Chris Braide - Singers Hampstead Home - A tribute to Cathal Coughlan

Remembering Cathal Coughlan…
I can remember hearing Cork singer/songwriter Cathal Coughlan for the first time in 1987. His band Microdisney (featuring the sublime music of Sean O’ Hagan) had just released a superb single called Town to Town which BBC Radio 1 would not stop playing. It was a fantastic song all about the aftermath of Nuclear war, burying the hatchet with an ex lover and helping to reap the dead harvest together. The lyric was haunting, the strings sublime and the voice of the singer, full of rage and beauty was fantastic. It was a blessed, artistic statement and as far as you could get lyrically from Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky. My older brother bought the album from which the song was lifted called Crooked Mile ( he had more pocket money than I did) and the follow up album 39 minutes featuring a song called Singers Hampstead Home which we both absolutely loved and played to death. It was like The Beach Boys with jangly guitars. stunning melody and harmonies and a cynical yet amusing lyric. In my mind, Town to Town and Singers Hampstead Home will always be number one records. Listen to the chorus of each. It’s as good as pop music gets. Truly. Microdisney made a handful of great albums, they were press darlings and I loved them and have never grown tired of listening to them. Their classic album on Rough Trade - The Clock Comes Down The Stairs (a euphemism for death) and the two albums that followed on Virgin are some of my most cherished albums. Really gorgeous stuff to my then teenage ears. Cathal went on to form the blisteringly powerful, and at times down right scary band The Fatima Mansions. I saw them live in ‘91 and it was quite intense. Like Punk circa 1977 on steroids. This music was not for the faint hearted and was truly confrontational and angry with songs such as Viva Dead Ponies and Blues For Ceausescu. Yet there were always moments of great beauty with songs like Pack Of Lies, On The Day I lost Everything, Bishop Of Babel. Back then as I listened as a young kid I knew this was the work of a lyrical genius and perhaps a troubled soul. His lyrics made me think deeply, I tried to figure them out as I listened. They haunted me. Microdisney’s 1985 single Birthday Girl still haunts me to this day. After all these years of loving the songs and voice of Cathal Coughlan I decided that I should get in touch with him during the Covid pandemic in October 2020 and see if we could write together. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the greatest artists and singers in the world, from the sublime (Sia) to the ridiculous (no names mentioned). I have also worked with a few of my musical heroes such as my dear friend Marc Almond (another brilliant lyricist), but I had never worked with Cathal. We exchanged emails, arranged a chat on skype and found we had much in common musically. We both loved Prefab Sprout, Scritti Politti, Robert Wyatt, Talk Talk etc. After our chat I said I would send him some music which I did. Cathal loved it and got to working on it straight away. What he sent back was gorgeous, haunting and as thought provoking as ever. He made my piano chords even more strange, sad, melancholy, romantic and mournful. I told him how much I loved it and he was pleased. We arranged another catch up on skype and had a wonderful, hour long conversation about the music we loved and where we could go next with our songwriting. We both loved Talk Talk so I said I’d do something with the kind of vibe of Talk Talk’s sublime 1991 single I believe In You. A song both Cathal and I adored. I wrote the new piece of music, sent it to him and he was delighted. He said he already had ideas for it and as soon as he was back from a holiday in Wales he would get the vocal down and send me the files. He did just that and I was once again thrilled and inspired with what I was hearing. We had planned to write a third song in the new year (2022) so that we could make what we were doing ‘a thing’. An ep would make it more than a single, but less daunting than an album, for now anyway. I loved his words so much. I loved his latest solo album from 2021 called Song Of Co Aklan and the wonderful project with Jacknife Lee called Telefis. He was on form and back to his melodic and lyrical best. I couldn’t wait to write our next song. Life is precious and the connections we make with one another even more so. Cathal passed away on May the 18th 2022 after a long illness and left a void in my musical heart. He was such a great thinker. He made me think the way that Christopher Hitchens made me think. It’s hard to lose great thinkers when they are so few and far between. Cathal and I never got to finish that third song, but the two songs we did write and record together I will cherish for the rest of my life. Thank you Cathal. You don’t know how special you were to me. Chris Braide , May 30, 2022.