Fatima Mansions Having a Devil of a Time : Pop music: The rock group never meant people to take its slogan--’Keep Music Evil’--in the Satanic sense; ‘just disruptive, chaotic, disaffected,’ says the band’s leader.

The London-based group Fatima Mansions knew it would cause a stir with its slogan “Keep Music Evil.” And sure enough, when that legend, in blood-red letters, was in an ad on the front cover of Billboard magazine during the summer, calls of protest came to the publication from offended fundamentalists.

Mansions singer-songwriter Cathal Coughlan never meant people to take the phrase in the satanic sense, or even as the cartoon-like evil of an Ozzy Osbourne.

“Just disruptive, chaotic, disaffected,” he said by phone from the New York office of the band’s record company. The slogan was a response to what he perceives as the complacency and escapism dominating British youth culture. “I felt I had to be derisive about that.”

But he seemed almost proud that he inspired a fearful response.

“I was kind of amused,” Coughlan, 30, said. “It shows how much people on the right will seize on anything that promises any advancement in their career.”

If some recoiled at the use of the term evil , they would be outright horrified by the key line in “Angel Delight,” the opening song on the band’s debut album, “Viva Dead Ponies.” Over a gentle, sweet keyboard pattern, Coughlan dryly croons, “Kill a cop, why the hell not?”

“It was my way of throwing a brick,” he said. “At the time, people were being jailed in England for protesting the poll tax. And I was having a lot of difficulty with government agencies. . . . And I was living in a bad area with lots of burglaries and the police did nothing. The ