By Gemma Brosnan

The empowering Mary Coughlan is a torch singer in the classic sense.

Devastating talented, she's a woman who channels the ups and downs of her own life into breathtaking interpretations, dealing with the harsher side of love she knows far too much about.

The House of Ill Repute (Rubyworks), “a return to the concept album”, effortlessly straddles the worlds of jazz, blues, chanson and pop in equal, sublime measure, highlighting the bad, ugly and worse, reflecting her soul, scars and more.

Its 13 tracks chart a course through the murky waters of infidelity, child abuse, pornography and prostitution. One song, “Antarctica”, is so bleak (“you lying bastard, whoring fraud/you rotten stinking cheat”) that an early listener wrote Coughlan a note begging her not to include it on the album.

“I put in most of my f**king horrific relationship with my ex-husband,” says Coughlan.

“From the age of seven, this is my life. It was born out of unhappiness, and I’ve never been as unhappy as that.”

Coughlan built her career on a series of albums that played on her image as a hell-raiser, down to the titles – Tired and Emotional, Under the Influence.

An early hit, “Delaney’s Gone Back On The Wine”, remembered a Galway tavern companion who drank himself to death at 33. She developed a ferocious reputation within Ireland’s musical industry.

“Sixteen years ago I stopped drinking,” she says now. “I thought everyone was going to love me. But people get used to you as a drunk. People have reasons for you to stay drunk.”

After her Tired And Emotional debut album in 1985, she ended up homeless, broke and wrecked, frequently in and out of alcohol dependency units.

The heartbreaking combination of crushing martial betrayal and her battle with the bottle led to 32 hospitalisations, before giving up drink in 1993 and climbing slowly back up the mountain.

With The House of Ill Repute, she has finally reclaimed the summit, but ironically it reflects another period of turmoil, watching Coughlan wash that man right out of her hair with tracks written by the likes of Leiber & Stoller and Kirsty MacColl, and some of her longstanding associates.

Despite the album title and saucy lyrical content, it's not all Parisian café songs about brothels.

The 13 songs here represent the end of a 13-year relationship in Coughlan’s life, and are peopled by women who are mad, bad and dangerous to know.

From the vaudeville jazz of title track to the hurly-burly burlesque of Pornography, these are flirtatious fancies, yet a layer of sublime blues follows with Mary Mary and In Your Darkened Room, perfected with stunning acoustic strings from Conor Brady.

Coughlan is not a rock singer, but she gives pieces such as Moon in a Taxi Cab an authenticity that few rockers cling on to and wraps her voice around the contours of Some Cats Know as sexily as Peggy Lee in her prime.

She can do scary, too with the eloquent bile of Antarctica, and the pounding, punishing Whore of Babylon.

Coughlan writes few of her own songs, but her choices and the way she inhabits them turn them alchemically into autobiography and she does it with a devastating and unique blend of weary, swaggering amusement.

Mother of five and grandmother of one, her performance at the Pigalle Club last week proved she is still a hypnotic, transfixing artist, whether loosely balancing on one heel or kicking off her shoes in impassioned defiance, steering her meditative voice through joy, pain and melancholy.

No one should wish her heartbreak, but everyone should envy her power to transform it.

www.marycoughlanmusic.com