The Fatima Mansions: Valhalla Avenue – 1992-2022 – 30 Years On

In the latest in a series of anniversary reappraisals, Martin Gray takes a look back at the work of the Fatima Mansions, one of the greatest and most undervalued Irish contemporary rock bands of the 1990s, led by the truly maverick and singular songwriting talent of Cathal Coughlan who recently, tragically, died aged 61.

Preface/Postscript to this reappraisal review:

I had originally prepared this piece a couple of weeks ago with the sole intention of re-visiting and reappraising the magnificently bilious 1992 album Valhalla Avenue by Cathal Coughlan’s Fatima Mansions as it was one of my all time favourite records of the year, and, after Viva Dead Ponies (1990), the second most essential of FM’s five albums they issued during their short explosive existence between 1988 and 1995, as one of the most exciting and adventurously brilliant bands of the decade.

Sadly, I found out only today (23rd May) as I was readying this article for the editorial, through colleague John Robb at LTW, the untimely tragic news that Cathal Coughlan had passed away after an period of [undisclosed] illness. This has totally knocked me sideways and I am reeling from this such that my immediate emotions are of numbed disbelief, devastation and total shock.

Cathal was one of my all time favourite Irish songwriters – ever – and despite only getting to appreciate his output passionately through his Fatima Mansions incarnation from 1988 onwards, I then inevitably started to backtrack and revisit his former band – critic’s favourites (and Peel staples) Microdisney, and found that they were largely excellent too.

Nobody wrote words quite like Coughlan. Nobody. He was a true unique singular maverick talent with an uncanny knack for clever phrasing and scabrous wit of the best kind. Possessed of a rich baritone singing voice that was so impossibly versatile, he often drew comparisons with (his idol) Scott Walker on the more mellifluous compositions. Yet he could also turn on a sixpence and rage like a ferocious hurricane, spewing fire and brimstone on the more aggressive and violently atonal, visceral numbers that the band were also so celebrated for, sometimes within the space of the same song.

Even his speaking voice was exceptionally satisfying on the ear, possessed of that unmistakable Cork brogue which never fully deserted him despite spending much of his musical life encamped outside his home county. Put it like this, I could happily listen to Coughlan recite the ingredients on the back of a box of cereal and he would somehow still manage to make it sound gripping.

He took no prisoners in his written and verbal outlook on life. Indeed, Mark E. Smith – arguably one of his only true contemporaries – was slightly in awe of him to the extent that he famously tried to wind Coughlan up by calling him ‘an Englishman’ in an attempt to try and undermine his unflappable and stoical Irish pride.

It didn’t work, and, amusingly enough, it was Smith who came out of it as the losing side in this otherwise insignificant little spat. Only because Coughlan was so dignified he rose above it all in his usual magnanimous way. And it is because of that that some folks harbour deep love, respect and adoration for him as an artist. Including myself.

His work transcended any simple pigeonholing. Not for him the trivialities of futile compartmentalisation or dumb unit-shifting to meekly appease the record companies’ bank balances. If, during their time together as a recording band, Microdisney had nothing to offer other than pretty melodies, they would have been seen as an innocuous pop-rock act. But the words issuing from Coughlan’s pen were what made them a defiantly individual concern. His intense, raging, soul-bearing presence when they played live meant that people forgot what the rest of the band’s members looked like…all eyes were focused and trained on his mighty commanding presence.

This was carried on when Coughlan formed his next band after the first dissolution of Microdisney in 1988 when both he and other main man Sean O’ Hagan pursued wildly divergent paths – the latter crafting beautifully opulent and pastoral acoustic/electronic-soundscapes as the Beach Boys / Van Dyke Parks-influenced High Llamas, and Coughlan continuing to stamp his indelible commanding presence with the far more confrontational and uncompromisingly eclectic Fatima Mansions.

A band who were so wilfully perverse, but nevertheless utterly ferocious and gripping when witnessed live, they even ended up memorably desecrating a Bryan Adams number one hit for a charity album and then scoring a top ten UK hit with it on the back of another cover (Theme From M*A*S*H) by the notably more celebrated Manic Street Preachers!

