [Laughing] It was one of the most bizarre things. Microdisney were popular but we were never a chart sensation, we never did an in-store but if we had you wouldn’t have people queuing around the block. So to have the opening of a Virgin Megastore [laughing] with a pontoon in the middle of the Liffey and this band playing with a few curious onlookers [laughing] it was very funny. [Laughing] Surely there was someone who thought, what on earth are you talking about in response to this brainwave. [Laughing] It was probably more likely: “I know a bloke who’s got a pontoon, how about we put a band on it?” “Yes that’d be great, I’ve got a mate who works for RTÉ, they’ll come down and do something.” [Laughing] Bingo it’s a fait accompli.
Sean O’Hagan — I do remember that day in Dublin well and spending a lot of time with Eamon Carr [Horslips]. The first band I ever went to see was Horslips. I remember seeing them at the Imperial College in London a big show, they were well known. Horslips played big gigs. He was writing by then, and DJing and he’s doing all sorts of things. Maybe he was interviewing us. The weird thing about Eamon Carr is that he is the connection to Big Star. Eamon Carr introduced Big Star to The Stars of Heaven and possibly Bill Graham and that’s how everyone heard about them. This is the weirdest thing, Horslips toured with Big Star — isn’t that amazing. They were on the same bill, Eamon remembers coming back and saying, “I’ve just seen the most unbelievable act.” I remember talking to Eamon just about Big Star all the time. Eamon was really supportive.
Cathal Coughlan — Eamon certainly knew them [Big Star]. I remember hearing that Horslips were in America on tour and when they were in Memphis they went to Ardent Studios and met Big Star and jammed and got the records and all that. It was Eamon telling people about them in Dublin alright.
Sean O’Hagan — We always had this smartarse thing. We were a bunch of smartarses always and we’re always on the outside looking in, having a laugh saying, “This is ridiculous isn’t it?” Myself and Cathal were still close but I think there was some kind of diversion of interests by this time possibly. My personality may not have been the best, [laughing] I would say that I was possibly a little bit arrogant. I think I was. When we were starting off we enjoyed being on stage but we didn’t feel like we had to provide a show, we just played. Whereas I do remember by that time it was like, throw the shapes, you’re entertaining now, you’ve got a thousand people out there. There was a little bit of that going on.
Cathal Coughlan — Usually some music would come first. It mightn’t be the finished thing that would come first. It was more often the case that Sean started some music than that I did. There were a minority of times where it was the other way round. One time [laughing] that really springs to mind was when I basically started ‘Town to Town’ and I had the verse and some other little elements but I had this thing that I thought was the chorus [laughing] and of course one of those things that will happen, happened. It was the fucking chorus of [laughing] ‘Suspicious Minds’. [Laughing] I’m not saying that Sean’s function was to save me from myself on occasions like that, but if there hadn’t been someone who knew their onions, it could have ended quite differently. [Laughing] It was bloody lucky. So that was one occasion where I started something, but it was more often the case that Sean was bringing something that was somewhat formed, not in a kind of dictatorial “this is the song” way at all, there was still plenty of times where it would just be the two of us in a room trying to take some really quite brief thing that someone had started and try and breathe some life into it. That was the way that suited our talents best.
Sean O’Hagan — There was a thing on Radio 1 called the Radio 1 Roadtrip. It was a big thing every year the BBC went out on on the road. And every day they’d say, “And today we are in where ever.” They’d use ‘Town to Town’ every day, 15 times a day “Radio 1 Roadtrip” with ‘Town to Town’.
Tom Fenner — We memorably did the Tom O’Connor Roadshow, a morning show on BBC. We arrived in the evening and got up to go over to the studio to do it on the Blackpool sea front, literally playing to a roomful of Union Jack waving Blackpool landladies. After a gushing intro from Tom O’Connor [laughing] we went into ‘Town to Town’, [laughing] with lyrics like, “Fry Dresden, fry Dublin”, [laughing] all part of the experience really.
Sean O’Hagan — I remember that ‘Town to Town’ was just this thing that happened, it was so popular. Mickie Most is like a pop guru. I remember Mickie Most coming up to me when we were doing the next record saying, “That was one of the greatest pop singles of the last 15 years and how it wasn’t mega, I don’t know.” He had it in his hand. He said, “ I love this, I love pop music, I love collecting it, please sign this.” I was just thinking, “Wow, that’s Mickie Most and he really likes this.”
Mark Healy — Once we [Cypress, Mine!] ended up supporting them in the Mean Fiddler. They were really nice, they were just fantastic. They were really supportive of us. Rory Gallagher went to the gig and we met him afterwards. We were putting stuff back into the guitar cases and he said, [laughing] “Could you bring some AK47s back to Ireland for me.” [Laughing] We were like, “Fucking hell Rory.” Microdisney were fantastic that night, they played ‘Harvest for the World’ and it was great, really, really good. They were an amazing band, so good.
Ronnie Gurr — You couldn’t market Microdisney [laughing] like you could Culture Club. They weren’t Culture Club, ‘Singer’s Hampstead Home’ would tell you that. You could advertise in the NME and you were preaching to the converted but if you advertised in Smash Hits you reached a new audience. Smash Hits knew that they weren’t a Smash Hits band and we knew they weren’t a Smash Hits band but that wouldn’t preclude you from including Smash Hits in your marketing campaign because it got the name of the band out to people. Smash Hits wasn’t exclusively read by 12 year old girls. The sales figures were phenomenal, they were far and away the biggest stand alone music-related publication in Britain.
