The Goo 1
COLM O’CALLAGHAN - theblackpoolsentinel.com Tribu
te Cathal Coughlan 16 December 1960 – 18 May 2022 When Microdisney briefly reformed in 2018, it was on unfamiliar turf - on the ornate stage at the National Concert Hall in Dublin – that they fired up together for the first time in three decades. That all-seated venue is dripping in history, beautifully-finished and is the capital’s go-to location for elite cultural events. Re-assembled to perform their acclaimed second album, The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, the significance of the setting for what was, to all intents, a delayed Microdisney swansong, wouldn’t have been lost on Cathal Coughlan, the band’s singer. So where did it all go right ? From Glounthane on the outskirts of Cork city, Cathal founded the band in 1980 with the Luton-born Seán O’Hagan and, over the course of an eight-year career, they produced four fine studio albums and an assortment of other odds and ends. The Clock is generally regarded as the pick of their bunch: like much of Cathal’s output with Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions and as a solo artist, it is underscored by images of chaos, destruction, loss and finality. The ‘clock’ in the record’s title can be read as a metaphor for death. Many of us who fetched up on Earlsfort Terrace four years ago found ourselves at a show we never thought we’d see. Microdisney had been narkily consigned to cold storage thirty years previously, after which both Cathal and Sean went on to enjoy productive, staunchly independent-facing careers, forever PIC: DAVE GUTTRIDGE stuck on the left of field. Cathal never outwardly struck me as one for nostalgia: for someone so staunchly up-front and engaging, he was an intensely private man. So in hindsight, you can make what you will of that handful of live dates in Dublin and London in June, 2018 and a decision to locate the band’s last ever show in Cork the following February, squaring the circle, completing the cycle. Cathal’s name first surfaced on a poorlyrecorded, shambling six-tracker recorded live at the UCC Downtown Kampus at The Arcadia Ballroom in Cork in the summer of 1980. Kaught at the Kampus – replete with its artsy spelling - was conceived in the can-do spirit of punk rock where the noisier and more tuneless you were, the better. An early iteration of Microdisney contributed a shouty, angular cut to the record, ‘National Anthem’, where it sat beside a handful of live takes from some of their peers: Nun Attax, led by Finbarr Donnelly, Urban Blitz and Mean Features, fronted by Mick Lynch. Released on the fledgling Reekus label, Kaught at the Kampus was intended as a calling card with which Cork’s live music scene could lay down a marker and flick a middle finger at those who dared to confront it. PAGE 12