The Mansions’ fire burned very brightly and fiercely for less than 5 years before they too were done….and since then Coughlan’s several solo ventures that have taken place on and off in the 20 years since have been nothing short of fascinating – touching on all imaginable bases such as puerile satirical sketches, stately Scott Walker-esque balladry, sonic experimentation, song/spoken word pieces, and intriguing concept albums about ‘an alternative history of the British Isles’, collaborating with other artists as diverse as late comedian Sean Hughes, renowned songwriter Luke Haines, French composer François Ribac, cellist Audrey Riley and more recently producer Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee under the name Telefís.

And now, suddenly he is no longer with us. The music world is a poorer place without him.

Revisit last year’s interview with Cathal conducted by LTW’s John Robb:

Anger Is An Energy – Keep Music Evil!

The Fatima Mansions were, make no mistake, a vehicle for the barely contained rage and righteous bile of chief man Cathal Coughlan. His previous band, critics’ darlings Microdisney, had failed to set the charts alight despite a late dalliance with major label Virgin Records, and yet no amount of promotional clout would ever see them get any further than number 55 on a three week stay in the top 75 with their beautifully melancholy power-ballad ‘Town To Town’.

The band called it quits in 1988 and Coughlan immediately set up his next venture, named after a notorious complex of council flats to the south side of Dublin city centre. Where his lyrical anger and broiling intensity with Microdisney was tempered by the pleasant melodicism and arrangements of former colleague Sean O’ Hagan, with the Fatima Mansions, Coughlan enlisted a gang of musicians who were daring and willing enough to tear the rule book up and do pretty much what he and they pleased.

The results were instantly thrilling, addictive and fascinating.

Let The Dark Ages Begin!

Debut mini-album Against Nature from 1989 was eight songs long, but each track could have been by a different band, so eclectic it was. Touching on all styles from brilliantly-titled opener Only Losers Take The Bus’s hilariously rollocking psychobilly canter, to stately keyboard ballads like Wilderness On Time and Big Madness, to the super-commercial Stock Aitken and Waterman (yes really!) dance-pop of 13th Century Boy, to stampeding, raging diatribes on society’s ills elsewhere. It was a contender for album of the year were it not for a whole slew of other equally magnificent records that were released that same year (see Pixies, New Order, Band Of Holy Joy, Beastie Boys, The Cure, etc).

They then issued their most infamous single of them all – the bruising, bludgeoning, coruscating Blues For Ceausescu – a truly monstrous relentless riff which ran for more than six minutes over which Coughlan was at his raging fire and brimstone best shooting vitriol at right wing politicians and of course gloating over the fall of the eponymous Romanian dictator himself.

Second full-length album Viva Dead Ponies which followed in 1990 really needs no further introduction as it is generally recognised as the Fatima’s DEFINITIVE musical statement and a true tour de force magnum opus of utter spellbinding brilliance. No other album released that year quite matched its sheer diversity of styles and its compulsive magnificence. Here, Coughlan’s lyrical guile and vitriol and his way with melody too is unrivalled.

It’s a head-scrambling, deliriously, deliciously manic and ferocious mix-and-match set of songs delivered in an array of bewilderingly disparate genres, often in the space of one song (opener Angel’s Delight is arguably the band’s finest schizoid moment of them all). These are linked together with deliberately jarring and incongruously cryptic instrumental or operatic interludes intended to keep the listener on their toes – as there are practically no pauses during the entirety of the album’s 46 minute 19-track running time. Side Two’s first few songs alone (Look What I Stole For Us Darling, The White Knuckle Express and Chemical Cosh) will rip your ears off with the sheer brutalising force of its relentless, stampeding, industrial-strength neo-vaudeville art-rock!

