Corona Cork Film Festival - The Adventures of Flannery

Cork singer-songwriter and enfant terrible Cathal Coughlan provided one of the highlights of Cork’s Capital of Culture celebrations in 2005 with his musical theatre presentation Flannery’s Mounted Head.Drawing inspiration for this work from the city’s Victorian ‘madhouse’ and from the equally sprawling ‘Arcades’ project of the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, Coughlan’s song-cycle narrative involved the creation of a marginalised and petrol-sniffing protagonist named Flannery amid the grim backdrop of a fictional 21st-century virtual experience. When the piece begins, Flannery is the night manager of a call-centre. When it ends, ‘he’ is a free-associating disembodied head, in a jar behind the counter of a bar.

The one-off Cork performance is a cornerstone for an examination of the work of one of the country’s most prolific and original recording artists. Coughlan began his career in eighties’ indie outfit Microdisney, whose radio-friendly melodies and bittersweet harmonies masked Coughlan’s increasingly bitter and vitriolic lyrics. After signing to Virgin Records and achieving a modicum of success,the band split up. Coughlan then formed the volatile and uncompromising Fatima Mansions who soon became cult favourites in the early nineties. His subsequent work has seen him engage in more inter-disciplinary projects while his solo work has seen him embraced by rock luminaries such as Scott Walker.