Mary back on the road with most personal album yet

Singer Mary Coughlan didn’t have the best start to 2015, having spent much of her Christmas in hospital after being diagnosed with the lung condition, bronchiectasis. But six months on, she’s in flying form as she embarks on a tour to celebrate the launch of her latest album, Scars on the Calendar.

The tour will see her come to Ballinasloe’s popular Pillar House Folk Club on Friday, June 19, preceded by a gig in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre on Saturday, June 13.

A collaboration with her long-time friend and producer Erik Visser, Scars on the Calendar is the first album of new material from Mary since The House of Ill Repute in 2088.

“I was going to make a CD of other people’s music, but Eric suggested I had enough in me to make one of my own material,” she says about this latest work.

For Scars on the Calendar, she teamed up with Erik, who has been working with her for well over 30 years, and with his former wife, songwriter Antoinette Hensey; there are also two songs by Mark Nevin of Fairground Attraction.

“I have the stories, Eric has the music and Antoinette helped me put shape on them,” she says

Six of the songs are about Mary’s younger years in Galway and several deal with her alcoholism and the sober, but never dull life that followed it.

It’s an album about Mary but it’s also about “everywoman”, she feels. “We all have the same back story.”

To a degree, that’s true, but Mary’s life has been more eventful than most people’s. High up there is her well-documented alcoholism – Mary finally stopped drinking in the mid 1990s after many attempts to dry out. Since then, the woman who first came to prominence in Galway in the early 1980s for her bluesy, earthy singing style, has remained a constant on Ireland’s music scene.

Recently she has been writing more of her own material, dealing with personal issues such as what might have happened if she had stayed with her first husband.

In This is not a Song, with its elegant backing music from Erik Visser, she calls herself as “a tortured vigilante” and references several events in her life, some minor and others not.