Mary Coughlan

Mary is Ireland's greatest jazz and blues singer and "one of our most openly raw performers" (Hotpress). In a career fast approaching its 40th year, she is about to enter its next, exciting stage.

Born in Shantalla, Galway city, Mary has made some of the most uncompromising, wholly personal, and universal music by any Irish artist. While her roots are in jazz and blues—Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith are among her inspirations—pop, rock, folk, and chanson (Edith Piaf is also a touchstone) influences also appear in her work. Now, the next chapter of her distinguished career finds her exploring a little known side of the music of Peggy Lee.

To hear Mary sing is, as Velvet Thunder said, "to be at the core of the human heart." It was a voice which first came to wide attention in 1985, when Mary burst onto the Irish music scene with her debut album, Tired and Emotional. That album led to appearances on The Late Late Show, a hit single with "Delaney's Gone Back On The Wine", and tours of Britain, Germany, and Holland.

She followed that explosive release with Under The Influence (1987), Uncertain Pleasures (1990), and Sentimental Killer (1992), which firmly established her reputation as an unflinchingly honest, emotionally raw vocalist, never afraid to embrace the most difficult of subject matter in her work.

As The Irish News said, she "doesn't just take her audiences to church with her music, she practically baptises them with her passion and pain."

It was the same in her 2009 autobiography, Bloody Mary, where she documented addiction problems, relationship troubles, familial abuse, career mismanagement, suicide attempts, and dark days spent confined to psychiatric wards.

Despite the difficulties she encountered, the music kept coming with Live In Galway (1996), After The Fall (1997), Mary Coughlan Sings Billie Holiday (2000), Long Honeymoon (2001), The House Of Ill Repute (2008), best of set The Whole Affair (2012), and Live & Kicking (2017). In 2012 she enjoyed a sold out show at Sydney Opera House.

Mary has also appeared on film (Neil Jordan's High Spirits and Breakfast on Pluto) and more recently her early life was dramatised in Woman Undone (2019), a fusion of theatre, music, and dance created with Brokentalkers. Now sober for close to 30 years, the mother of five and grandmother of six reached new peaks with her most recent album, 2020's Life Stories.

By turns powerful, swaggering, sexy, harrowingly raw, and deeply honest, Life Stories runs