MARY IS BACK ON THE STAGE, LIVE AND KICKING
SINGER COUGHLAN IS BRINGING HER NEW SHOW TO MERMAID ARTS CENTRE THIS OCTOBER
MARY Coughlan and her band are bringing her new show ‘Live & Kicking’ to Irish Venues Nationwide this autumn, and Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray on Friday, October 6 at 8 p.m.
The show is a celebration of Coughlan’s 30+ years in the music business. Her music career has been a roller coaster – one hell of a ride – and this concert will reflect that as it features all the songs that are close to Mary’s heart.
Coughlan has often been described as one of the greatest female vocalists and interpreters of songs the country has ever produced.
She proudly stands alongside the iconic giants of jazz on both sides of the Atlantic, the likes of Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf.
Mary Coughlan is the only singer these shores have produced to rival the greatest of cabaret and jazz club blues thanks to her unique voice. She is unique in blending the whisky-blurred, smoke-seared, husky notes and laconic wit of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee and the line of deep, down and dirty blues singers back to Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith with the sardonic, bitter-sweet defiance and despair of the Piaf.
Coughlan delivers it all in a delicious and unapologetic Irish drawl, sceptical, rueful, mournful and melting, ardent for love, all in one voice which wraps itself around Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, Elvis Presley and Joy Division.
Over 25 years and ten albums, Coughlan has made the most grown-up, uncompromising, wholly personal and utterly universal music on either side of the Atlantic about what goes on between men and women. She has taken the classic standards of jazz balladry and the recent gems of rock and Irish song-writing, shaken them and offered them up anew.
She sings in the voice of the wrong and wronged woman and she makes us think what it is men make of women and what women have to do to make do. She has just one other forebear in the pretty pallid parade of female pop artists, just one other woman whose bruised, haunted voice could find and enjoy the inconsolable longing and loss in a three minute pop song: Dusty Springfield.
Tickets for Live & Kicking cost €22.50 (€20 concession) and can be purchased online at www.mermaidartscentre.ie or by calling the Mermaid’s box office on 01 2724030.