Of all the arts, pop music rewards its greatest fringe players the least. There are no grants to help out when record companies drop their former charges, no museums for albums deemed difficult or obscure. Cathal Coughlan has been on kissing terms with success - more so in the early 1990s with the Fatima Mansions than with his first band, Microdisney - but his relationship with the mainstream has been at best uncomfortable.
He is a pithy, cerebral songwriter, though that hardly does justice to these visceral, funny songs. Microdisney's Singer's Hampstead Home, unearthed unexpectedly tonight, is a breezily lacerating treatise on pop star excess apparently inspired by Coughlan's then labelmate Boy George. Virgin Records released it as a single; it was not a hit. The Fatima Mansions' slogan was "keep music evil", and if Coughlan is now something of an outsider (new solo album The Sky's Awful Blue, his third, is released on his own Beneath Music label), you sense that is where he feels happiest. He has too much to say to shut up and toe the line.
Though the DIY approach necessitates economy, Coughlan's stripped-down new songs have lost none of the punch of their better-dressed predecessors. And Springtime Followed Summer unfolds over skeletal guitar and disconsolate cello, the burnished, woody richness of Coughlan's voice utterly compelling. "Maybe things won't be so bad," he sings with a magnificently defeated stage shrug, a gesture worthy of Jacques Brel. Elegant and complex, these acutely observed narratives also recall Scott Walker and, to some extent, Mark Eitzel - another unjustly marginalised singer.
There is a higher class of between-song banter, too. "I'm like Wittgenstein after a brain transplant from an orang-utan," he laughs after a short bout of existential contemplation. "That's not a morality tale," he says before the last notes of Three Rusty Reivers have died away. "As those who know me will tell you, I have no morals." He is lying: the vicious romance of You Turned Me and the meditation on privilege and class that is White's Academy are intensely moral. Coughlan's intelligence and passion are a rebuke to a vapid music industry, his chronicles of disaffection and disgust an inspiration.