Sean O’Hagan — What I do for a living now is string arrangement, and the weird thing is we had strings on ‘Mrs. Simpson’ and an arranger was brought in and there were 16 strings in the studio. I had never seen a string section before but I do remember the arrangement and I did like it but it was very weird because I was there in the studio and I remember thinking that this is proper music, I don’t know anything about this. I remember saying that I didn’t like the end of ‘Mrs. Simpson’. I remember going to the arranger saying, “I want a soulful Curtis feel at the end.” He said, “What do you mean?” So I played the riffs. At the end of ‘Mrs. Simpson’ there’s a real soul thing going on and I remember going up and playing it on the piano, “All in unison and I want stabs, I want a real Love Unlimited Orchestra or Curtis Mayfield feel about it.” It’s very interesting because I didn’t know, [laughing] but that’s [arranging] what I was going to do later on.
Cathal Coughlan — Sonically Crooked Mile wasn’t the record that Virgin wanted and there was this big long silence after it. It didn’t have the second single on it, I guess it didn’t. I can’t really listen to it, even now. Not that I think it’s a wasted opportunity, I just can’t hear it through the web of all the stuff that happened around it and the time it took to be made even.
Cathal Coughlan — Getting out on tour finally after making Crooked Mile was a lot of fun, because we could just play material that we hadn’t really played, there was stuff from The Clock Comes Down the Stairs that we hadn’t really gotten to play live because of the strategy that was adopted. So there was a sense of release, a sense of we’re actually cooking with gas now. It’s just unfortunate that wasn’t [laughing] the trajectory that continued but it was a good time.
Ronnie Gurr — We didn’t really see them that much. A lot of bands used to hang out in Virgin’s offices. The Rip Rig + Panics of this world were never out of our offices, similarly Boy George would do the rounds, or XTC if they were in town would hang out and have a beer. On a Friday night you could find John Lydon in the pub. Virgin wasn’t a corporate company by any means, you could go to the pub across the road and there’d be Branson sitting having a pint with Lydon. All of the staff would be there, there was a social element to it, but I don’t think Microdisney were ever involved with that in any way unlike others. Heaven 17 were always there, John McGeoch from Magazine and latterly PIL would always be there, The Skids if they were in town. The bands who were not part of that were bands like Japan or Microdisney. Microdisney didn’t engage in that way with the record company, [laughing] but it wasn’t mandatory that you had to go for a pint with Branson.
Cathal Coughlan — I do remember being in the pub on the canal with Simon Draper once, but there was a very stilted conversation. There was me, him and this other band’s manager — an arty pop Scandinavian act, I think they were Finnish actually. A lot of it consisted of him and Draper talking about posh Indian restaurants in Soho, these kind of gourmet places, like The Red Fort. I just about knew what they were talking about. Even then, a year and a half into having a wage there is no way I would have been darkening the door of any kind of similar establishment, so I thought, I know I’ll tell them about this really good place in Kilburn High Road. [Laughing] Well you can imagine, it was excruciating. In fairness to Simon I think he was a pretty good sport about it, I didn’t know him well but he seemed OK. It was only when he quit that things started getting a lot more mean in there and Ronnie wasn’t there for too much longer after that either.
Ronnie Gurr — At the turn of the 80s Virgin were in a perilous state, they could have gone under if they hadn’t released The Human League. The Dare [Virgin Records, 1981] album saved us basically. They were making people redundant the year before Dare came out. They’d signed a lot of my favourite bands — the Magazines of this world. Even the Pistols hadn’t sold. It sold well in the UK, but The Sex Pistols didn’t sell internationally at all — literally next to nothing. Everyone thinks the Pistols were a huge band, they were plainly culturally huge, but they didn’t commercially make as much money as people might have thought. The consequence of ’77 to the end of the 70s was that the label was putting stuff out and it wasn’t really making enough, so they had to make some redundancies for the first time. But from that time on Virgin started to be successful. You’ve got Phil Collins, you’ve got Culture Club, Simple Minds, Japan — we were starting to have big successes, The Human League and Heaven 17. These were big platinum selling artists, not only in the UK but internationally. That must have been uncomfortable for a band like Microdisney but Simon Draper to his credit always wanted to work with credible artists but did they get subsumed in that wave of Virgin becoming a good record company — and I use the term “good” advisedly — a successful record company, quite the contrary. It was the Domino Records of its day, it was the hippest label going in the late 70s and early 80s. As the 80s progressed suddenly Richard Branson was talking about buying jumbo jets. What was that about? I can remember the discussion, Simon Draper said “He wants to set up an airline.” It was kind of weird, but I suppose he’s vindicated — the airline’s still here and the record industry’s gone to hell in a handcart.
