After he’s compelled to return to England, a year passes before he can allow his family anywhere near him and five years before he lets his wife eat with him – even then, only at the end of a long table, while he has his nose stuffed with lavender and tobacco leaves to deflect her Yahoo scent.) Swift’s Latin epitaph declares that he is now “where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no longer,” a rage articulated in his lifetime through the immeasurably bitter irony of A Modest Proposal (cannibalism as the ideal solution to hunger in Ireland, with children reared specifically for this purpose) and the final part of Gulliver’s Travels, which (Walt) Disney left decidedly alone (Gulliver finds a land run by wise, benevolent horses and populated by the brutish, barely-evolved Yahoos, who, he is forced to concede, are as human as he is. Virgin, well on the way to becoming a byword for musical reductiveness and loads of cash, no longer wanted to know.Ĭoughlan was often compared with James Joyce – well, they were both Irish – but a closer comparison, who also happened to be Irish, is Jonathan Swift. While Microdisney’s fourth album, 39 Minutes (its perfunctory, factual title a grudging and sour compromise the band wanted a far more colourful title) was a fine record, still lyrically excoriating and melodically acute, it was over-embellished in places (unnecessary horns, Londonbeat on backing vocals) and stubbornly refused to yield a hit. After their 1985 masterpiece, The Clock Comes Down The Stairs, they were poached from Rough Trade by Virgin, who appeared to believe they had secured themselves their own Deacon Blue, when, in fact, they had on their hands a band which could glide and swoop as deftly as Steely Dan but which was fronted by a scabrous amalgam of Elvis Costello, Randy Newman and Mark E Smith. The life and foreshortened times of Microdisney will be another story for another time but, in crude precis, it revolved around the tension between the meticulous, mellifluous music of Sean O’Hagan and Coughlan’s pitiless studies – sometimes direct and unvarnished, as often luridly allegorical – of human cruelty, stupidity and ridiculousness. It appeared right at the end of a decade which left much of the UK drained, dispirited and soul-sick and which had been documented in withering detail by Cathal Coughlan, first in Microdisney and then in Fatima Mansions. Despite rotating at 45 rpm, Against Nature is, for me, the last great album of the ’80s.
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