Mary Coughlan for special Druid show

Galway’s Mary Coughlan, Ireland’s leading jazz and blues vocalist, will play a one-off  concert at the Druid Mick Lally Theatre on Tuesday, July 29 with  an all-star band that includes the Dutch guitarist Erik Visser who  produced her debut album, Tired and Emotional.

The concert will be filmed by director Martha O’Neill and Wildfire Films for a new hour-long TV  documentary based on Mary Coughlan’s best-selling autobiography, Bloody Mary, which documents the ups and downs of the singer’s life from her sexual abuse as a child to her international success onstage and her subsequent struggle with addictions.

The Galway concert will be the first time that Mary Coughlan has played with the Dutch guitarist Erik Visser since 1984 when Mary and Erik supported The Flying Pickets at the old Great Southern Hotel, now the Meyrick.

“I met Erik in Galway in the late 1970’s when his band, Flairck, who were selling out concert halls all over Europe at the time, played a free open-air concert in Eyre Square” recalls Mary.

In 1984 Erik suggested they make a record. According to Mary the result, Tired and Emotional, changed her life utterly. It contained some of her greatest hits including The Double Cross (written by her first husband, Fintan Coughlan), Invisible to You and Delaney’s Gone Back on the Wine.

Mary will play songs from this album and her later trademark numbers at Druid on Tuesday, July 29. And there are further plans afoot with Druid for a stage adaptation of her book to be produced next year.

Tickets for Mary’s concert at the Druid Mick Lally Theatre on Tuesday, July 29 cost €20 and are on sale at the Town Hall Theatre Box Office 091 569777 or online from tht.ie