MARY Coughlan is the essence of the Irish torch singer.

Now 52, her candle has long been burning at both ends, through years of alcoholism (she has not touched a drop for 16 years); betrayal by her cheating second husband, Frank, who confessed to sleeping with the nanny; and a fluctuating recording CV since her 1985 debut, Tired And Emotional, typified by the label mismanagement that left her broke when Uncertain Pleasures should have been her commercial zenith in 1990.

Indeed, “uncertain pleasures” would sum up an erratic career whose latest turning point is wholly in character. Her new album was so long promised that her website had ground to a halt, undernourished and neglected.

The House Of Ill Repute is here at last, accompanied by a new website and a tour rearranged from last year.

Pocklington Arts Centre manager Janet Farmer, long a devotee, cast aside her frustration and booked Coughlan anew for tonight.

Typically, the album came out initially in Ireland last autumn but not on this side of the Irish Sea. More galling too for the Galway gal, “it did sh**e in Ireland,” says Mary. “The Irish Times gave it a bad review. They said it was sh**e! But it was voted one of the best 12 albums of the year in Germany.”

Why was the release delayed in Britain?

“Fear of the economy, I guess. It was going to come out in November but the record company wanted more time,” says Mary. “And record companies don’t ever give you any answers except ‘No, we can’t give you more money’ and ‘No, you can’t have a tour support’.”

The record was not been easy to make, emotionally or creatively, let alone financially. “I couldn’t get anyone to give me any money and I didn’t have any money myself,” she says.

When, five years ago, Frank revealed his affair seven months into their marriage after 16 years together, Mary left him for a new life and musical salvation in Australia, taking her children with her.

“I decided, ‘maybe I could live here’, and then I became really friendly with one of the women who ran a jazz festival in Christchurch, Jodie Wright,” says Mary.

“She said I could have a space, a beautiful apartment for six weeks, so Erik [Dutch guitarist and producer Erik Visser, her collaborator on her earliest albums] came over to New Zealand for a while. A wonderful bass player called Brett joined us and we just worked on the album for that time, and it was then that I realised what I could do with it.”

She knew from the demo sessions that the songs, from Kirty MacColl’s Bad to Pornography and The Whore Of Babylon, would need the full treatment. “I wanted to do it with strings,” she says.

Where was the financial backing for such elaboration? She sold her house in Ireland and contacted her first manager from “years and years ago”, Denis Desmond.

“I felt I would never get a big deal again though I knew Denis had his own label and could put the record out, but at first he said, ‘No one is making albums like that any more; they just do it in their front room’.”

Nevertheless, a deal was struck, recordings were made in Dublin last May, and while Desmond may have been anticipating a set of Peggy Lee covers, instead he received an album born out of a “painful time” for Mary.

“I said I’d drop it in when it was finished and it was at about track number two that he said it was brilliant,” she says.

He was right, The Irish Times was wrong, as a raft of glowing album reviews this month affirms.

The album chimes with the times in tales of anger, suffering and distant hope. “They’re all songs of desperation,” says Mary, whose life has been pock-marked by such moments, never more so than 16 years ago when she almost died, hospitalised as so often before by her vodka consumption.

“I ended up in the intensive care unit with my body turning against me,” she says. Her family had been forewarned she was likely to die, but she survived.

“I haven’t drunk since but I can still feed into those songs. I’ve always been attracted to Brecht and Weill, Tom Waits, and I loved Billie Holiday from the moment I heard her when I was 17, when I didn’t really know things. But like listening to Van Morrison, she could articulate things I couldn’t say.”

For Mary, there is one unifying factor, whether she is interpreting Leiber and Stoller’s Some Cats Know or Echo and The Bunnymen’s Killing Moon. “The music I love is music that moves me because there’s some sort of emotional connection,” she says, “That’s why I’m so grateful. I love singing so much; I don’t why that is the case but it is.”

Mary’s torch is burning brightly once more, maybe brighter than ever.

Mary Coughlan plays Pocklington Arts Centre tonight at 8pm.