The four track Hive EP which came out in early 1991 was a 10 minute super-concentrated blast of full-on gonzoid psychobilly-garage-thrash-noise which was another glorious slap around the face to mediocrity, and featured a truly unhinged cover of Ministry’s Stigmata which outdid the original by being even more caustic and violent! But stand-out track was The Holy Mugger, a truly frantic, crazed electro-punk rattler which when played loud would in all likelihood cause your neighbour’s windows to crack within seconds… The Fatimas have lost none of their compulsive urgency with this release!

Another 8-track mini-album followed as an interim measure in late 1991 – the more reflective and comparatively acoustic Bertie’s Brochures which nevertheless featured a truly skewed and deranged mutant electronic desecration of REM’s Shiny Happy People, a song which in Coughlan’s words was simply ‘cruising for a bruising’ even though the author admitted to liking Stipe’s bunch of merry men’s music generally.

The true reason for them deciding to trash the song arises from an incident whereby Stipe walked out of a Fatima’s show one time, citing his contempt for ‘art rock bands’. But Coughlan decided that ‘pot calling kettle black’ was reason enough to indulge in this puerile but perfectly justified tit-for-tat gesture – to hysterical effect: “Go Fuck Yourself! Aargh!! Go! Go-go-go-go…Go Fuck Yourself!!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tENX07HzVMg&ab_channel=saxfreak01

Open The Gates – Hell Awaits You, Sinners!

So we – and you – finally arrive at Valhalla Avenue.

This was the Fatima’s only album which charted, incredibly reaching a respectable number 52 in the UK Top 75 for one week only at the beginning of June 1992. It was prefaced by a single Evil Man which also charted at 58, again for one week. However that was about as commercial as things got.

If Viva Dead Ponies was the consummate, quintessential, genre-hopping Fatima Mansions album which embraced every conceivable style the band tried their hand at whilst cranking up the tension and excitement quotient to 10, then Valhalla Avenue perversely enough, is less immediate and if anything in places was even more cathartically aggressive. If that was possible.

Coughlan’s indignant rage at the way the world is – a dystopian nightmare of empirical corruption overrun to the hilt with freaks and misfits decked out in ironic animal costumes (remember Coughlan’s original title for Viva Dead Ponies was Bugs Fuckin’ Bunny, perhaps also a timely reverential double finger salute to the second part of his previous band’s name, who knows?), is cranked up several notches on many of the song lyrics here. Coughlan simply takes hold of these situations by the scruff of its collective neck and comes up with a series of vignettes which, through their caricatured grotesqueness and comical bleakness offers a comprehensive insight into his wondrously misanthropic mindset.

The sheer lyrical barrage that assaults the ears of the listener here from the first track (Evil Man) onwards is a pure delight to behold, if you love having your senses regally fucked with that is. Coughlan’s ranting delivery here gains an increasingly crazed momentum as it drags you along by your hair and forces the words into your throat in one utterly demented breathless torrent: “The city was evil some country was evil the hippies were evil the writers were evil the homeless were evil the workers were evil the summer was evil independence was evil….!!!”

The pace hardly lets up with track two Something Bad (Is Giving Birth To Something Worse), despite its slower tempo, nor the third, title track ….. even if it does start on a deceptively mellower note than the first two. And then you get to the fourth track 1000% (released as a second single in July) which is so incendiary it simply bludgeons your face into a pulp before setting it alight!

The epic narrative that runs through the aptly tempestuous North Atlantic Wind showcases Coughlan’s incredible poetic prowess (be it subconscious or not) for portraying vividly surreal settings forever teetering on the precipice of chaos and all-out apocalypse. And this is his major strength as witnessed on much of the lyrics throughout this album.

In fact the only number that offers any kind of genuine respite to this relentless cavalcade of twisted dystopian imagery is the closing track on the first side Purple Window which, melodically speaking, is a conscious throwback to the more plaintive reflective songs on previous album Berties Brochures and could effectively be seen as a left-over from that album, having perhaps relinquished its place in the track-listing for that maliciously irreverent REM cover.

