Perhaps Gay Byrne said it best. Back in 1987 he was fond of playing a song called Town to Town by Cork band Microdisney on his morning show on RTÉ Radio 1.
The track, an upbeat tale of the daily grind of life under the constant threat of Cold War Armageddon, was the nearest thing the band ever had to a hit (it reached No 30 in Ireland and limped to No 55 in the UK chart).
Microdisney may have been championed by the English music press and veteran broadcaster John Peel but Gay summed it up better than a blizzard of great reviews and BBC studio sessions; "That," he would intone after playing Town to Town. "Is a proper song - with a beginning, a middle and an end."
Billy Connolly also said it pretty well. After eight years of heroic struggle, Microdisney broke up in 1988 and played their final live show at a charity gig in London's Dominion Theatre.
Introducing them on stage, Connolly said, "This next band sing about torture, corruption and human misery."
Formed in Cork in 1980 by Cathal Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan, Microdisney were yet another one of the great "nearly was" stories of Irish rock. Acclaimed by critics and still loved by their fervent fanbase nearly forty years later, their literary and mordantly witty songs of doomed humanity, delivered in Coughlan’s sardonic baritone, deserved far more.
As people often quipped, if Joyce and Beckett had formed a band, it would have been Microdisney.
After reunions for a gig at to accept a classic Irish album accolade in 2018 and further shows at London’s Barbican and a hometown show in Cork, the band are finally getting the documentary treatment.
The Story of Microdisney: The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, which airs this Friday night on BBC Four, arrives nearly two years after Coughlan passed away aged 61 after a battle with cancer.
Produced and directed by filmmaker Julie Perkins, it charts the band’s formation in Cork and the recording of their four albums, including the titular 1985 classic The Clock Comes Down The Stairs.
Julie, who has previously made current affairs documentaries and lifestyle shows for Channel 4, had been friends with Sean O’Hagan for many years but her plans for a film about Microdisney began to crystalize in 2012 at a birthday bash for Nick Allum of The Fatima Mansions, the band Coughlan formed after Microdisney broke up.
The party featured a musical reunion of Coughlan and O’Hagan, the first time they had played together in 24 years.
"I thought `ohh this is quite a momentous thing’" Julie says. "And I decided to make a documentary with no real clear idea of what I'd ever do with it so I just kind of parked it. Then in 2018 it became clear that things had changed significantly, and I started to think well, `you know, there's a film here’."
It was the fallout from their break-up and the band’s still passionate fan base that first drew her in. "I'd known there'd been this big break-up and my initial interest was just the fervour of the fans," she says.
"The obsessive nature of people who would just talk relentlessly about Microdisney 30 years after they broke up was extraordinary. The band just kind of shrug it off and say, `you know, well that's all in the past’."
We need your consent to load this Spotify contentWe use Spotify to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
The result is a raw, honest and sad overview of one of Ireland’s most vital bands. As well as new interviews with Microdisney themselves, a long list of fans and friends have turned up in the new film, including producer Jacknife Lee (Cathal’s collaborator in his last band, Telefís), actor Aidan Gillen, and Elvira Butler, head of Reekus Records and the woman who promoted Microdisney’s earliest shows in Cork venue the Arcadia, where they shared bills with a young U2 and The Fall (even Mark E Smith was impressed by Microdisney).
Town to Town may have been their best-known song but the quality of singles such as Singer’s Hampstead Home, said to be written about the press hounding of Boy George in the late eighties, and the powerful Loftholdingswood cannot be denied.
We need your consent to load this Spotify contentWe use Spotify to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From their early days of playing mutant funk in Cork to squat rock in London and their final incarnation as sophisto purveyors of arch and clever literary rock, the albums, including the delicately titled We Hate You South African Bastards in 1984 to the following year’s landmark The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, just got better and better.
And Microdisney could only have come from Cork. Emerging from the same scene as fellow eccentrics like Nun Attax, Stump and Five Go Down to The Sea, they had a certain Leeside strain of surreal absurdism and idiosyncratic humour.
"I think that was just incredible and it’s all thanks to Elvira Butler for putting on those early gigs in the first place," Julie says. "I think she was amazing. There's been so much collaboration throughout the making of this film, so much help and input from various people."
The band moved to London soon after forming and The Story of Microdisney: The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is a tale of exile and cunning but also noble failure.
London in the eighties could be a cold house for Irish people as the IRA brought their murderous campaign to the "mainland".
Coughlan had escaped the stultifying atmosphere of catholic Ireland of the eighties only to find there were new demons to battle. Whatever about lack of radio play in the UK, in the new film, he speaks about the band’s time in London, saying he didn’t like the city and would rather be anywhere else - except Ireland.
"That's something that Cathal was very aware of," Julie says. "The sort of reception given to the Irish was horrifying and maybe people may not be aware of that now and it is good to be reminded of it."
As music journalist and lifelong champion of the band Andrew Mueller remarks in The Story of Microdisney, they "were outsiders in England because they were Irish and outsiders in Ireland because they weren’t from Dublin". Coughlan and O’Hagan admit to a bunker mentality and as Coughlan says, "I was a bit of a monster, drinking too much and throwing my weight around and I feel bad about it to this day."
As potential success slipped away, Microdisney became their own worst enemies. "I think they recognise that," Julie says. "But, you know, hindsight is a wonderful thing. They can look back on it now very differently but at the time they were just young guys with no guidance really."
It is an age-old music business tale of pure talent, hard work and ambition foiled by public and industry apathy.
After the split, Coughlan’s sulfuric rage found a new home in Fatima Mansions, who released a series of superb albums of industrial techno punk, while O’Hagan’s sang and played with space age lounge music cats Stereolab and languid American west coast rockers The High Llamas.
Following Coughlan’s sad passing in 2022, The Story of Microdisney: The Clock Comes Down the Stairs is tinged with sadness. And despite all the articulate fury and pithy cynicism of Microdisney, the band remained philosophical about their glorious failure.
"They weren’t bitter about their lack of success at all," says Julie. "They all went on and had other careers and Cathal was doing work with Jacknife Lee in Telefís and he had a solo career so the creative work was still there."
You might say that Microdisney were always a proper band - with a beginning, a middle and an end.
The Story of Microdisney: The Clock Comes Down the Stairs, BBC Four, 10.00pm on Friday 15 March
