Mary Coughlan is Irish musical royalty and, like many of the best jazz and blues singers, her life has been a catalogue of pain, abuse and addiction, most of it centred on her family
- The Guardian,
- Article history
In the kitchen of her uncompleted new house in Bray, about half an hour outside Dublin, Mary Coughlan is making coffee. She explains that she moved in just seven weeks ago, and though there is much renovation work to do, she is relieved to be out of her former house, the one she shared with her second husband and their two children. When asked why, she offers up her distinctive laugh, black as tar: "Because that's where he'd been shagging the nanny."
Coughlan, 54, is musical royalty in Ireland, a position she has occupied for the last 25 years. A flame-haired, bluntly outspoken mother of five, she is Ireland's Billie Holiday, a jazz and blues singer whose life story gives weight to the cliche that the best singers are the ones with the most painful lives. If anyone wondered quite why she was such a booze-soaked hellraiser in her time, her autobiography, Bloody Mary: My Story, offers up ample reason. Like so many Irish people of a certain age, Coughlan grew up in an environment where "the family can be the most destructive of units".
Sexually abused from a young age by both her grandfather and an uncle, she was also terrified of a father prone to bouts of violent tyranny. She grew up confused, angry and drenched with guilt, as if she herself were somehow responsible for it all. At 15, she was experimenting with drugs; by her early 30s she was an alcoholic mother of three. It would take another failed marriage, two more children and several more years of hospitalisation, rehab and therapy before she finally came to realise the roots of her behaviour. Getting it all down on paper was nothing less than exorcism.
"The book upset a lot of people," she says, now sitting in a living room whose floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of rolling hills and grazing sheep. "One member of my family is particularly upset about it and I haven't talked to her since." But other family members, she says, have welcomed it for prompting conversations that otherwise would have remained unspoken – as have thousands of readers across Ireland, where it has been a bestseller since its publication last summer.
Coughlan's experiences, it seems, are not unique. "The stories of abuse in families throughout the 50s and 60s in Ireland are absolutely horrendous," she says. "There are hundreds and thousands of documented cases of women being very badly abused at home, often the victims of incest."
She now works to raise awareness of the Magdalene laundry in Galway, which ran institutions for so-called fallen women – graphically depicted in the 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters – and does likewise in Australia, where she has a buoyant following. Studies in Brisbane, she says, have suggested that as many as one in every two women of Coughlan's age have suffered abuse.
"People have tried to make sense of it all around the world," she says. "Why did it happen? So many reasons: extreme poverty, lack of education, ignorance, and the fact that people can behave like animals. In our grandparents' time, unspeakable things happened. So what we are talking about here is generations of abuse and suffering. No wonder so many of us are dealing with the fallout still today."
Her widowed father, now 82, elected to read the book and "cried like a baby afterwards. He opened his heart to another human being after 80 years on this planet – me – and, well, let's just say a lot of things became clearer."
It caused pain, too, for her second husband, as it meticulously details the episode with the nanny that abruptly ended the marriage. "I don't understand why [he did it]," she says, still clearly bereft. "I mean, I'd gotten sober. But then I must have made his life hell before that, what with all the drink and everything else." She ruminates, before concluding: "I'd made so many people's lives hell ..."
Coughlan became a mother at 20. Ten years later, she became a singer. Her first album, 1985's Tired And Emotional, made her a star in Ireland and beyond. "All of a sudden I was flying all over the world and having a great time. And, naturally, there was a lot of recreational drug use about."
She maintains she took the business of motherhood very seriously – a former hippy previously obsessed with natural childbirth, the benefits of breastfeeding and a macrobiotic diet – but as her career took off, there were temptations and, as a result, her marriage suffered.
By the mid-80s, she was a single mother with sole custody of her children. A decade on, she had met and married her second husband, with whom she had two more children.
Her career fluctuated wildly, some albums selling poorly and record deals going sour. Much of it she took very personally indeed. "I'd managed to stop drinking while I was pregnant with Clare," she says of her now 18-year-old daughter, "but when she was just six weeks old I went off on an awful tear [bender]." Why? "Look, any reason I give you will just sound like the reasons of an alcoholic, but I had no record deal any more, no money, my house had to be sold and I was in the fucking gutter."
Nevertheless, she got pregnant again, but miscarried. Her next pregnancy went full term and she gave birth to her fifth child, a boy called Cian, now 13. "I had children because I thought I would love having children and I knew I'd be able to love them so much, and that they would never hurt or suffer the way I suffered." She pauses. "That didn't happen, did it?"
She had finally stopped drinking – doctors had warned her that she would die otherwise – but, needing another crutch, switched to cocaine. At first, she managed to conceal this from her family, but not for long. Her counsellor at the time was convinced that the situation was so dire that she encouraged Coughlan to absent herself from the family home. "I was destroying myself. Again. And everybody else around me, which is why I had to leave. Oh, it was awful, the absolute fucking worst. I left my house with a few suitcases, my books and CDs … It was the most painful thing I've ever done in my life, leaving my kids behind. But it had to be done."
It would take two years to beat her demons. She has been sober for 16 years, clean for six, and is now settled, seemingly content in middle age, in Bray with her younger boyfriend John, a lighting engineer from New Zealand. "I'm happy," she says, grinning, "but penniless." Really? "Well, I just paid for this house, didn't I? All I've got left is €700 (£602) in all the world." She laughs: "I'll have to start working again."
To this end, she is enthusiastically planning to promote her new album, The House of Ill Repute, and to get her faltering career back on track. "Not just for the money," she points out. "If I don't sing, I go fucking insane."
People frequently ask Coughlan whether she has regrets, the suggestion perhaps that she should have more than most. But she always answers them in the same way: no. "I've inflicted a lot of damage on a lot of people, I know that, but then I was very damaged myself," she reasons. "But I'm proud of myself and I'm proud, ultimately, of what I've achieved."
And if she didn't always have the best of relationships with her children growing up ("they had a right to be angry"), she is at least close to them now, as she is to her two grandchildren. "They are sound human beings, my children," she sighs, "so I must have done something right, no?"
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