THE blues/ jazz/ soul survivor Mary Coughlan played a belter of a gig at Doolin Folk Festival last weekend. The best gig they had in six years the festival organisers declared.
It was her first time playing Doolin Folk Festival, says Mary on the phone with Limerick Post, chatting about the upcoming Belltable show. “It was brilliant, a great festival.”
And it almost never happened. Mary was on tour in Australia for the last few weeks and picked up what she described “some mad f*ckin’ virus” that left her hospitalised. She saw a doctor before leaving Perth.
“I don’t know what happened, I was on the flight talking shite – I thought my father was here and he is dead!
“When I got off the plane I had to go to hospital. They put me into a big bath of ice – my temperature was 104!”
Thankfully a heavy dose of antibiotics and steroids helped the singer to recover and was soon “jumping around the place.”
For a true survivor, such as Mary Coughlan, the show must go on, and two days later Doolin got a tremendous show from the music legend and her band Johnny Taylor, Cormac O’Brien and Davy Ryan.
Ironic then, that for a previous show in Belltable in 2016, Mary was recovering from a fall at the passport control at Dublin airport on her way back from Germany. That fall broke two ribs and punctured a lung. We wonder sometimes that if it wasn’t for bad luck, would Coughlan have no luck at all.
But if anyone knows about picking yourself up off the floor and fighting on, it is Mary Coughlan. After a decade of addiction that very nearly left her for dead in her 30s, the singer got sober in 1994 and hasn’t taken a drink since.
But she’s never lost the whiskey-soaked blues voice and the sardonic wit of the true survivor.
When a show in the Treaty City is on the horizon, she loves to remind me that as a kid she ran away TO Limerick –
Laughs, “Two weeks after my Leaving Cert, I ran away from home and ended up in Limerick! I got a job in The Galleon Grill and I was the first nude life model employed in Limerick Art College.”
The current album ‘Live and Kicking’, recorded in front of a sold-out Vicar Street, is a fair reflection of where Coughlan is now musically: flowing easily between showstoppers Jimmy McCarthy’s ‘Ride On’ and Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ and Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
Mary delayed celebrating her 60th birthday due to getting a stent in her heart and took a year off the road for recovery
“I decided to go back to Vicar Street a year later and celebrate. It was packed – it was brilliant.”
Her sound engineers convinced her that the recordings were too good not to be released. Coughlan was back and performing better than ever.
Next project for Mary Coughlan will be her stage-play ‘Woman Undone’ being developed by Brokentalkers which premieres in November in Dublin. ‘Woman Undone’ is a re-imagining of Mary’s Coughlan’s early life. The story of a young woman who endured physical and sexual abuse, addiction and mental illness; whose discovery of art and music was instrumental in helping her to overcome trauma.
For the piece, Coughlan and female vocal quartet Mongoose will perform a score created by Iceland’s Valgeir Sigurdsson who has worked with Sigur Ros. ‘Woman Undone’ will tour the country in 2019.
This weekend, expect classic jazz standards mixed with gems from Jagger/ Richards to Ian Curtis (Joy Division) as Coughlan makes them her own, taking this Limerick audience from European cabarets to American jazz clubs and sending you back out into O’Connell Street having witnessed Ireland’s true soul survivor.
Mary Coughlan and band play Belltable this Saturday June 23.
