Party: Legendary Irish singer Mary Coughlan one show only

Party: Legendary Irish singer Mary Coughlan one show only

Singer Mary Coughlan sings the Blues with Irish guitar legend Jimmy Smyth and Brett Hirst on bass.

The grief of Billie Holiday, the soul of Van Morrison and the defiance of Edith Piaf…there is only one Mary Coughlan.

Dubbed “Ireland’s Billie Holiday” by The Guardian, Mary Coughlan is arguably one of Ireland’s greatest female jazz and blues singers.

Her powerful vocals, enigmatic stage presence and utterly spellbinding interpretations of classic jazz balladry, blues, rock, Irish song writing and original compositions have enthralled audiences around the world for a quarter of a century.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear Mary Coughlan perform in Canberra on Sunday 4 June in celebration of more than twenty-five years in the music industry. She will perform the best from her many albums, including Ancient Rain, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Magdalene Laundry and God Bless the Child.

Since she her last tour here in 2013, she has released a new album, ‘Scars on the Calendar’, her first album of new material since ‘The House of Ill Repute’ in 2008. For this new album, Mary has reunited with long-time collaborator and producer Erik Visser for their ninth album together.

Mary will perform with Irish guitar legend Jimmy Smyth and Brett Hirst on bass. Widely regarded as one of Ireland's greatest guitarists, Jimmy Smyth’s impressive credentials include serving as Musical Director for Van Morrison, being nominated for a Grammy Award alongside Toni Childs in the category of Best Rock Song, and recording and playing with Roger Daltry, Curtis Stigers, Chaka Khan, Van Morrison and Reba McIntyre. A highly in-demand recording and touring artist, Jimmy regularly tours with Gilbert O'Sullivan in Britain and Europe and will be accompanying Mary Coughlan for this tour.

Mary Coughlan live in concert is one heck of a ride. Not only is she an amazing vocalist, she is a cracking songwriter and a great storyteller. And her shows are not for the meek hearted.

More about Mary:

Mary Coughlan is an Irish jazz, blues and folk singer from County Galway. She is musical royalty in Ireland; a position she has occupied for the last 25 years because of one thing: her voice.

Coughlan is a flame-haired, bluntly outspoken mother of five and the only singer Ireland has produced to rival the greatest of European cabaret and American jazz club blues. She blends the whisky-blurred, smoke-seared, husky notes and laconic wit of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee and the line of deep, down and dirty blues singers back to Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith with the sardonic, bitter-sweet defiance and despair of the Édith Piaf.

And she enfolds it all in a delicious and unapologetic Irish drawl – skeptical, rueful, mournful and melting, ardent for love – all in one voice which wraps itself around Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, Elvis Presley and Joy Division, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and sails down that long river of blues that links the Mississippi to the Liffey in her magnificent Irish brogue.

With Coughlan it’s not the Irishry of Riverdance, U2 and The Corrs, but in her curt consonants, luxuriant plosives and Dub diphthongs she is nakedly Irish, Galway born, the daughter of a Donegal soldier and a Connemara woman. Yeats wrote, “Out of our quarrel with others, we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry.” Out of her quarrels Mary Coughlan has made some of the best music in Ireland for twenty-five years.

Over twenty-five years and ten albums Mary has made the most grown-up, uncompromising, wholly personal and utterly universal music, on either side of the Atlantic, about what goes on between men and women. She has taken the classic standards of jazz balladry and the recent gems of rock and Irish songwriting, shaken them and offered them up anew, like jewels dripping from the deep, strewn on black velvet.

She sings in the voice of the wrong and wronged woman and she makes us think what it is men make of women and what women have to do to make do. She has just one other forebear in the pretty pallid parade of British female pop artists, just one other woman whose bruised, haunted voice could find and enjoy the inconsolable longing and loss in a three minute pop song: Dusty Springfield. Or Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, to give her her real name. Born to an Irish Catholic family. Small world.

Sunday 4 June
Doors open at 7pm
Show time 7:15pm