In A Velvet Glove

Microdisney Love Club

William Blake, illustration for Thomas Gray’s Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, 1797-98

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

W.H. Auden, from In Memory Of W.B. Yeats, 1939

Exhibit A is taken from the BBC4 series The Story of Microdisney, and features a clip from the ITV series The Tube, broadcast early in 1985. Microdisney have written their own introduction, and Paula Yates takes exception to their suggestion of the existence of an art movement in - New Zealand. For unknown reasons (decolonisation?) BBC films can’t be directly accessed in New Zealand, and when I tried to post this on YouTube under “fair use” (from a Kiwi perspective, we were owed it) it was blocked for copyright reasons. Except in the case of Adam Curtis, who seems to be allowed to share his work on YouTube as a term of his employment, the iPlayer-only filmic works of the BBC are lost to history. Would you like to watch In Praise of Hardcore, the 2005 fictionalized version of Kenneth Tynan’s anti-censorship battle, starring Rod Brydon? Go whistle, there isn’t even a tortoise-paced torrent for it out there.

The story of Microdisney, exactly what went into their successes and failures, would be a complex and intrinsically interesting one even with a lesser soundtrack. The Story of Microdisney barely gets into those realities; the band is reforming, the lead singer has reformed, so there’s a little too much hindsight and good intent around, but the music, of which we hear plenty, still speaks for itself, this tormented-soul-on-a-windswept-rock music, still the most gorgeous pop of the 1980’s if you’ve never been right in the head.

A few years ago I reposted my review of the first Microdisney album, Everybody is Fantastic, here. It’s a perfect album, which loses nothing from being a two-men-with-a-drum-machine effort, and fortunately it’s available on Bandcamp.

Before Everybody Is Fantastic (1984) the two-man lineup had released two singles, and these, with B-sides and four instrumental tracks, made up the next release, the 8-track 12” EP We Hate You South African Bastards (1984). Those were the apartheid years, and also the IRA bombing years. As suspect Irish outsiders, Microdisney were at war with English complacency; as cosmopolitan outsiders, from the Irish hinterland of county Cork, they were equally at war with the complacencies of Catholic Ireland. In the documentary someone quotes W.H. Auden’s eulogy of W.B. Yeats - “Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry” - as a description of Cathal Coughlan, and it seems true enough, with the caveat that Coughlan, as poet, falls closer to Auden’s own illusionless humanism than to Yeats’ mysticism. Here’s ‘Helicopter of the Holy Ghost’, the B-side of the 1982 debut single ‘Hello Rascals’ and the song that first impressed John Peel, who called Microdisney “an iron fist in a velvet glove”.

Holding on, holding on
From your birth to the day you die
Let it rest, let it slide
One day you’ll see the face of Christ
And you think you’re bounding through
Life’s adventure
You see yourself in coloured clothes
Smiling nicely
That’s no stinking corner where all rats can feed
That’s the helicopter of the holy ghost
People starve and see their children shot to bits
Every corpse that falls will make him swell

These are lyrics that have hardly dated. “Quadrocopter of the Holy Ghost” maybe, Abraham in place of Christ, perhaps.

Or take the instrumental, ‘Patrick Moore Says You Can’t Sleep Here”. This gentle poke at the British astronomer and much-loved television personality, in his squirearchic role as party chairman of the anti-immigration United Country Party in the 1979 UK general election, shows a close acquaintanceship with Brian Wilson’s Pet Soundscape, shorn of its sunny connotations, over some honest Tascam tape hiss.

I was in my twenties when I first heard this music, but it’s always made me feel more like a moody teenager than the sounds I heard when I was a moody teenager. There’s a “factual pain music” honesty in it that goes deeper than just about anything else, with a deft interpretation of pop, rock, disco and soul’s potential to sweeten the deal. And, miracle of miracles, this feeling is still present at the very end of Microdisney, after 4 LPs, including 3 major studio affairs. Here’s ‘Ambulance For One’ from the finale, 39 Minutes (1988), more lived-in, more outgoing, and far, far cleverer perhaps, with its thuggish disco swagger, but just as heartsick and, ultimately, comforting.

