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Six years ago, Mary Coughlan had her worst St Patrick’s Day. The details might have come from one of the songs she sings of betrayal and regret: drunken revelations from her now ex-husband about the nanny.

“I really needed to get away,” she says. She went as far as she could, to stay with her second daughter in Sydney, initially vowing never to return. Her antipodean exile led to a six-week residency at an arts centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. This residency led to a new album, The House of Ill Repute, and this album now sees her touring again. On Tuesday she celebrates St Patrick’s Day at the Pigalle Club in London.

Coughlan describes The House of Ill Repute as “a return to the concept album”. Its 13 tracks chart a course through the murky waters of infidelity, child abuse, pornography and prostitution. One song, “Antarctica”, is so bleak (“you lying bastard, whoring fraud/you rotten stinking cheat”) that an early listener wrote Coughlan a note begging her not to include it on the album.

“I put in most of my fucking horrific relationship with my ex-husband,” says Coughlan. “From the age of seven, this is my life. It was born out of unhappiness, and I’ve never been as unhappy as that.”

Coughlan built her career on a series of albums that played on her image as a hell-raiser, down to the titles – Tired and Emotional, Under the Influence. An early hit, “Delaney’s Gone Back On The Wine”, remembered a Galway tavern companion who drank himself to death at 33. She developed a ferocious reputation within Ireland’s musical industry.

“Sixteen years ago I stopped drinking,” she says now. “I thought everyone was going to love me. But people get used to you as a drunk. People have reasons for you to stay drunk.”

On Sunday, Coughlan and her band put in an appearance at London’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square, before her appearance at The Brook, a cavernous Southampton pub.

They ran through a mixture of songs from The House of Ill Repute and old favourites. A version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” she played slow and brooding, the central repeated riff carried on piano. As with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ “Mother’s Little Helper”, which she has also covered, she lifted the song out of adolescent callowness by inhabiting it with the voice of lived experience. When she sang about the “bedroom so cold/turned away on your side” it sounded less like a lovers’ tiff, more like an anatomy of an entire relationship.

As ever, she ran through a variety of styles. “The House of Ill Repute” began as Weimar-on-the-Liffey cabaret, swerved into a carousel waltz for a middle eight, then a snatch of “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, then a fairground horror-show with a carillon tinkle. “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”, one of several old standards of her heroine Billie Holliday, added a bossa-nova tinge to its tango. Leiber and Stoller’s “Some Cats Do” had alleycat bass, with pawprints of cymbal and moonlit piano chords underneath Coughlan’s miaows; clinking glasses behind the bar fitted in perfectly. “Antarctica” she sang a cappella, icicle-precise.

Coughlan writes few of her own songs, but her choices and the way she inhabits them turn them alchemically into autobiography. Mother of five and grandmother of one, so far, she is an unlikely but transfixing performer, whether standing on one leg on a vertiginous high heel or kicking off her shoes – “now I’m six inches smaller” – to whisper, growl, cry out loud and occasionally lean against a monitor to listen appreciatively to her showband as they vamped out. No one should wish her heartbreak, but everyone should envy her power to transform it.

The Financial Times

March '09