MARY COUGHLAN
‘I never paid for cocaine’
‘WHY didn’t you just say Mary Coughlan’s house?” the taxi driver calls after me. That might have been easier than the Google Maps fembot and braving the snarling guard dogs on foot all right. The house has been the subject of so many headlines you would figure it’s a bit of a landmark. Just in the last few months we have had “Singer Mary Coughlan faces losing home” (The Sun) and “Singer Mary Couglan ordered to bring the house down where daughter is living” (The Times), which made it sound like she was being required to stage a particularly good show for the daughter. Mortgage anxiety is almost part of the brand: Cuttings from 20 years ago refer to her “almost losing her home” even back then. I half expect to see Mary chained to the railings, singing some gorgeous bluesy number into the Wicklow air.
Instead she’s in her kitchen in a nest of envelopes, which will soon contain copies of her new album, Life Stories ,tobe sent all over the world. The view from the window is to die for — and certainly worth a little jousting with the bank or the council if that’s what it took — but she seems remarkably unconcerned about the latest round of house drama. True, she is “f **ked” now that all her gigs (including, most painfully, Glastonbury) have been cancelled, but there’s only a small mortgage on the house and it sounds, all things considered, like she’ ll be fine. The story about having to pull buildings down on her land is wrong, she says. “My kids live at the wee house but the council sent us three recommendations which we’re taking care of,” she says. “I’ve sent a solicitor’s letter (about The Times story).”
On the brink of her 15th album release, she’s an artist who has, more than most, seen the highs and lows of the music business. She’s recorded in New York and played in local hotels here. She’s had Van Morrison and Elvis Costello send champagne up to her on the stage, and yet can pass unrecognised on the street. “People think I have loads of money but I don’t. I was never that big in Ireland, believe it or not,” she says. When the
Covid payments were being calculated it was found that she “hadn’t earned 200 quid a week here”. And yet her devil-may-care voice was also part of the soundtrack to a generation of Irish women. She was, and is, loved.
Given her ill health — she suffers from a degenerative lung condition and recently had stents put in her heart — and the ravages of past addictions, I expected her to look a little careworn. But in the lunchtime light, the cats peer in at an owner who hasn’t a line on her 64-year-old face. There are other surprises too. She seems scatty but is unexpectedly precise. A text after we’re finished shows that she remembers every detail of our long, free-wheeling conversation. For a woman whose private dramas have made news for a generation now, she knows just how much of her soul she wants to bare.
She saves a lot of it for the songs themselves. The new album is full of melancholy wit and gorgeous vocals. Family
brings her back to her mother’s funeral. Twelve Steps Forward and Ten Steps Back is a paean to the wounded bird she once was. Her voice, weary yet light, assures you that she’s lived every sad syllable. Why Do All the Bad Guys Taste So Good began as a testament to the moreishness of cake but became a song about her poor choice in men. “Every f**ker I’ve known has destroyed me, they clog your arteries and destroy you, but they taste great at the time,” she says. “I was attracted to the type of men who would treat me badly. When they hit your head off the wall and you land in hospital, that’s abusive, there were a few of those.”
Her confusion about men stemmed from the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her grandfather. “I wasn’t quite seven, I hadn’t made my holy communion. You feel intrinsically bad and you repeat situations which will perpetuate that view of yourself.”
She was always running after that; she ran away from home for the first time when she was 14, to the Aran Islands. At 18 she was gone again, this time to London. Music was her solace in her teenage years, she would listen to Radio Caroline under the covers. She sang along but never dreamed she could make a go of music.
By her mid-20s, she was in an unhappy marriage, had three children, and working as a cleaner, among other odd jobs. Her first husband didn’t want her singing “for whatever reason”, but it didn’t stop her. “I used to cycle down and sing two songs with the jazz band in Galway. And, f**k me, I’d never experienced anything like it. I never thought it would happen to me. I didn’t know anything about music really.”
On her 30th birthday, she was injured in a car crash that gave her the money she needed to leave. “I got 10k from an insurance claim and it helped me pay rent on a house in Dublin for a year. I’d left my husband by that point. I was really deeply unhappy and I gave as good as I got. He felt trapped in the situation and so did I. Music was a way of getting away from all that.”
She began singing at the Harcourt Hotel and people would come in dribs and drabs. Then, one night, her mother rang to say she was on the radio. “Mark Cagney played the whole side of an album and there were 300 people queuing the following week to see me.”
Two-and-a-half years into the business, she’d earned enough to buy a mansion in Howth. She was living out her dream. And then she started drinking and doing coke. “I’d done acid when I was 16 and smoked dope but I’d never seen coke. There was so much of it, you wouldn’t believe it. It helped because you could drink longer. I never had to pay for it but I paid for it in other ways, when I couldn’t do without it.”
How bad did it get? “There were guards picking me up and bringing me home. My family endured horrific shit, my kids endured horrific shit, my then partner Frank [the American businessman Frank Bonadio] endured awful stuff. I was appalling. My son once said he was really scared when I was drunk one night and drove them home. He spoke about how it was lonely and about how I’d take him to the pub and give him a bag of crisps.”
She went into the Rutland Centre and underwent aggressive group therapy, but it didn’t help.
“The day I got out, I went straight out and bought a bottle of vodka and my husband found me with bread and butter stuck in my hair. I was told that I needed to come in and tell us in a two-year programme what is really going on. Those centres are not magic places, you have to do the work.”
It was only intensive oneon-one therapy in the Rutland, and acknowledgement of the abuse in her childhood, that helped her move toward recovery and sobriety. She bought Neil Jordan’s house from him in Bray as he was finishing his movie, The Crying Game. It was around then she got the call to become involved in A Woman’s Heart tour. She repeats Bonadio’s dismissal of the music as “women moaning in bedsits” but the money wasn’t to be sniffed at and her solution for staying involved in the tour, while staying sober, was to bring musicians on the road with her who were themselves in recovery. “I knew I could never stop singing, I loved it too much.”
She met Bonadio in a pub in Howth. He sent her a “big bucket of roses” and when she walked off the stage in London a few nights later, he was
there waiting for her. They had a child together but Mary briefly began sliding into her own ways.
“And he was left holding the baby, trying to feed her with warm milk and honey.” Bonadio, she says, “had an affair with our nanny. I threw him out. He was angry and that was how he did it. But we’ve come through all of that. He did the therapy as well”.
She’s been sober for the last 26 years and has a new guy now — John, a lighting director from New Zealand.
The years of illness, addiction and family strife have given way to a hard-won contentment. Her house and garden are idyllic and she has her family around her. She gestures over to a piece of paper affixed to the fridge. It says: “Remember to be grateful.” Life Stories is out on September 4