Check Suzanne's own Cushy Production webpage for the latest gig dates.
Thursday, 20th August, 1998 at 8pm at the Twelve Bar Club, Denmark Place, London
Also playing that night is Billy Mahonie and The Clientele.
Some gig reviews:
Hi,
I just found your Rhatigan page. I saw them play in London last night, it was a brilliant show
as normal, although the crowd were a bit sparse (just like normal!). I don't know what I like
about her music so much, generally I listen to punk, but it's totally bewitching. Cheers for
the page!
Toby Conyers, June 21st, 1996
Lots of great new songs: 'Don't', 'You', 'Summer songs', 'I remember
you', 'Help me', 'No No No No No No No No (No)', 'King dong', 'Be my man', 'Stabbed' and more. An
outstanding performance ending up in jamming / sessioning. Brilliant atmosphere.
Manfred Baumeister
Late Developer - Pie Mag
Late Developer - review site
Late Developer - Strobe Magazine
Late Developer - review site
Late Developer - Rock 'n' Reel
Late Developer - Melody Maker
Big Stick - Time Out
By: Calle/Pie Mag
Music can as you all know put you in different moods. Melodic happy punk
can make you become ridiculously happy, while aggressive hardcore can make you behave like a
crazy boar. You get excited by RHATIGAN. If "no-holes-barred" DaN wrote this review he
would say that he became outright horny like a buffalo in heat, but I feel a bit more delicate
than that. This is an expression of emotions as much as music, but don't think now that it's some
hard to grasp arty farty mumbo jumbo kind of music, because it's not. The music is great! It's
groovy and heavy at the same time as it's noisy and straight-forward. It's impossible to place
this record in a certain niche, I would have to use different etiquettes for every song. I think
they sound the best when they're a bit funky with juicy wha- wha's and bluesy bass lines.
And Suzanne's excellent vocals should be able to wake up any dead impotent man there is. I
can't describe this to you, somehow I think it's too hard. DaN would like to say that it 's
erotically charged lo-fi soul, and I guess that's a good description. Try it out today, for
once Linda Norrman is right.
I picked this up at a review site.
What becomes a legend most? While Polly Jean tries on her party dresses
and Liz practices saying "fuck", up sneaks Suzanne Rhatigan to steal our hearts and
naughty bits. "Do you like me? " she breathes in the title track, and all of a sudden
my trousers fit funny. Rock's new femme fatale arrives with a silk purse full of sow's ears,
shredded steel strings and many, many good songs. Recorded in six days at a small studio (except
'Dick' and 'Hello', which were born and raised on a 8-track in her...sigh ...bedroom), Late
Developer is smeared with sweaty fingerprints and spattered with assorted body fluids. Soulful,
sly, harsh and startling, it's everything a great rock record should be. Hope the chaps at Org are
ready, because this is going to be big. Very big.
By: Liz Cattermole/Strobe Magazine
The other winner is Late Developer, from Dublin-born Suzanne
Rhatigan. Forget anything you may have heard in the past. Think: a bluesy Liz Phair, a more
mature Alanis Morissette, a female Beck, a more streetwise Aimee Mann. There, I said it.
By: SP
Unrepentant, experimental noise - frightening as a dentist's drill -
snuggles around warm melodies in this debut album from Suzanne Rhatigan. Late Developer
is a delight. In the opening title track an orgy breaks out with amplifiers tortured and
synthesizers bludgeoned in a murderous frenzy at a telephone exchange, full of horrifying
feedback. 'Only joking' is almost a calm after the storm, comparable to Talk Talk's
Spirit of Eden period. This record covers every phase of hysterical emotion, from "
killing a canary with a hair dryer" to "making ash trays with Bread records".
Dark, twisted ,raw, sexy, provocative and as sharp as a knife ripping flesh - Suzanne Rhatigan
could be the big discovery of 1996 so far.
Rock 'n' Reel - Issue 24 / Spring 1996
Rhatigan is a major discovery, her Late Developer a debut of
unstoppable power, that oozes sex and rock'n'roll and growls with a primal energy and crackles
with static induced feedback. Sometimes sounding angelic, sometimes like a demonic possession,
vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Suzanne Rhatigan, backed by a potent two piece on drums and
bass, sings and performs with an intensity that is so rare, never resting on her laurels and
constantly surprising. The cabaret jazz stylings of 'Keeping us together' are torn off the bone
on the straight ahead sonic attack of 'Scared' and closer 'Hello' almost shreds your speakers in
its uncontrollable steamrollering blast of musical mayhem. Glorious.
By Nick Johnstone/Melody Maker - April 13, 1996
Rhatigan sound like Joni Mitchell with an enormous hair up her ass. Imagine
Lisa Germano fronting Dickless or Alanis Morissette covering The Breeders' 'Pod'. Songstress
Suzanne Rhatigan bombed in regal style when her spell on Imago failed to shift the necessary
units. Now she's back with a rhythm section that boasts a mutual love of Pavement and Beck.
Translation: her melodious love gone wrong ponderings have been given the musical equivalent of
a stab in the face of Joe Pesci. 'Not your girlfriend' is an ugly break-up psychodrama, clenched
teeth vocals, a bitter f***-you rant addressed to an ex-lover. Late Developer opens with
the sort of cracklings and splutterings that would sound more at home in Lee Ranaldo's bathroom.
It is breathless, a mass of twisted sound - like a stinking drunk bastardisation of Madonna's
'Justify my love'. Better a late developer than a half-baked Seventies-influenced singer/songwriter.
Let's face it, all the world needs is another f***ing Mitchell.
An article from the TimeOut listings magazine published weekly in London:
After a while, Suzanne Rhatigan gave up apologising. 'Yes', she would
sigh, 'I am the same Suzanne Rhatigan who, some years ago, had big hair and a major label contract
and a humiliating press campaign and made songs that sounded like Meredith Brooks, only worse.' And
then she would carry on writing songs about crap men and how to square your self-respect with your
desire for a decent shag and why being a woman with any degree of personal autonomy doesn't seem to
be getting any easier these days. Wondering all the while if pop really allows anyone to make a
mistake.
Nowadays, Suzanne's sharp, intense little vignettes keep any incipient
feisty-woman hysteria on a tight rein. Her finest recorded moment, 'Big Stick' (currently available
on her own Cushy label), plays a strange trick. It gives some unnamed bloke a big kick in the
privates, while simultaneously sounding both quietly vengeful and almost... turned on. It's a
disturbing, spooked record, too eerie to pigeonhole.
But it's in performance that Rhatigan, the band, truly surprise. The
diminutive leader seems to grow an extra six inches, her extraordinary voice (the anonymous star
of many a Stock/Aitken/Waterman hit pop-pickers!) swoops and growls its way into your bones, and
she'll suddenly look down at her guitar-slashing hands, only to realise that they're covered
in blood.
So, no apology necessary. Go see, for on of those rare
I-saw-her-before-she-was-massive moments.
Garry Mulholland
