Shape shifter

CORK'S Cathal Coughlan is one of the last men standing. Survivor of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions, two of the best, most malcontent Irish rock bands of the past 30 years, his demeanour has transformed and matured from the height of disgruntlement to what might be interpreted as a plateau of general dissatisfaction, writes TONY CLAYTON-LEA

It’s no wonder he is perceived by those who think of such things as a man whose default settings are hard-wired to negative. “Considering some of the things I’ve done,” he says in his obdurate, lugubrious Cork accent, “it’s kind of understandable, I’d say. Though, on the whole, I’m a fairly gregarious individual. But, that said, my life has been episodically turbulent. And some of the records have reflected that.”

Indeed they have. Microdisney and Fatima Mansions albums notwithstanding, Coughlan's solo records have distilled both weary and active sedition in a way that is equally cathartic and disruptive. Like the reluctant master of surprise that he is, however, his new album, Rancho Tetrahedron, has – I'm not quite sure how to say this – pop songs. Explain yourself, man.

“When I was working and living in America for a while, I was kind of cut off from my normal working environment. I experienced a few counter-intuitive moments, all right, but some of them were good, so I kept them. They were unlikely things for me, I agree, but I thought it’s no harm to surprise yourself and, perhaps, your audience as well. And, you know, it’s something I feel is my job. It’s also no harm engaging with counter-intuitive methods, because sometimes really interesting things happen, your usual reflexes are down, and you can surprise yourself in terms of how you perform.”

Coughlan has a fairly canny knack of surprising people. Just when you think you have him pinned down as something specific (be it someone seething with a righteous, reasoned sense of rage, or a musician busy rattling the cages of normality) he comes along and blind-sides you. It isn’t so much the strategic reinvention of your average pop star, but more an intuitive creative reassessment.

“One of the fortunate things about not having become massively successful,” he explains, “is that there isn’t a large body of people who are clamouring for the old-style Cathal Coughlan, or the canonical way of doing things. The silver lining of this is that I am pretty much free to do what I like from one record to the next, and I try to make the most of that. I feel I could make more of it, but to a degree you are a prisoner of your capabilities, and the things you can convince yourself with.”

Does he wilfully stretch the boundaries? “I try to. Something that haunts me to a degree is that when I started in the post-punk period of the late 1970s, we were all doing a very narrow bunch of things because it was either uncool to step outside certain parameters, or most of us didn’t have a great deal of musical ability. It was all about being self-taught, and so on. So I find it hilarious to have watched, in the past few years, that this group of post-punk styles has been adopted by the younger Brooklynites, for want of a better word.

“These are kids who can actually play their instruments, and the technology is far more accessible, yet they impose this limitation on themselves. The Brooklynite thing incorporates bands such as TV on The Radio – who I think are fantastic – but at the same time you have other people, middle-class kids, messing about for a couple of years before they go back into the advertising business.

“I work with people who have enormous musical abilities, but I don’t have that background. I wasn’t playing my scales assiduously when I was 18, so I have to have a certain humility about that. Similarly, I think non-musicianship is over-rated; we’ve had dissections of the lives of people like Malcolm McLaren, even Brian Eno – although I do have a lot of regard for things he’s done. But non-musicianship is also a form of limitation, is it not? It’s the art-student thing of feeling that musicians are just an inferior breed of oiks who can do a little party trick with an inanimate object.”

Coughlan doesn’t subscribe to that line of thought.

“I feel I can’t go one way, because that’s what McLaren would do, and I can’t go another way because I can’t do it as well as Mark-Anthony Turnage. So the limitations of attitude are probably the most severe limitations you can have, really, and I’m certainly not immune to those.”

• Rancho Tetrahedron,by Cathal Coughlan and the Grand Necropolitan Quartet, is released today on Kitchenware/PIAS. Cathal Coughlan the Grand Necropolitan Quintet play Whelan's, Dublin, on Sep 11