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Andrew Mueller : London-based rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist and

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"I Wouldn't Start From
Here" is Andrew
Muelleros personal
memoir of the 21st
century so far. It features
any number of exotic
locations, and a cast of
revolutionaries, rock
stars, politicians, hitmen,
warmongers and
peacemakers. Between
ducking for cover in
Gaza, running roadblocks
in Iraq, getting arrested
in Cameroon and hanging
out with Hezbollah, this is

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NEVER was an album so suited by its lyric sheet. The words
to the songs, and intermittent demented fragments, that
comprised The Fatima Mansions' "Viva Dead Ponies" were
presented in a dense, barely decipherable" spidery scrawl. At
first glance, they resembled the manifesto of a fulminating
desperado in a remote shack, composed in between posting
home-made explosives to bewildered bourgeois opinionformers. On closer inspection, this seemed even more likely
to be the case. "Viva Dead Ponies" is a fabulous, disgusted,
paranoid invective, a howl nonetheless prirnal for its
eloquence.
The demented urgency that fuelled

"Viva Dead Ponies" was
demonstrated by the speed of its arrival. Singer and
songwriter Cathal Coughlan' s previous band, Microdisney,
had imploded in 1988. A little over ayear later, The Fatima
Mansions - named after a notably drug-ridden Dublin housing
estate - launched the exploratory salvo of the "Against
Nature" mini-album and "Blues For Ceausescu". The colossal
earth-scorching barrage of "Viva Dead Ponies" followed in
1990. Thematically, it was a companion volume to
Microdisney's 1998 swansong, "39 Minutes". "Viva Dead
Ponies" was another survey of Cork*born Coughlan's adopted
London as a Hobbesian dystopia, a filthy and heartless
kleptopolis, a "victim farm", its avaricious citizens bafflingly
unperturbed by "the queues, the burning trains, the squalid,
mute despair", and unheeding of a returned Jesus Christ who was, as the title track explained, now running, for
reasons known only to his father, a newsagent's in Crouch
End.
Musically, however, The Fatima Mansions forsook
Microdisney's suave soulboy threads for the rent garments of
ranting, derelict street preacher (Coughlan would later
embrace this role fully in a memorably wretched video for the
1991 single "Only Losers Take The Bus"). "Angel's Delight",
"Look What I Stole For Us, Darling" and "Chemical Cosh"
were deranged, if oddly melodic, jerry-riggngs of metal and
electronics. Even the album's relatively pretty moments "'You're A Rose'', the unhinged Euro-disco of "Thursday" felt, in this context, as sinister as a clown with a switchblade.
At the heart of it all fumed Coughlan as a prophet without
honour, a sandwich-board Jererniah balefully wandering the
gold-paved streets, largely failing to interest passers-by in
their impending doom. "l could have been important,"

http l/www.andrewmueller.netldisplay.l asso?id: I 1 5

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ler : London-based rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist and

for an answer to
the key question
of our time: "What is it
with these people?"
Australian readers can
buy it here, among other
places. New Zealand
readers can buy it here.

"An addition to the genre
founded by P.J.
O'Rourke's'Holidays In
Hell', but it is one that
pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the
emtrodiment of what can
happen with a fire in the
belly and a desire to write
out loud."
- Australian Book Review

"In the grand tradition of

Mark Twain, though in a
world considerably more

author

Page 2 of 3

reflected the righteously ranting protagonist of "A Pack Of
Lies", "if I'd been somebody else."
The Fatima Mansions made three further albums: "Bertie's
Brochures" (1991), "Valhalla Avenue" (1992) and "Lost In
The Former West" (1994), which are anthologised on the
second disc of this artefact. AII three captured the
extraordinary feat of a band managing to keep pace with the
increasingly promiscuous range of Coughlan's writing. The
Fatima Mansions' catalogue included the juddering, seething,
lyrically overloaded monologues ("Belong Nowhere", "The
Loyaliser"), spectacul ar eruptions of bile ("Humiliate Me",
"Evil Man"), Brechtian melodrama ("Bertie's Brochures"), at
least one ballad that would have graced the canon of Roy
Orbison ("Behind The Moon"), and the establishment of the
still woefully under-subscribed field of great hear,y metal
songs about Vatican complicity in the exile of wanted Nazis
("Popemobile To Paraguay").
The best-known of The Fatima Mansions' treasurably
belligerent t-shirts demanded "Keep Music Evil". Feverishly
intelligent, defiantly erudite, a careening carnival of the
grotesque, "Viva Dead Ponies" and all that followed it
adhered to that credo with the white-knuckled determination
of passengers in a derailing roller-coaster carriage- The
Fatirna Mansions are still mourned by any and all who've
ever felt that Howard Beale was being unnecessarily
circumspect.

hostile."
- The Daily Truth

PRINT PAGE IBACK T'O TOP
"Snappy, self-deprecating
and sometimes outright
hilarious."
- The Age

"Indelibly humorous and
heartfelt.'t
- Sydney Sunday
Telegraph
"He brings to his material
the mixture of rage and
earthy irony that is the
mark of a great satirist

...rewardingthoughtprovoking and
ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters

"His reporting is sharp,
his experiences terrifying
and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"Mueller busies himself
with finding the odd, the
surreal and the laughable
as much as the shocking
and upsetting."
http://www.andrewmueller.net/display.lasso?id:1 t 5

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