Chapter 10–39 Minutes
Things were just building up in a very negative manner — Cathal Coughlan
Cathal Coughlan — We had an abortive recording session with Stephen Street. Stuff that never came out. He had done maybe three albums with The Smiths by that stage and he’d been the house engineer at Amazon in Liverpool which is how we met him. He was very capable but it was a re-recording of ‘Birthday Girl’ — that will tell you how desperate it was getting — and ‘Send Herman Home’ which ended up on 39 Minutes. It was a committee job. Then there was more songwriting, a lot more songwriting. We played the odd festival, or the odd Mean Fiddler gig along the way. So we did play some of the 39 Minutes stuff live before we recorded it and we thought it was all going to be OK.
Sean O’Hagan — We had this thing about making Black music, we listened to a lot of black music at the time, we were listening to The Beach Boys a lot, we were listening to country music but we were also listening to a lot of Northern Soul. We were listening to Donnie Hathaway, Luther Van Dross, Cameo were big with us. It’s weird, and I think we wanted to try and do this and we wanted to get somebody who understood soul music and we thought that Jamie understood soul music. So with the next record we had ambitious to push that slight agenda.
Cathal Coughlan — It seemed to have the potential to work in that way but then committee thinking began. Lucky somewhere along the way we got agreement that we could work with Jamie again, that was only after a bunch of committee work. To be fair to the committee, the money that all of this was costing was unthinkable. It would have been unthinkable five years before that and even five years subsequent, much less in 2017. It was that window where you had the likes of Virgin, Chrysalis, Island — these things that had been Indies 10 years previously that had gotten big and they’d all been floated on the stock market — and there was all this money around and nobody quite, to be honest, knew what to do with it.
Sean O’Hagan — Virgin want a bigger record. But I think they were a bit confused, dance music hasn’t quite taken off but the beginning of electro is happening and obviously block parties are happening in New York and samplers are around. We’re playing around with these soul influences and I’m sure Virgin were just going, “What the hell are they at, what’s going on here.” Creation Records was beginning to take off about that time and I think they just wanted us to be a white indie band, but we don’t want to be a white indie band.
Tom Fenner — 39 Minutes was done really under a slight bit of duress, the deal with Virgin was that the first two albums were firm without an option so we went straight into it, there was a discussion about who to use as the producer and I think Jamie just sort of suited the picture at the time really. He was very easy to work with. Crooked Mile was recorded under different circumstances to 39 Minutes, the band were in a different stage by the time we did 39…
Cathal Coughlan — You had this mixture of business people and music fans, like Ronnie Gurr, who really knew their music. Simon Draper really knew his music, the reason he was there was that his cousin, Richard, [laughing] knew nothing about music but wanted to have a music business. The same was true of those other labels as well because we knew some of those people.
Jon Fell — ‘Singer’s Hamstead Home’, which I also think is a great song and single, was an attempt to try and built the audience and sell some records as well for Virgin. I don’t think that we felt that secure on Virgin, we knew that we had to sell some records. That’s probably when things got a bit more stressed I think really [laughing] in general for the band.
Tom Fenner — The lyrics of ‘Singer’s Hampstead Home’ were remarked upon, I can remember it being reviewed on Round Table [BBC Radio 1 weekly singles review show] and it was Andy from Erasure was reviewing it. It may have been something that was sold by the Virgin press department but it wasn’t specifically about Boy George at all, but that’s what everyone supposedly thought. It was just about a certain type of person really, I think that was quite a good press line and there was mileage made out of it but I don’t think it was catastrophic for us in any way.
Ronnie Gurr — It’s a fair comment. Singer gets successful, makes a lot of money — and it’s a fair comment on a pop star’s life. It was an interesting subject to write about for Cathal and I think he did it brilliantly. I don’t think we would have put it put out as a single if there was a problem with it, there’s nothing in my recall that says that it was contentious. It was interesting, I thought, OK, I know where that’s inspired from. They didn’t hang out but I guess there were periods when Cathal would have been in the office and George [Boy George] inevitably would have been in the office — because he was never out of the office. So you would have had this kind of journalistic observation of what was the label’s biggest pop star at the time.
Sean O’Hagan — The label weren’t that upset about ‘Singer’s Hampstead Home’ but I think their interest might be beginning to wain, but they were going, “We’re committed to this, so we have to see it out.” One thing that was conspicuous was that the label never paid for us to go to America, the albums were barely released over there, we never go to America. So Microdisney remained this real underground thing there. When we [The High Llamas] eventually went to America people were like, “Microdisney never came to America, but I knew of Microdisney.”
Cathal Coughlan — Every step of this thing was costing crazy money so we go to record 39 Minutes and the edges began coming off. It was very much like the anti-The Clock Comes Down the Stairs. It was for me the point where my belief in what we were doing crumbled.
Andrew Mueller — This is where I have to out myself as a bit of a Microdisney heretic. It’s not that I don’t think The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is a great album because I do think The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is a great album, but I also know that that’s the Microdisney album you’re supposed to really like if you’re a Microdisney fan. I think it’s a great record but [laughing] I actually prefer both Virgin records and in particular 39 Minutes. I know, from having had this argument with absolutely incredulous fellow Microdisney fans many times, that I’m unmasking myself as something of an eccentric here but I really do think that it was on those two later Virgin albums — because they had a major label budget and because they had the proper posh studios — that they were actually able to absolutely and ultimately realise what they were trying to do, or if you like pursue it to its ultimate state of absurdity. I don’t know whether they knew 39 Minutes was going to be their last record when they made it, but it really does have that sort of, “What the hell, who cares, blaze of glory, Butch and Sundance, let’s go out swinging” aspect to it, which I’ve always really liked. I’m being the absolute opposite of the traditional indie snob who says he preferred their early work before they signed to a major label. I really do think those two Virgin albums are fantastic records.
