St Brigid’s 2025: Mary Coughlan – Repeat, Rewind Tour 2025

Mary Coughlan says: “After 40 years in this business and having reached a point in my life where I do a lot of this, looking back and replaying scenes from my life… and wondering…I walk aroundGalway sometimes and remember absolutely everything about growing up there. All of those events made me who I am. I’m easy with that these days. The good and the bad times. All the learning. After 40 years in this crazy business I’m still here and still working. I still love going to a studio and making music, I love playing music live. I hope you enjoy this album”

Often described as the greatest female vocalist that Ireland has ever produced, Coughlan proudly stands alongside some of the world’s most iconic jazz singers. She is unique in blending whisky-blurred, smoke-seared, husky notes with the laconic wit of Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee. She draws the line of deep, down and dirty blues singers back to Bessie Smith with the sardonic, bitter-sweet defiance and despair of Edith Piaf. Yet Mary Coughlan delivers it all in a delicious and unapologetic Irish drawl: sceptical, rueful, mournful and melting and ardent for love.

Coughlan is one of our greatest singers because over 40 years she has made the most grown-up, uncompromising, wholly personal yet utterly universal music on either side of the Atlantic about what goes on between men and women. It’s hard to believe that four decades have passed since Coughlan went into the studio to record her debut album, Tired and Emotional.

On new album Repeat Rewind, as the title might suggest, we see Mary at perhaps her most open, honest and introspective (‘Repeat Rewind’, ‘I Can Let Go Now’, ‘Really Gone’) – but not at the expense of her trademark humour and astute observations of everything from domesticity (‘Marital Bliss’) and relationships (‘Freefalling feat. Ultan Conlon’) to women’s traditional place in Irish society (‘More Like Brigid’). A cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and a brand new seasonal offering, ‘Tinseltown’ will delight listeners and concert-goers alike, as Mary Coughlan celebrates four decades in music with this accomplished and heartfelt new album.