After the singles, and Everybody Is Fantastic, the songwriting team of Sean O’Hagan and Cathal Coughlan gathered a band, recording a 3-song EP In The World (Irish for being out of Ireland)¹, which would be added to the 1996 CD release of We Hate You South African Bastards (now retitled, post-apartheid, as Love Your Enemies), followed by the LP generally considered to be their masterpiece, The Clock Comes Down The Stairs (1985). The opening chords of ‘Horse Overboard’ show a rare gift of both Coghlan’s and O’Hagan’s, an easy sense for what’s known in the classical world as the grotesque, music that’s humorous for purely musical reasons. This darkly tragicomic song soon swaggers into the lyrical grotesque, in its picture of a British marriage, post-colonial by implication, in which “my wife is a horse”, a suburban ‘Horse Latitudes’.

There’s that spirit of Brian Wilson; Microdisney were Fall fanatics who thought they themselves might do more damage if they tried to sounded like The Beach Boys and Steely Dan. They are still, so far as I know, the only band besides Steely Dan themselves to put a real sense of danger into the Dan sound. Microdisney fully embraced ‘80’s pop audio technology and style, but there was always barbed wire under the plush.

In the buoyantly mordant ’Genius’ Cathal’s viewpoint is uncertain and shifts as we listen, so we can hear the song as both an attack and a mea culpa. As Cathal says in the documentary the songs are informed by Catholic guilt, explaining their beatific visions of hangovers and the regret-strained aftermath of hubris.

The English toy town’s looking well
William Blake fans sipping halves of ale
They are so profound, they’re all one colour
But she came from rocks and rain
Where the people have no pride or hope
And you’re oozing both, now they won’t help you

You’re a genius, you’re a giant
You’re a prince, you are the Pope
The things you feel are just a joke
So burn burn burn

The Clock Comes Down The Stairs should have made Microdisney bigger stars, but their label Rough Trade was struggling financially and put their resources into marketing the Smiths, then the safer bet. So the band signed up with Virgin, an older independent label who’d recently struck rich with Culture Club and heaps of other brightly coloured posers.²

In the documentary Microdisney’s collaboration with producer Lenny Kaye on the third album Crooked Road (1987) is celebrated for all the right Hall of Fame reasons, but I remember the band partially disowning it at the time, and an ancient fan website confirms this memory.

The only song that seems to correspond to their original intention is ‘Give Me All Of Your Clothes’ with its laid-back, yet punchy R&B groove and June Miles-Kingston’s increasingly assertive accompaniment. On the rest Kaye applied a more complex, less blended style of rock arrangement, substituting chamber orchestra instrumentation and pianos for chorus and synths. It’s Microdisney’s The Soft Parade (or their Das Capital), but even as a sidestep from the master plan the songs are as glorious as ever. And as oblique; there’s something sinister about ‘Mrs Simpson’ to justify the lines

So hard luck,
I won't own up,
At your inquest come December

but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Like ‘Mrs Simpson’, ‘People Just Want To Dream’ is a stately mansion of chamber rock construction, this time a meditation on gentrification and Thatcher’s England.

She nods at the architect on TV
Who says “people, people just want to dream”
So tell it to the kids making whoopee with the tin-foil dragon
Because soon they’ll have to go so make real sure they know that
Money is everything

Don’t make the gentry mean
It’s for you they dream
With their ugly clothes and carnage magazines

The High Street, it used to be such a slum
(Petrol queues and bomb scares and liberal confusion)
Until we prised it away from the welfare scum
(Marching piggy-wiggy and bovine retribution)

Oh take it any way you want, everything is better
We used to play around before too long we found that
Money is everything

After Microdisney disbanded Cathal Coughlan formed Fatima Mansions, and mixed electropop with industrial extremism. The Fatima Mansions song that comes first to mind is ‘Broken Radio No. 1’. When another fan of this song posted it in a Microdisney facebook, Cathal came into the thread to admit that he had no memory whatsoever of making it.