Giordaí Ua Laoghaire — I was really blown away when I saw Microdisney in Sir Henry’s in 1988 [15 April, 1988]. That was a great band. That gig was jointed. Stump played the same week [09 April, 1988] and I remember thinking that I’d enjoy Stump more but I was completely blown away by Microdisney. Stump was also jointed. Microdisney was the week after Stump. Cork isn’t that big so a lot of the people who went to see Stump also went to see Microdisney. I think the consensus, among the people that I knew at the time, was that they were all pretty much blown away by Microdisney. It was a quality gig I thought. It was a bit like seeing Steely Dan, put it that way. It was that good, and no matter what you say about Steely Dan they were a very classy group. With Microdisney we were looking at something that was very, very finely tuned and very well worked out and very strong. Cathal related well to the audience as well, I’ve good memories of it. I also struck up a very good conversation with him that night for the first time in years and I really enjoyed it. And then in time we became good friends I think. Myself and Cathal maybe had things to talk about I guess. There’s something about Cathal — he has a lot of soul. I always liked him, maybe not so much when we were young, but certainly after the late 80s.
Cathal Coughlan — I think ‘Singer’s Hampstead Home’ was one of the things we wrote late in the day. ‘Gale Force Wind’ was actually written in the studio, or pretty near to it anyway. There were songs that we demoed that we thought we were going to do and then a bit of a three-line whip was issued that they shouldn’t be on there. We didn’t cope as gracefully with it as I would have liked. It had gotten to that point by that time, the business side of it was just so dominant. It had become dominant because we spent so much on doing not as much as it should have funded. Every time we went on the road, it lost money.
Cathal Coughlan — It’s only with the passage of time and doing things in many different ways that you realise it doesn’t have to be like that, but when you’ve only done things in two ways, i.e. completely seat of the pants, never even staying in a B&B because you can’t afford it, versus this kind of more professional but not Top of the Pops kind of way, where you do have people tuning the guitars for you and having valves available if the amp blows up so that you’re not left standing there like a tool for ten minutes while the person who’s amp it is has to try and fix it or borrow one or whatever. It gives rise to a tunnel vision, I don’t know how people at a young age achieve a kind of sufficient objectivity to know that there is a different way of doing things other than the one that they are currently immersed in. I really didn’t have that objectivity myself, it made me much more of a difficult person to deal with, made it more difficult for me to get things done, to contribute to things, to be a useful family member, partner, you know — I had no objectivity, I continued to compartmentalise even within the limited purview that I permitted myself. Things were just building up in a very negative manner.
Sean O’Hagan — We know its nearly over. Tensions, demands, I think Cathal really feels, rightly so, that his artistic intentions are being edited by the label. It takes a while before we’re dropped, there was a new record planned and guess who was over to produce it? Don Was. Don Was was in London to watch us do one of our last shows by which time Don Was is big, big news. Was Not Was are big news. He’s at the show and he really wants to produce Microdisney and so there’s a new record planned and it’s Don Was.
Ronnie Gurr — Tom Dunne recalls me being on the verge of tears telling Something Happens that Microdisney had been dropped. I was obviously upset. There comes a point with each successive album that the advances get bigger and the recording costs probably grow a little and the marketing probably remains the same and you have to make a value judgement if your sales are not incrementally growing on an album by album basis. There’s got to be a pragmatic commercial decision that you can’t carry on and commit your resources, financial, staff or otherwise. It was decided to put the album out and see what it does, and obviously it didn’t do what was required. The decision would have been made quite quickly.
Tom Fenner — Sean and Cathal by that stage hadn’t been communicating or speaking very much for an extended period of time, so the songwriting would have become more difficult and there would have been more gaps between things. We were in dispute with our management, or had decided to leave our management so we were management-less and we wanted to see another record deal. I know that Polydor came down to the Intruders at the Palace gig. It was a fund raiser for the ICA over two nights, the first at the Dominion Theatre. That was really towards the end of things, it was the last gig, [laughing] there was disquiet, shall we say.
Cathal Coughlan — La La La Human Steps and Bowie and Reeves Gabrels, the guitar player, doing ‘Look Back in Anger’. He sang live over a re-recording of it. We were on the same night as The Woodentops. I remember being on a staircase behind Bowie, he was on his own. I thought, what do I do here? Do I go back? No I thought, I need to go up. It was up to the dressing rooms back stage. [Laughing] He heard me and he looked around and he looked absolutely fucking terrified and I thought, Oh God! So I think I just slouched way down. [Laughing] That’s my one and only David Bowie story.
Tom Fenner — The day itself was quite a combination of events too. It seemed that everyone was in awe of David Bowie so everything stopped for David Bowie. He was doing a performance with La La La Human Steps which required a certain type of gauze. [Laughing] So everyone had to wait seemingly for hours until the right gauze was bussed in [laughing] from Watford or something before they could perform. Resentment set in a little bit, all this standing around while other people were sound checking, the Kronos Quartet and others and [laughing] it was rapidly descending into the kind of thing that Cathal hates. We’d had a drink or two by then as well so by the time we went on stage the general overview of things, what we’d gone through in the afternoon and where we were, manifested itself in the performance. [Laughing] We pretty much called it a day there and then after that.
