Telefís - a hAon (2022)

Of all the celebrity deaths to occur in recent times, that of Cathal Coughlan particularly hurts, not least for coming within just weeks of release of the first Telefís album, itself revealing the discovery of a hitherto untapped seam of joyous bile. It additionally hurts because I honestly believe he was one of our absolute greatest vocalists combining a larynx equal to those of Sinatra or Tom Jones with an unparalleled acerbic yet lyrical wit of a hue so dark as to make J.G. Thirlwell seem positively breezy.

Jacknife Lee only now shows up on my radar, leaving a much bigger blip than I would have expected of someone whose claims to fame include producing Snow Patrol and the Killers; but his music is a perfect match for that voice and those words, and uncannily so. As a whole, the album suggests the compositional techniques of techno and hip-hop somehow amounting to what feels like late seventies television theme tunes, specifically late seventies regional television theme tunes with no obvious shame in overdoing either the vocoder or string synth. It carries a sense of doomed nostalgia for something which we all know was actually pretty miserable at the time, and which yet still somehow raises an admittedly conditional smile.

I could just have pulled that out of my ass, or it could be something implied by Coughlan's testimony which, as ever, does loads of different things at the same time - shoving something horrible in your face with a joke and a bitter smile that opens up a near bottomless pit of melancholy or regret, or summink.

It's nearly three in the morning,
and Danny won't come off stage.
The Stepney boys are offended.
He's forfeited his wealth,
with one catty tirade.

The lyrics are, as ever, like short bitter science-fiction novels in themselves - science-fiction in the sense of New Worlds magazine or Amphetamine Sulphate publishing - surreal, inscrutable, revelling in the truly appalling, and yet sad enough to bring more than just a single tear to the eye. It might be argued that Coughlan's doing the same thing he's always done, but it seems a redundant objection when it's done to such a standard; and so it seems doubly unfair that we should have lost the guy now that the real world has come to so closely resemble the absurdist horror described in his songs.