At the platform's end, where the crowd grew thin
And the light was dim on our shoes
Where we sat there so tense,
Not to touch though we meant to (i think)
There was no will, no spell
To breach the night and stop the talk
She tossed her hair and home did walk

Broken radio
Broken radio

On the day that I was born
There was no big flash and no great storm
But the man read the news in Dutch and warned,
"I'm gonna play 'je t'aime' on my hunting horn."
In my cradle i was most impressed —
So this is what you call success…

Black Seamus cried, "My shamrock has died
And my father's gone back to Peru."³
The frost-damp town wore a fat-guts frown
And the DJ's played Brian Borù
The Sunday's sticky, home with rain
Sedition never entertained

Broken radio
Broken radio

Murder the past and all who sail in it
If the past is a wreck then all who sail in it
Make me realize it's time to move on
But all the ships and the planes have gone
I'm in a savage place with a timid song
Mumbled words...[maybes?]

It’s not surprising that some of Cathal’s last album, Song of Co-Aklan was informed by the work of documentarian Adam Curtis; their world-views and their kaleidoscopic approach to history have always had something in common.⁴

“I would say that the new Adam Curtis series [Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, on BBC] is up to his standard. It meanders early on, but that’s because he’s doing the things that he likes to do, playing with images and contrast. It makes you think in ways you’re not made to think by other media, and I wholeheartedly applaud making a fine art out of reportage.”⁵

Cathal Coughlan died in 2022; his Microdisney songwriting partner Sean O’Hagan, who makes an appearance on Song of Co-Aklan, founded High Llamas post-Microdisney, as well as appearing in Stereolab from time to time. High Llamas albums are always a treat - here’s the sandpit-friendly ‘Toriafan’ from last year’s Hey Panda.

One way to learn about what’s going on in New Zealand music is to follow awards show nominations, Creative NZ grants and the like. In the Silver Scrolls, APRA’s attempt to find the best song in NZ, every local APRA member is supposed to nominate 5 songs from a shortlist of 20, and last year I couldn’t in all honesty use my 5 votes. This year, I wanted to place 7.⁶ Last year’s nominees, and this is a songwriting contest, didn’t include any particularly convincing lyrics, but this year’s different. Vote if you can. My top pick was Emily C. Browning’s ‘Goldfish’; because of her quality collaboration with Phoebe Vic noted in my last post, I was already well-disposed towards this track, and indeed it’s led to my first wholehearted AOTY pick.

’Goldfish’ begins, over a funky 2025 pop bump, to tell of an ex who’s improved himself but has he made amends? At the sudden chorus, we hit half-speed, with Beach Boys harmonies, in the underwater world of the forgetful, perpetually distracted fish. Later the guitar, which has been lurking in the gaps between verses, pulls out a completely unexpected Steely Dan solo, indeed the feel in the slowed changes was reminding me of ‘Glamour Profession’. There’s a subtle, original use of trap hi-hat, and a funky bass guitar playing licks trimmed tightly to the drum pattern.

Heard it through the vine
You've been working on yourself
Big thumbs up, good times
Funny, never got a
Sorry, sorry, tumbleweed
No sorry from a goldfish
A goldfish

You got counselling
Could you pay up for mine?
Still a clown I see
Dick around without a
Sorry sorry static
It's all crickets from a goldfish, a goldfish

Did you forget something?
Check your pocket, nothing
No money, phone, no key
And no apology
It's such a head scratcher!
Ring any bells for ya?
Did you forget something?
Did you forget?

Is he afraid of me?
I'll get him into trouble
He was just a teen
Can we blame him?
So emotionally stunted
It's all bubbles from a goldfish, a goldfish

’Not Done’, where the bass guitar has been replaced with synth, is a tour de force of production, composition and performance, shifting into the major key often with pleasurable, surprising effect. Browning’s symphonic electropop songs are full of unexpected-but-exactly-right modulations, rhythmic shifts, and production choices. ‘Fruit’ has to be the most successful acapella harmony work I’ve heard since the Kodaly Girl’s Choir of Budapest. ‘Self Preservation’, opens with the same chords as Ye’s ‘WW3’ over a 3/4 soul beat, and is almost as gratifying, like Ye in a good mood rewrote ‘WW3’ for Aradhna. The ‘bonus track’ section of Primary includes Fleetwood Mac-ish 2021 disco single ‘Wasn’t Into You Anyway’, which again overshoots expectations. My only quibble is that some of the lyrics, good as they sound stretched over these lush recordings, look minimal on paper.