Sean O’Hagan — That was the day we split, that was the moment we finish. That’s a band in nervous breakdown filmed on TV, that’s exactly what happens.*
*Intruders at the Palace — A Benefit for the ICA was broadcast on BBC 2 in 1988.
Cathal Coughlan — I have enormous regrets about that. It was a completely unnecessary self-inflicted trauma. What can I say, I had allowed things to get on top of me to the point that I was not functioning with any kind of honour really.
Sean O’Hagan — That’s the end there and then I think a few days later Cathal rings me up says, “I don’t think this can carry on.” And I said, “OK, fair enough.”
Jon Fell — I don’t think that Cathal and Sean would be offended by me saying that the demise was a split between them, they couldn’t work together anymore, I’m sure they would both agree with that. There was a strong impetus to reach people which means selling records. Everybody was actually incredibly happy with their lives — it’s not like we wanted to be incredibly rich and famous, but we did want to sell records, to be able to continue making records. When we weren’t selling records, which is what happened in the last two or three years, that meant that arguments happened as to why that wasn’t happening. For me that’s really what the split was, if the records had sold then those arguments wouldn’t have arisen. But arguments came about: “We’re doing this, this is good, but the records aren’t selling, let’s try this.” “I don’t like that.” That’s where it all came from really, just trying to get people to buy it, there was just so much difference of opinion about that. It was very stressful. The other big factor is that everyone was pretty young in the 80s and during that time a huge amount of alcohol was drunk and probably various other activities that make judgement a bit fallible and it’s very easy as you get older to look back at that but we made lots of very rash decisions really in the rush of youth I think.
Tom Fenner — I was about 27 or 28 when it ended. In a way it was a relief because the feeling within Microdisney, by the time we broke up, wasn’t great. We had kind of been expecting it all to fall apart at any point in the previous 12 months anyway, to a certain extent. So it was kind of a relief and it seemed like a good thing to do. Sean and Cathal obviously regrouped very quickly and started doing their own thing.
Chapter 11— The Fatima Mansions
I wanted things to either be more noisy or way more stripped down than Microdisney — Cathal Coughlan
Jamie Lane — The High Llamas and The Fatima Mansions were totally logical. Sean using his great arranging skills going off in his great love of The Beach Boys and so on and so forth and Cathal actually more down his road, always musical but getting more and more out there lyrically. I think it was totally predictable.
Cathal Coughlan — I had had to rediscover my enthusiasm for music and at the same time as all the other things that I was not getting right, not doing well with. Irish music was the backbone of it really. There was a particular Peadar Ó Riada record that I was pretty gone on [Peadar Ó Riada, Dord Records, 1987]. It was really eclectic, there were home recordings of him playing the piano with the fire crackling in the background. It was bloody-minded, quite a Lo-fi record, the Cór Chúil Aodha recorded in the church. My blas [accent] is uafásach [awful] and I wish I hadn’t recorded it [‘Im Long Mé Measim’] but I did, it was the first thing I probably did.*
*Cathal’s first post-Microdisney recording was a version of Peadar Ó Riada/Donal Ó Liatháin’s ‘Im Long Mé Measim’. It was released as a flexi 7" on Bob Stanley’s Caff Corporation Records.
Cathal Coughlan — Irish music was the thing I rediscovered, particularly Ó Riada [Seán Ó Riada], The Bothy Band, anything Lunny [Donal Lunny] did really. I thought it was pretty cool when I was younger but I didn’t have any records, I only knew what I heard on the radio, but I did remember that the odd Bothy Band thing was incredible like ‘Tiochfaidh An Samhradh’ [Summer will Come, from Old Hag You Have Killed Me, Mulligan/Polydor, 1976], anything with the Ó Domhnaills [Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill] singing and the tunes, the whole thing, those records are classics really. It’s a shame that they didn’t get to continue, they had some bad luck with things. How I had gotten into it was through English Folk music. It was through coming to hear the likes of The Watersons and Richard and Linda Thompson and Sandy Denny, through the British Public Library system and the fact that you could get all these things at a time when albums were expensive and there wasn’t any money. It didn’t matter if you didn’t have a record deal, you could still hear the same stuff you’d been hearing. That set me thinking about Irish music as well but it’s not something I’ve ever really pursued because no way into it ever manifested, it would be kind of bogus as an English speaker from the suburbs you know. I don’t know if John Spillane was always a Gaeilgeoir [Irish speaker], but he’s certainly become one, a genuine one, totally genuine.
Cathal Coughlan — We became quite friendly with Edward [Barton].* Edward Not Edward largely consisted of people interpreting Edward’s work, it bore no relation to what it was like witnessing him in full flight with his randomly strung acoustic guitar.** Edward was extreme, it was really on the fringes of what qualified as music. I think his father or mother was a diplomat and he’d grown up all over the world and he’d come back to Manchester to go to college, he was kind of in the scene but kind of not of it exactly. We [Microdisney] did a whole tour with him actually as the support act. He was friendly with Graham Massey, they just knew each other from doing a bunch of the same things. Stump were quite friendly with Ed as well and Rob did a track on his own and there was one with Mick.