A recurring theme which resurfaces often on this album is retribution and repentance. Coughlan gleefully sticks the knife into these situations with relish and reconfigures and re-purposes the outcomes for his own twisted gratification. It’s what makes Valhalla Avenue (the title track) so deliciously bitter and rancorous as it all but virtually revisits the scenario witnessed in The Door To Door Inspector from Viva Dead Ponies, as if to say “Purgatory is a place that you’re duty bound for and there is no escape nor going back my friend”. This is most tellingly articulated in these lines: ‘Well now they’re breaking down the door / your hideaway is safe no more / scream as they drag you from your bed / when you recount from a bleeding head’. It’s completely merciless.

The second half kicks off with another taped voice (like the previous album, the gaps between many songs are filled with disquieting snippets, this time of snatches of dialogue) before piledriving into the relentless Go Home Bible Mike, a near cousin of Ceausescu if ever there was one. Again, the vivid and viciously dark wordplay of Coughlan’s lyrics take swipes at all deserving targets from overzealous evangelists (hence the title) to the sort of social outcasts and misfit freaks that populate the most unsettling suburban settings befitting of Stephen King.

Witness these couplets: “As people dressed as cows form an orderly queue / For a drug that makes you dead for a second or two” and “Gasping all night in this Nazi city / You bit it, I’m bleeding, we’re sliding in my blood / Humping in my blood / Market my blood! / Market my blood!”. Hilarious but truly disturbing at the same time.

Perfumes Of Paradise lulls you into a false sense of security with its innocuously pretty waltz time signature, but remember the name behind this track so do not be fooled for one moment that you’re being left off the hook, because before even a minute is up you’re jolted back into the real world….. and then all hell breaks loose 50 seconds later! A sudden monstrous roar of orchestrated mayhem and electronic noise overload threatens to bring the ceiling down as Coughlan belts out his neuroses at full throttle and all around him is the sound of malfunctioning machinery, foundations collapsing in on themselves, crashing, screaming, whining, pleading, accompanied by a cast of lunatics recruited from the pits of hell. And then it abruptly stops again and we’re back into the original pretty waltz.

The dolefully resigned and brow-beaten musings of Greyhair which swiftly follows offer up little in the way of comfort or repose either. For all of the implicit references to imperialism and aristocracy, there is another which simply tears down such pretences and paints an ever blunter and bleaker picture of peasantry and betrayal. You can almost sense Coughlan salivating through his gritted teeth as he intones the words “So here you are / the boy who broke the plough / who struck his father down / who told us to be damned / and betrayed us to the Englishman!”

Whenever the Fatima’s fancy cranking things up a few notches, they do it with barely restrained glee: C^7 (so-titled because of the chord the whole track hinges on no less) is so sheer, scalding and corrosive in sound it threatens to make your ears bleed. A monumental, sludge tempo-ed stab of grinding, screaming industrial noise, it surpasses anything else you have ever heard by this band.  You can barely make out the words as they stand, delivered as they are in a scree of vari-pitched distortion and all but buried in the searing shrapnel. It’s brilliantly tinnitus-inducing and remorseless.

This abruptly segues into the equally disquieting lament ‘Breakfast With Bandog’, with a distant-sounding Coughlan making out as if he is reciting the last rites to an un-named victim about to be lynched in the cavernous echoing surrounds of a derelict foundry or somesuch, with all manner of truly unsettling industrial squealing from all directions, as if Einsturzende Neubauten had gatecrashed the proceedings. Obviously such a scenario is pure speculative fantasy. Nevertheless, it’s a wonderfully atmospheric – if all too brief – vignette and it forms a fitting sign-off to the pummelling firestorm that raged only moments before it.

Ray Of Hope, Hoe Of Rape – such an original title could only come from the pen of Cathal Coughlan. The final song proper on an otherwise truly extraordinary album (save for the following appended instrumental reprise of Holy Mugger, here re-titled Be Dead!), the words here are a stream-of-consciousness litany of bug-eyed monsters, devil worshippers and all manner of scenarios that all conspire to – yet again – paint a picture of what is hell on earth.

