Honesty is a recurring theme in conversation with Mary Coughlan – the Galway singer knows it can, and has, cost her dearly in the past, but she doesn’t know any other way to do it.
“I’ve never tried to be anything other than who I am, but I think it was when I got sober that I really started to get honest with myself,” she says. “I find fake people are very easy to detect, and I know people have different reasons for being the way they want to be – but I don’t think you can be afraid with the truth.”
It’s a policy that has worked for and against her over the years, but she’s unlikely to change now; her inability to tolerate fakes or fools caused her to walk out of a Newstalk Radio studio this week because she couldn’t appear on the station after George Hook’s comments on rape victims.
It’s now 32 years since her multi-award winning debut album, Tired and Emotional; and after turning 60 last year, the reality is that this quintessential Galway woman is now longer away from the west than she was in it.
She is coming home later this month, bringing her top-class band to the Town Hall Theatre on Friday week, September 22, for what might be described as a journey through the Mary Coughlan songbook – which, with 14 albums under her belt, gives her plenty to choose from.
“We’ve Jimmy Smyth on guitar, Johnny Taylor on piano and Cormac O’Brien on double bass – and we have a set list of 35 songs to pick and choose from or to play if there’s a request from the crowd,” she says.
She knows where the action starts – because it always begins with Meet Me Where They Play the Blues from that debut album – although, in keeping with Mary Coughlan on many fronts, she never knows where it finishes.
Galway is one night on her biggest Irish tour in years, but it will be special – not just because she’s home, but because she already knows there will be a big crew in from Shantalla that she hasn’t seen in years.
“I was on Galway Bay with Keith Finnegan recently and afterwards I got a load of Facebook messages from girls I went to school with. Now they’re all coming on the night – and it will be great!” she says.
Her life has rarely been dull or predictable, but the past year has thrown up its share of new drama – not least with a heart scare that saw her undergo surgery to insert four stents.
“It was the biggest wake-up call of my life and made me think about my health in a new way,” she says, fresh from a cardiovascular session in the gym.
Doctors had suggested the chest pains were probably just panic attacks – but when she finally made it into St Vincent’s Hospital, they discovered how critical her situation actually was.
“I had a 99 percent blockage and 97 percent blockage in one artery and in my other artery I had a 60 and 40 percent blockage,” she reveals, although the stents have solved all that.
That health scare also saw her take stock of things in another way – because now more than ever, her philosophy is that you only live once.
“You’re only here for a short time and you have to make the most of it. I’ve spent a lot more time catching up with people that I haven’t seen in ages and doing things that I want to do.”
Mary left Galway at the age of 30 in 1986 – so she has now lived more than half her life away from the city of her birth; not that she ever really went away.
“When we left first, my children were heartbroken and I made a promise to them that – when I wasn’t working – we’d go down every weekend. So on a Friday, I’d collect them from school and it used to take us hours in traffic, before the motorway.
“As I got busier, my parents would come to Dublin to mind the children, so the Galway visits were down to once a month or so. But I loved going down; I used to do my sister’s shopping just to be out in Galway,” she laughs.
Her most recent album, Scars on the Calendar, may also be her most personal, both in terms of the songs and because it was recorded at home with her longstanding musical collaborator, Dutch guitarist and one-time Galway resident Eric Visser.
Eric was the guitar virtuoso behind the Dutch musical ensemble Flairck, whose blend of jazz, blues, folk and classical enjoyed huge success back in the early eighties.
His friendship with Mary pre-dated that – and has survived over the decades that followed.
“It really started when I was knocked down by a car in Knocknacarra, when I was pregnant with Aoife – and she is 42 in January. I broke my back and I was in the Regional for weeks not really knowing how my baby was affected – because this was before all of the new technology.
“Eric was living in Galway and every evening he used to come into the hospital and play the guitar in the room. He wrote a piece inspired by that time – and he called it Aoife,” says Mary.
Aoife was a track on the multi-platinum album, Variations on a Lady; Eric later returned to live in Galway where he rented a house where the lodgers included Mary – and the now Irish Times Religious Affairs correspondent, Patsy McGarry.
But just as he was an integral part of her last album, he was even more influential back when it all began.
“Eric came back to Galway in 1984 and he was behind the recording of Tired and Emotional. We went out to Greenfields Studios in Headford and I hadn’t a penny, so Eric paid for the whole thing – £1,700 I remember it cost.
“And I don’t know how many it sold, because the record company never told us!”
Now Eric is working with Mary on a new project in a different direction – collaborating with Dublin-based theatre company, Brokentalkers, with the working title, Woman Undone.
Collectively they will produce an original music / theatre performance exploring the themes of oppression, abuse and redemption of women through song, dance and text.
The initial inspiration was Mary’s personal experiences – but it also explores the wider historical oppression endured by women ‘from the home to the brothel, the Magdalen laundries and the lunatic asylum’.
The cast will include Mary and an ensemble of dancers and performers, while a string quartet and pianist will perform Mary and Eric’s original score.
It is scheduled for next year’s Dublin Theatre Festival as well the LOKAL Festival in Reykjavik – and it will be in Galway in 2018.
“It’s completely different to anything I’ve ever done before and it’s very exciting; I don’t know how it will work out but I do know one thing; with Eric’s score, the music will be brilliant,” she says.
■ Mary Coughlan is at Galway Town Hall on Friday, September 22. Tickets on sale at tht.ie.