*Jane’s a capella version of Edward Barton’s poem ‘It’s a Fine Day’ [Cherry Red, Cherry 65] reached №5 in the UK Independent Chart in 1983.
**Coughlan’s version of Barton’s ‘Dear Dad’ appears on Edward not Edward. Though credited to Cathal Coughlan and the Fatima Mansions on the back sleeve, on the front sleeve and A-side label the band are credited as Cathal Coughlan and the Fatima Gardens.
Cathal Coughlan — There was one show near the beginning of The Mansions where we didn’t have enough material and we had to do a couple of the later Microdisney songs, I think we did ‘Back to the Old Town’, that might have been all really, just because I thought it was fairly simple dynamically straightforward. So much notice was taken of that I thought Jesus no we can’t do this. [Laughing] A Year Zero -100 was called for.
Cathal Coughlan — Having gotten so bogged down in the way of working that we had had, more than anything else the need was to wipe that blockage of enthusiasm away. It had come to its logical end really and there wasn’t going to be any way of resuscitating it. It was necessary to make records for a lot less money — we were making Mansions records for the cost of a week of Microdisney rehearsals. I was pretty discouraged at times because something would happen, there’d be another twist in the Microdisney tax saga for example.
Cathal Coughlan — Microdisney had toured a lot with Hurrah! and Martin Stephenson & The Daintees which is how I came to know the Kitchenware people. I started working with Kitchenware as my management and they were trying to get me a publishing deal to try and tie the band over until we could make records and try and do things by the book way. A major publisher, who shall remain nameless, led us right up the garden path to the point of a contract being negotiated with lawyers involved and everything and on finally coming to see one of the band’s gigs they pulled the plug, leaving us with a legal bill which was substantial. That kind of thing really meant that the cycle of debt started over again, not as bad as the Microdisney one, and it did get sorted out after a while. You can do without this really.
Cathal Coughlan — I don’t know what I thought I was doing for those first couple of years as The Mansions especially. Kicking over the traces of what had gone before was a bit of an axiomatic [laughing] tent-pole. I suppose what I would have said at the time was that I wanted things to either be more noisy or way more stripped down than Microdisney, and I think we got somewhere towards that.
Cathal Coughlan — It was more a reaction against the way Microdisney had gone about it and the tunnel vision that I had in my mind about the whole thing. I really couldn’t see the wood for the tree and I couldn’t see that wreaking relationships was not necessary, it was not a logical conclusion of the admittedly quite difficult situation we were in. Writing a whole lot of lyrics that were finger pointing about social conditions and trends in society was not a logical follow on from the fact that the miner’s strike had been lost and the Tories were riding rough shod over the rights of the majority of the population of the UK.
Andrew Mueller — I wasn’t surprised by the sound of The High Llamas. That seemed fairly congruent with what Sean had been contributing to Microdisney. The Fatima Mansions seemed fairly congruent with what Cathal had being contributing, as I understood it, to Microdisney. He clearly decided that the medium was going to have ally with the message. In terms of making a statement with a single, ‘Blues for Ceausescu’ is one of the all-time greats in that respect, it’s hard to imagine anything that could have sounded less like Microdisney than that. I absolutely adored Fatima Mansions, they were one of the great, great, great bands of the 1990s.
Chapter 12— The High Llamas
Wilderness, wilderness years, three or four years in the wilderness, absolutely just not able to do it — Sean O’Hagan
Sean O’Hagan — I’m 29 maybe, and it’s frightening because I didn’t know what to do. Cathal was a songwriter and a lyricist and I wasn’t. I just wrote music, Cathal wrote music and lyrics. So I felt that I could carry on but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I think I was probably pretty much in shock. Cathal is very quick, he’s very fast and forms The Fatima Mansions very quickly but that’s because he’s a hard working guy and he’s very focused. I don’t know what to do really so I start driving a van with Friends of the Earth. I had heard bits and pieces of The Fatima Mansions but what you do is, you avoid each other, I don’t want to hear them. I was writing songs but I was totally directionless, because I haven’t got a voice, I had never written a lyric. I was doing some demos.
Sean O’Hagan — I remember weird things, Kirsty MacColl gets in touch and asks me to join her band. A few people said that maybe I should be producing various people; maybe I should move to America, that my future was there. There was all sorts of stuff going on but I kind of started to try and write songs and then demoing and of course it was weird going in because you’re not with your pals. It’s just you and you realise how difficult it is. Wilderness, wilderness years, three or four years in the wilderness, absolutely just not able to do it. Then Anita Visser comes over from America and we become pals and I decided to form a band [The Twilights] with her at the centre and Jon [Fell] then wants to join us and then Marcus Holdaway joins us, this is before The High Llamas. There’s a whole waft of songs that I’d written that sound like Wendy & Lisa, it’s unbelievable, going back to this American thing.
Sean O’Hagan — Then I kind of make a record and I decide that it’s gotta be my own voice. The only way that I can find my own voice is through Alex Chilton. So again, I get very close to Alex Chilton. I want the record to sound like an Alex solo record. Demon [Records] hear it, and want to put it out. So that was the beginning really. After that I really begin to form a musical vision in my head, that’s the real beginning.