If there is a common theme that runs throughout this album, it is that of Coughlan’s inherent fondness for juxtaposing misanthropic tropes which detail the collapse of civilisations with truly surreal disturbing imagery that verges on the satirical and darkly comic. Very few other artists, with the possible exception of contemporary Nick Cave, can marry such incongruity and make it sound so profoundly poetic, with as much wit, guile and elan as Coughlan does.

He really is a true wordsmith par excellence in so many ways. If anything, his way with lyrical dexterity almost makes him the James Joyce of modern contemporary rock writers, a quality which has been casually hinted at by others before. Only because, rather like Joyce, he possesses in him a truly visionary and unique turn of phrase as witnessed in his love of the unconventional and avant-garde as well as his often erudite and articulate approach to songwriting.

That is not to overlook or discredit the rest of the Fatimas in their collective roles in crafting the incredibly widescreen sound of this whole album, because very few bands can swing so effortlessly between seemingly disparate styles and genres with such ease as this motley bunch can do. They perfected it on previous long player Viva Dead Ponies and they have merely refined it on this one. Special mentions must therefore go to guitarist Andrías Ó Grúama and keyboardist Nick Bagnall as well as producer Ralph Jezzard for their part in generating and engineering the raging torrents of broiling, discordant noise that makes this album so visceral and compelling to listen to.

Support slot on U2’s Zoo TV tour

If there was one single thing which raised the most eyebrows among both music fans and music critics alike (seriously now), it was the discovery that soon after the album was released, The Fatima Mansions were asked to open for U2 on part of their massive world tour, chiefly in Europe. How this ever transpired is unknown, suffice to say that Bono and co. must have been sufficiently impressed by the band enough to invite them out on tour with them.

For the band, it was a measure of just how far they could try to convert, pervert, or alienate some or all the fans of the biggest rock act in the world. It’s no secret that all gallant attempts to achieve any sort of recognition met largely with indifference, but there were one or two very notable, now legendary performances where the band simply pulled out all the stops in forgoing any kind of conversion therapy, and opted instead for all-out mischievously spiteful provocation simply for the hell of it.

The show in Milan was where the band were at their most fearlessly confrontational. The massed crowd were already impatient and showing their usual animosity towards any support band eager for them to clear off and for the main attraction to arrive. In the Fatima’s case, it was cue for the band (or rather one of them – the guitarist Ó Grúama) to enter to pitched battle with their adversary. Ó Grúama’s wisdom, or lack of it, in donning a Barcelona FC football top was seen as crowd baiting of possibly the most foolishly suicidal kind! Even the rest of the band were mortified for a moment upon seeing him step out and reveal said shirt….but then in true stoical fashion, they shouldered all of the hostility and missiles promptly being hurled in their direction and carried on….

However, the set was changed at the last minute to now feature all of their most wigged-out gonzoid and thrashy aggressive numbers, and these only served to whip the crowd up into a near frenzy of blood-baying hatred as the projectiles towards the stage became an endless hail of ammunition directed at the band.

As if Ó Grúama’s deliberate provocation with the Barcelona shirt was not enough, Cathal Coughlan then produced a plastic bottle in the novelty shape of the Virgin Mary and proceeded to feign sodomy with it (head first obviously) to the even greater volcanic rage of the by now truly mutinous crowd. Screaming to the masses “Fuck the Pope!”, he was now beside himself. You could see the red and purple mist descend over the entire outdoor arena as the temperature started to rise in line with the sheer anger of the crowd. Bottles, glasses and coins rained down relentlessly onto the band as they tore into Ceausescu as their final valedictory sign off (after the gig they counted a fair few hundred Lira was thrown at them!).

After this truly controversial performance, Bono unbelievably, went up to the band and instead of saying that they were going to be kicked off the tour, simply said to Coughlan and his cohorts “Fair play to you!”. The Fatima Mansions survived to conquer another day.

Final score: Mansions 1 – Milan U2 Massive 0.

Cathal Coughlan RIP. There may be no other like him.

All words by Martin Gray