Mary Coughlan

Mary Coughlan was born in Galway in 1956 as the oldest of five. As a young teenager she cut convent school and developed a taste for drugs and drink. A period of depression and a suicide attempt follow at the tender age of 17. After spells in hospitals and a belated graduation from school she left her parents’ home in search for freedom. "It wasn’t that I had a horrible family,” Mary explains, "there was just a lack of communication and trust.” She took various odd jobs to keep afloat. In 1974 she moved to England and became a mother at the age of 20. After having two more children, Mary walked out on her husband in 1981. In 1984, Mary Coughlan went back in her hometown of Galway. She then started singing in public and was promptly discovered by Dutch musician and producer Erik Visser, whose group Flairck was a great success in Europe at the time. Mary’s debut album TIRED AND EMOTIONAL sold 100,000 copies.

Mary’s success was then followed by the renowned "successful-but-naive-artist-gets ripped-off-by-greedy-managers” period. After some years of great success Mary Coughlan lost her house, car and record contract and turned into a severe alcoholic. At the age of 29 she started drinking seriously and was hospitalized more than thirty times.
Looking back from a distance she blamed herself: "I just couldn’t handle it. I was angry at everyone, angry at myself. Above all, I was angry, ready to blame everyone. I didn’t take responsibility and a lot of people fucked me over.” And so, despite of some success in a side career as an actress, the downward spiral of her personal life continued until Mary Coughlan hit rock bottom in 1993. The public perception in Ireland was no longer concerned about Coughlan - the singer and general interest in her music faded slowly.
Mary Coughlan stared treatment for alcoholism and began a new relationship in the mid 1990s. She had two more kids and released AFTER THE FALL in 1997. It’s the album that heralded her return to form. Moreover, due to the fact that she’s one of the many female artists featured on the enormously successful "A Woman’s Heart” CD series, her name never completely disappeared from public memory. But Mary Coughlan couldn’t stand the image of the suffering, lonely Irish woman communicated in the series and neither does she want to be considered a victim.

RETURN AND SECOND SUCCESS:
Mary Coughlan returned to the music scene as a survivor. Her public stance concerning the topics of abortion, Catholic moral bigotry, and the role of women in Irish society in general, are still marked by brutal honesty and frank criticism. For the AFTER THE FALL project some of the most talented younger Irish writers contributed exclusive new songs. The jazz and blues-inflected timbre of the famous Coughlan voice was still intact and the album became a creative catharsis marked by autobiographical themes: divorce, abuse, self-loathing and redemption – everything was confronted in the new songs.

In the new millenium, Mary Coughlan started working on the grandest project of her career so far. With the staging of "Lady Sings The Blues” on various Dublin and London, stages a dream came true for the Galway singer. The elaborate multi-media stage production was dedicated to the life and art of Billie Holiday. Mary had a number of elegant 40s-style outfits made and matter-of-factly declared that for this particular occasion she would just put up her hair, get the contact lenses in and put on one of the dresses. In case of disaster, audiences could at least remember the fine dresses - excellent proof that the laconic nature of the famed Coughlan style of Irish humor was still pretty much intact these days.

But nothing went wrong and the show was a great success. But it wasn’t a comeback in the true sense of the word. Mary Coughlan never really stopped singing even in her darkest hours.