Sean O’Hagan — The real, real beginning is Santa Barbara. Anita had such a great voice, her voice and my voice and Marcus on stage. I was still obsessed with little bits of The Band. Still obsessed with weird things like The Byrds. Strange things happened like an Italian label asking us to do a cover song. I can remember doing a cover of ‘Up Around the Bend’, by Creedence Clearwater Revival but doing it like The Byrds, doing it like something from Sweetheart of the Rodeo [Columbia, 1968] and thinking, “Wow this works so well.” I can remember doing a cover of ‘Brass Buttons’ [Gram Parsons] and really beginning to understand how to arrange and produce. These things are all out there on various little labels, we did a cover of Nick Drake’s ‘Chime af a City Clock’ and these were all off the back of Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara becomes huge in France, and we sort of had another career in France. Anita wanted to go back to America, then I met Tim Gane from Stereolab and for some reason I’m dragged right back to Brian Wilson and that’s the beginning of Gideon Gaye.
Chapter 13— Looking Back
It sounds like Merle Haggard on acid [laughing] lyrically it’s biting but melodically really sweet and approachable — Jamie Lane
Cathal Coughlan — If it’s an album I suppose it would be The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, if it’s one piece of music I think something like ‘Are You Happy?’ or ‘Birthday Girl’, both of which are on that record. I get why people mention The Clock…, as something that flows from beginning to end and that just about transcends some of the sonic anachronisms, it works. We did do uptempo things that were just as good as the downtempo things, but the way it tends to work is that there are more good downtempo things, I’m afraid.
Jon Fell — We had gigs that were so intense that sometimes I would literally feel like I was rising off the stage. Of all my musical life since then, those were probably the most intense moments really and that’s the great thing, it was just fantastic nothing will ever change that. It was a proper band in that it was a bunch of men who met in their very early 20s, who got on really well and used to hang out all the time. For quite a long time I shared a flat with Cathal and we all socialised together all the time. We would be sharing music all the time, so it was just fantastic fun. We were all big music fans and we all knew that our music was actually really good and unique. What Sean and Cathal brought to each other and to the band was a unique mix and it was fantastic and that was brilliant to do something where you just think, this is really, really good.
Ronnie Gurr — I really enjoyed working with both of them and I’m proud to have been involved, even in a small way in their development. In retrospect I’m sure they would think that the signing to Virgin was probably a bad move and ultimately killed them. I’d love to see Sean and Cathal working together again, I don’t know if there’s any possibility or viability in that, or would that be seen as too much like becoming a legacy act. I just think what they had was obviously very special — that oil and water. A lot of songwriting partnerships are two average talents coming together, and if they’re good they become slightly better. They were both great anyway and it was their coming together — their end product I’m still a fan of.
Garreth Ryan — I think what we would all like would be Sean and Cathal getting together again. Cathal’s got pop songs in him but I’m not sure whether that’s what he wants to do or not. It seems crass, but nobody’s going to go to Scott Walker after his last three albums and try and sell him the idea of doing pop songs but Christ we’d all love to hear it and I’d love to hear Cathal doing it as well. It’s probably drifted away from that. I’d love Sean to do stuff with him.
Jon Fell — One of the things about all of this is that I was really young at the time, I was younger than Sean and Cathal and I didn’t have much of clue about how the music business worked at all. To some extent I think that was true of all of us, we made a few mistakes along the way and probably looking back years after the fact, we’d go, “No OK, we definitely shouldn’t have done that.” Me more so than the rest because I was completely inexperienced in the music business when I arrived in London.
Tom Fenner — I think it’s just great, absolutely fabulous stuff. It endures because of the quality of it. We were very popular with the press at the time but nothing really manifested itself too much in terms of record sales particularly. We played to modest houses, nothing particularly large really and we played sporadically. They always say that Microdisney are sort of uncategorisable and maybe that’s true, perhaps it’s easier to like things that are more one dimensional.
Cathal Coughlan — I definitely don’t get nostalgic. There are no laurels to rest upon, that’s the overwhelming thing really, it isn’t the equivalent of Dave Gilmour having to take a few weeks out of his schedule [laughing] to remaster Dark Side of the Moon or something, it is not a scaled down version of that. It is nothing. The only way for me to keep enthusiastic about making music is to make new music, that’s the thing about someone in my position really. I neither credit Dave Gilmour nor Mark E. Smith, [laughing] it’s a different thing.
Tom Fenner — The music stands up, sometimes perhaps the records didn’t get the production that they deserved but they were made anyway and in a sense it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point, it doesn’t matter, and I just think the music and the words are just so brilliant they are indestructible — the world’s worst production or the cheapest one can’t really do them any damage. They just really stand out, I’m just very, very pleased about that.
Sean O’Hagan — The Clock… was very different from any other record at the time. There was a joy in the music. Cathal and I meet at a party in 1979 on New Year’s Eve, this stumbling pair and then it ends by 1988. But here we were in 1985 with this record where it just all came together. I think that’s it, where these intentions and discussions, and influences, and shared experiences and emotional intentions, that whole thing of our growing up articulated as music. That’s exactly what The Clock… is.
