There have been a few Irish bands over the years that should be, if not still with us, at least respected by anyone who claims to like terrific pop music. Cork's Microdisney were one such; driven by the twin efforts of vocalist/lyricist Cathal Coughlan and guitarist Sean O'Hagan, Microdisney left Cork for London in a (as it turned out) deluded effort to rid the world of bad pop music and replace it with good stuff. This the band did in the 1980s through albums as fine as The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, Crooked Mile and 39 Minutes. Over the course of a double album, we come to the conclusion that, following a rocky start, Microdisney mutated into a lyrically vituperative and quite subversive pop group. Bilious they might have been - shafted as they were by the music industry and their own self-lacerating disdain - but they were also quite brilliant.
In many ways Microdisney exemplify the difficulties facing any band who feel that they have something valid and non-conformist to say but are also driven by a desire to bring that vision to as wide and diverse an audience as possible. Within those terms of reference, 39 Minutes may be a definitive offering.
Certainly, it is by far the Micros' most polished effort to date, slick and streamlined yet much harder and more direct than last year's Crooked Mile which, on reflection, sounds rushed and strangely incomplete. The melodies are as comforting and reassuring as a familiar fireside and a bottle of well-aged malt - but what separates Microdisney from the Johnny Hates Jazz' and even Prefab Sprouts (with whom the Disneys have more in common than one night think) of the world, is the lyrical bile of Cathal Coughlan.
"You've got dreams and I've got dreams", he sings on 'High And Dry' and his unwillingness to lie down and write a few nonsensical ditties and let the resultant ackers exorcise his troubled spirits must be the cause of great consternation when Virgin's annual accounts are totted up. On 39 Minutes both Mr. C's dander and muse must have been up extremely early in the morning as the targets are spread wide and none - but none - are missed with as vicious a verbal volley as is conceivable in 'mainstream' pop. And yet, no matter how many times Coughlan twists the knife, there's always a flowing melody courtesy of Sean O'Hagan to soften the blow, which continually drags the listener back to the songs and ultimately prolongs the public humiliation of the target.
Taking lines of lyrics out of context is not something which becomes these songs as Coughlan treats each track as an entity rather than stumbling upon a snappy couplet and working backwards and around it to arrive at the finished text. The subjects tackled encompass tabloid harassment ('Singer's Hampstead Home'), the devaluation of the media ('Bluerings'), cultural imperialism ('Herr Director') and the pernicious influence of colonialism ('Send Herman Home').
The latter is one of the album's standouts as a perfect impersonation of a well-known Northern political figure leads into a razor-sharp rhythm track, O'Hagan's guitar-playing leading you to think that the lad grew up in Memphis rather than Cork, and the mid-section features a tap-dancing solo which mutates into the sound of stomping jackboots (incidentally, the tap-dancing/jackboots solo is credited to Eugene Terrablanche and John Hermon… naughty boys!). Off the wall, playful and hurtful, 'Send Herman Home' is arguably the best song Microdisney have ever recorded.
Whatever fate ultimately befalls Microdisney, be it chart acceptance or the dreaded epithet of 'cult status', there can be no remotely convincing argument against the assertion that they're making some of the best and most provocative pop music ever to have emanated from this country.
39 Minutes catches them at their very best.
This long overdue reissue of one of Rough Trade's defining mid-'80s albums only serves to strengthen the argument that Microdisney's creative catalysts Cathal Coughlan and Sean O'Hagan were at the top of their game and remain two of Ireland's key songwriters. It's a shame no-one thought so back in the day - The Clock Comes Down The Stairs is a peach and should have furnished the band with an infinite supply of sex, drugs and the singer's Hampstead home - but that's another story, indeed another album. Lyrically descriptive, occasionally surreal, frequently darkly-humoured and musically anywhere but typically 'indie', TCCDTS is Microdisney's second album (after Everybody Is Fantastic) and a triumph from start to finish for all of the above superlatives. From the opening Horse Overboard (with the immortal lyric, "my wife is a horse...", sung with Coughlan's trademark Cork dialect), past the pin-sharp 'shoulda-been-a-massive-hit' single Birthday Girl to the album title-checking closer And, musical references include bar-room blues, sprightly jangly guitar-pop and downtempo kitchen-sink drama. Forget U2, Waterboys, Hothouse Flowers and other 'big' music from Ireland at the time, much of Microdisney's output stems from London and the North and cleverly marries easy-going music with character observation and social bite. For me, nothing surpasses what was the original closing song on side one.Are You Happy ? has a sad but erudite lyric and, at first listen, a straightforward enough hook-line. But it's the whole song that does it - dissection of its perfect 5 minutes, 29 seconds hardly does it justice. Look, just listen to the bugger. There's a line in it that goes "Streets shining morning/ whey-faced and shaken/the bus people argue/everyone sees you...". 'The bus people argue' - isn't that just the last thing you want to experience when life is being a pisser? Elsewhere, Genius is, well, genius and just about every other track could and should have filled up radio 1's schedules to the brim. Sadly, they didn't. John Peel was the exception to the rule - somewhat predictably, the band knocked out a few Peel Sessions, one of which is included here (from October 1984), alongside the two b-sides from the Birthday Girl 12". A far cry from the more mainstream but equally creative follow-up Crooked Mile and the material issued by the later confrontational post-Microdisney Coughlan vehicle Fatima Mansions, The Clock Comes Down The Stairs has aged well like a robust Irish single-malt with plenty to savour from the barrel in years to come.
