Mary Coughlan

Join us for a very 'Mary' Christmas evening with the legendary 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”. Now sober for close to 30 years, the mother of five and grandmother of six, reached new peaks as a performer and songwriter with her most recent album, 2020’s acclaimed Life Stories. To cap it all, in 2020, Mary was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the then Mayor of Galway, Mike Cubbard. Now you can see Mary, to mark her oncoming fifth decade in music, live in the intimacy of the Wexford Arts Centre.Photo credit: Andrew Downes