Mark Healy — I’ve never seen Cathal Coughlan not give 110% to any performance. I saw him in the Arc and I saw him more recently as The North Sea Scrolls and he still has that intensity that separates him out from any other Irish performer that I’ve ever seen because he’s got that ability to deliver and create such fantastic lyrics and songs whether he’s on his own or if he’s got a full band behind him: Microdisney; The Fatima Mansions, he’s just consistent all the way along and has been from day one. When he came back to Cork with Foburg for the City of Culture [Cork 2005, European Capital of Culture] he filled the Father Matthew Hall and again it was fantastic, it really was good. He’s just really inventive.
Tom Fenner — I’m very happy to say that playing with Sean and Cathal kind of ruins it for the rest of your career because the combination of music and lyrics was absolutely everything. I was left stunned by it essentially. I think it’s a wonderful collection of songs and the experience of being in that band at the time — I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. As a consequence any other music or bands I’ve played with subsequently, they’ve had to measure up to what Sean and Cathal did, and nothing really does to be honest.
Jamie Lane — It’s the only time I’ve been anywhere near a number one record [laughing] albeit an Indie, but still a number one record. I’m very proud of it because we made it under very lean circumstances and we used all our ingenuity and worked very hard to do it as well as we possibly could. It sounds like Merle Haggard on acid [laughing] lyrically it’s biting but melodically really sweet and approachable.
Andrew Mueller — It was a common analysis with Microdisney that at the heart of it was this dichotomy between Sean O’Hagan’s incredibly sweet melodies and slick arrangements and Cathal’s angry choleric and vituperative lyrics. I’m not sure the band ever themselves quite saw it like that, I think they regarded it as one more seamless whole. It was a remarkedly potent combination. I don’t know if there is one thing that underpins the other great Microdisney dichotomy which was that they were never massively commercially successful, but however many decades later people are still talking about them and people are no longer talking about any number of their more profitable contemporaries.
Ronnie Gurr — I was a fan when I signed them and I remain a fan. I think individually they both proved to be fantastic songwriters. But I think that when they were together, musically and lyrically, that balance for me was just intriguing, it drew me in. There was real substance there, both musically from Sean’s contribution and lyrically from Cathal’s contribution and I think that the legacy is there in the records. You’ve got a catalogue there that shows this band had real substance.
Stan Erraught — It was the first time anyone I knew of my age had made a record this good, [laughing] The Clock… is probably the only record this good that anyone I know has ever made. It still stands out as an amazing record. Having got the first record out of the way, and starting to write again they just hit something that was really individual. I still think it’s just one of the best Irish records ever made.
Andrew Mueller — I would say to somebody that if you like sweet well-arranged pop melodies, and really who doesn’t? If you also like intelligent articulate lyricism, and again you would hope who doesn’t? Then here they both are in one band. I don’t know whether Cork has quite yet got its head entirely around what Cathal has contributed, I won’t go so far as to say that they should build a statue of him — but I think they should build a statue of him.
Sean O’Hagan — I think there have been tentative approaches and ideas put to us — certainly in Ireland. It doesn’t interest me a lot to be quite honest, I’m very interested in the next thing, the thing that keeps me sane and keeps me happy is the next thing. My worry is saying, “This is what we used to be.” Maybe that’s silly but if there was a great desire, if the other guys in the band just really, really, really wanted to do it and if they said, “Sean would you do it?” I would absolutely do it, yeah. I wouldn’t be an arsehole and say, “No, I’m not gonna do that.” If it was like we all wanted to do something, I would of course do it. [Laughing] We haven’t gone out and pursued it, absolutely not.
Cathal Coughlan — All through my teens I had pretensions to just try and do something creative, if possible to just try and keep my parents happy as well, but maybe not. It was really only meeting Sean that gave me any indication of how you could practically go about it. Meeting Mick Lynch a bit previous to that had given me the idea of how you could make a splash while doing it except I have no pretension that I could touch Mick for the things that Mick could do.The things that myself and Sean learnt together are things that I still put into practice anytime that I’m fortunate enough to be able to make music. Despite having tried to kick over the traces of it for the period immediately after it ended and so on, the practicalities — that’s the only way I understand how to make music, was the way that we learnt about together and the way that he knew about first.
Sean O’Hagan — We were just kids, growing up but the great thing about pop music made by young people is that it is the music of young people discovering things. It is the music of youth, it absolutely is. [Laughing] Pop music made by old people doesn’t quite work. I know there’s great music; soul, blues, certain types of R&B that can be made by older people but this joyful pop thing is the music of youth and it has something to do with naivety, and instinct. It’s like you’re not doing something that you know, you’re doing something that you’ve instinctively just learnt. That’s it, you’ve just learnt it and that’s what’s good about it.
Final Word
In December 2017 it was announced that Microdisney would reform to play two gigs in June 2018. The band performed The Clock Comes Down the Stairs at the NCH in Dublin (02 June) and the Barbican in London (09 June). In 2019 the band played two gigs, Vicar Street in Dublin (18 February) and then a hometown final show the following night at Cyprus Avenue in Cork (19 February).
Thanks
Thanks to Conor O’Toole and Kieran Hurley from UCC98.3FM. A special word of thanks to all of the contributors who were willing to take the time to answer my questions.
© Paul McDermott 2018, All Rights Reserved
For further information:
Further Reading
© Paul McDermott 2018, All Rights Reserved
Further Listening
© Paul McDermott 2018, All Rights Reserved
