The Return of Microdisney

In advance of Microdisney’s recent reunion to play their 1985 album The Clock Comes Down the Stairs album live in Dublin and London, BBC 6Music’s Mark Radcliffe asks founding members Cathal Coughlan and Sean O'Hagan the inevitable question: if the two shows go well, will they go on tour?  Their decision to re-form in the first place must surely have been a difficult one – seeing them play both concerts and listening to their recorded output from the 1980s gave me the impression that this was a band driven by a deep-rooted contrariness.  In interviews, they allude to having annoyed a lot of people in the music industry, while when they actually perform at the two venues, singer Coughlan makes several references to his fiery younger self. Like many great artists who underachieved commercially, Microdisney were seemingly allergic to compromise.    

                Though they were obviously eager to make a successful career out of music – they signed to major label Virgin in 1986 and many of their songs are hook-laden earworms that recall The Beach Boys, Steely Dan and the intellectual pop strand of the early 1980s represented by Prefab Sprout and Scritti Politti – listening to them thirty years later, and seeing them in performance in the National Concert Hall and Barbican Centre, gave me a clearer idea as to why they remain an acquired taste.  

                Take their single ‘Birthday Girl’.  Over an infectiously bouncy melody (further brightened by O’Hagan’s glistening guitar) Coughlan sings a chorus as sweet as any you will hear in the chart: ‘Birthday girl, rosy and special / Will this night last forever?’  But his mournful Cork baritone lends the song an unavoidable sense of melancholy and listening closely, you can later hear him sing  ‘Feed the birds poisoned bread / In the square beneath my place of birth'.  The effect is like biting down on a slice of brack only for your teeth to come in contact with the hidden ring.

 Microdisney were renowned for their live shows and in the reunion gigs, they are punchy and sparkling. Coughlan is often hunched over, his face twisting into a ferocious snarl as he sings. While utterly compelling, it also cements the impression that this is a band who were more intent on creating interesting, original work than on attracting listeners.  

                Halfway through their rendition of The Clock, the band welcome on stage Dublin singer Eileen Gogan, whom they have enlisted to sing the female vocal parts, and their performance of ‘And’, the final song on the album, is one of the highlights of both evenings. Like several of the songs – ‘Are You Happy Now’, ‘Begging Bowl’ – ‘And’ appears to explore the bitter residue of a failed relationship. 

A similar combination of disillusion and defiance is evident on the sublime ‘Loftholdingswood’, one of the non-Clock songs they play once they get through the tracks on the featured album.  A brilliant mixture of synth-pop and country that contains one of the all-time great lines – ‘I died on the cross / Now I’m the boss’ – the song manages to be simultaneously timeless and utterly redolent of rainswept 1980s urban decay.      

                  Answering Radcliffe’s question, Coughlan and O’Hagan claim that they won’t be extending the two gigs into a tour. Maybe that is for the best. Being part of the nostalgia circuit would doubtless make a band as sceptical and sardonic as Microdisney feel uncomfortable, despite the obvious financial incentive. So those of us who managed to see them in the NCH and the Barbican can count ourselves lucky.