The opening, title track of Primary, a song about going back to school, still has under 1000 plays on Spotify; the album’s biggest fans are skipping it. I’m not, it’s a slamming bit of distorted electronic pseudo-metal in a heavy trip hop style, under howling vocal cascades, like an update of Rasputina’s ‘State Fair’ (2002). They should play music like this on the radio.

Another local artist with Californian leanings is Kayleb Duckett from Taranaki, found on Instagram, whose latest song ‘Airport’ begins with what sounds a lot like a nod to local DIY hero Frog Power then trips out, slipping the surly bonds of earth alongside Brian Wilson (whom Duckett sounds a lot like) and, if not Steely Dan, then something like Ariel Pink’s version of Todd Rundgren; it’s a neat debut, and there are plenty more garden shed BBs harmonies on the album this is from, Speechless Housefire.⁷

The art did move in New Zealand in 1986 when I played side one of a cassette my brother Ian sent me and heard (two thirds of) The Clock Comes Down The Stairs. By 1987 the Puddle were covering ‘Give Me All Of Your Clothes’, with an arrangement inspired more by the Doors’ ‘Soul Kitchen’ than the original’s R&B groove, as captured on Live At The Teddy Bear Club (1991). In this arrangement, there aren’t too many chords.

It’s not that more chords = finer art. An album of two-chord songs, like Jvcki Wai’s Enchanted Propaganda from this recent essay, can approach an alchemy of hermetic perfection. But modulating between keys in the course of a tune can create a different kind of magic, which you can hear in this new recording of Vítězslava Kaprálová’s ‘Ty staré písně v duši zní mi’ by tenor Nicky Spence, accompanied by Dylan Perez on piano.⁸

Those old songs sound in my soul
And my imagination sketches their mother;
and the times of evening linger with them
and sacred dreams, like God’s child from the manger

I am dead-tired, drunk with some dear blossom,
which scattered its roots fruitlessly in my breasts;
and I droop my head in silence slowly to my chest
and devoutly I lift in prayer my palms

The times of evening go, my dreams with them
Those old songs sound in my soul

~ Bohdan Jelinek, trans Timothy Cheek

Algorithmic reference - ‘Glamor Profession’ by Steely Dan

1. Microdisney’s work can be read as a picaresque satire of England and its culture industry as seen by travelers from another land.

2. The song ‘Singer’s Hamstead Home’ on 39 Minutes satirizes tabloid reports of Boy George’s excesses. Members of the dance-pop act Londonbeat sing backing vocals on that album’s ‘United Colours’, a better guide to Microdisney’s taste in 80’s pop.

3. Relations between Peru and Ireland date back to the Viceroyalty of Peru, where Ambrosio O'Higgins, a viceroy of Irish descent, governed the polity from 1796 to 1801. During the Spanish American Wars of Independence, Irish volunteers participated alongside British troops in the Peruvian War of Independence. One such example is the presence of an Irish battalion during the decisive battle of Ayacucho, as well as during the battles of Pinchincha (of the Ecuadorian campaign), among other engagements. - Wikipedia

4. Curtis makes documentaries for the BBC, Coughlan worked as Project Manager for BBC Digital.

5. Interview from The Irish Examiner, March 2021, in which Coughlan also recommends the music of Jockstrap.

6. Culling the top 7 down to 5 was made easier by the discovery that one entry’s lyrics included an identity-based artist statement which wasn’t heard in the song itself. If the Māori entrants can go without listing their iwis, you can do without this.

7. Is this the start of the Frog Power wave?

8. From an upcoming album of songs by Dvořák, Kaprálová, Bartók and Křička named Sparks From Ashes, after Kaprálová’s 1932-33 settings of four poems by Bohdan Jelinek (1851-1874).