Episode 11
Black River Falls
by Cathal Coughlan
Episode 11 - Preview
Black River Falls (Cooking Vinyl, 2000). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Episode Notes
Episode eleven of To Here Knows When - Great Irish Albums Revisited focuses on Black River Falls by Cathal Coughlan, his second solo album released on Cooking Vinyl in 2000.
“Cathal Coughlan, of Fatima Mansions and Microdisney fame, after years of contractual problems has finally brought us 12 powerful new compositions, Black River Falls - certainly an album not to be missed”
Cooking Vinyl (Delicatessen Two, 2000)
Following the end of The Fatima Mansions, Cathal was unable to record or perform for a number of years. “There was all this business nonsense going on,” according to Cathal. “I wasn’t able to perform at all because of certain contractual difficulties.” In the midst of these Kitchenware almost sneaked out his debut solo album Grand Necropolitian in 1996. Though released without fanfare the recordings marked a new path. Of the album Select magazine wrote, “The music heads a sombre yet relatively orthodox path back towards the Ministry-free lilts of Cathal’s former band Microdisney.” ‘Unbroken Ones’ was issued as a 7” single from the album. Select wrote: “while ‘Unbroken Ones’ has something of Scott Walker at his most forlorn.” This new approach to songwriting and singing would be expanded upon four years later with the release of Black River Falls.
“Somehow managing to express strength and beauty in songs of waste and ruin. Cathal Coughlan is one of modern music’s incredible voices and one of its most inspired poets”
Time Out
In this episode Cathal joins me to discuss Black River Falls, the album he describes as, “the dark horse of my output”. We chat about those years between The Fatima Mansions and the release of Black River Falls, touring Ireland with the Nine Wassies From Bainne in 1997, singing with Nina Hynes and Mimi Goese at two Hector Zazou shows, supporting Arto Lindsay, training his voice, recording with new collaborators and using new recording techniques such as remote recording and file sharing. We also chat about Telefís his musical project with old friend Jacknife Lee and the release of the duo’s first album Telefís a hAon.
‘Unbroken Ones’ (Kitchenware 7”, 1996). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Cathal Coughlan and Nine Wassies From Bainne - Flyer, October 1997. Designed by Andrew MacDonagh (aka DJ Fork). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Cathal Coughlan and Nine Wassies From Bainne - Ticket Stub, October 1997. Designed by Andrew MacDonagh (aka DJ Fork). Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Arto Lindsay Group and Cathal Coughlan - Halfmoon Club, 02 November, 2000. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
Cathal Coughlan & the Grand Necropolitian Quartet - Halfmoon Club, 21 March, 2003. Photograph by Paul McDermott.
For Further Reading/Listening/Viewing:
For the Irish Examiner’s B-Side the Leeside series I’ve written about Black River Falls…
by Paul McDermott
Irish Examiner - 09 March 2022
Black River Falls can be heard below:
Telefís a hAon is available on Bandcamp.
In the episode Cathal talks about the song ‘Whitechapel Mound’: “That’s an extrapolation of a photo by a Belfast photographer called Donovan Wylie, he had a book called Losing Ground which was a photojournalism type thing about the New Age Travellers who’d been pushed off the roads and the kind of life they’d been living in the 1980s.”
In 1993, photographer Donovan Wylie began documenting the lives of a group of young people who were first dubbed by Thatcher as New Age Travellers. He found them in a lay-by on a main road in Gloucestershire and has been photographing their lives ever since.
Losing Ground tells the intimate story of one gathering of individuals searching for an alternative. Whether disillusioned by modern culture, excluded from it, or simply seeking a safe haven, this group found each other and created its own refuge outside society. Donovan Wylie’s photographs chart their progress and decline, from the idyllic rural setting of Gloucestershire to London’s urban underworld. (Taken from Losing Ground by Donovan Wylie, 4th Estate, 1998).
A selection of photographs from Losing Ground can be viewed at Slate.
Julie and Caroline inside their van at New Age Travelers site A46, 1994. © Donovan Wylie / Magnum Photos.
Cathal explains in the episode that the title Black River Falls was inspired by an article he read in the late 90s about Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy’s 1973 book.
Lesy’s book compiles photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin, photographer Charles Van Schaick taken between 1890 and 1910. These photographs were mostly taken in the city of Black River Falls and detail the harsh living conditions of European immigrants to the Mid-West and a series of macabre incidents that took place in and around the city. The book juxtaposes Van Schaick’s photographs against newspaper accounts and state asylum and police records.
Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) is James Marsh’s dramatisation of the events at the centre of the 1973 book. The docu-drama was originally broadcast in 2000 as part of the BBC’s Arena arts strand. The film is narrated by Ian Holm with music by John Cale and DJ Shadow. It’s an incredible film - I highly recommend it. It can be viewed below.
B-Side the Leeside, Cork's Greatest Records: Black River Falls, by Cathal Coughlan
My feature on the album for the Irish Examiner.
My review of the 1997 Cathal Coughlan/Nine Wassies From Bainne gig in the Rob Roy, Cobh that’s mentioned in this episode is published in In Concert: Favourite Gigs of Ireland’s Music Community (Hope Collective, 2017). The book also contains Kieran Cunningham’s review of Cathal’s Flannery’s Mounted Head show that was staged at Father Matthew Hall, Cork in September 2005 as part of Cork’s European Capital of Culture celebrations. The book is available to buy here.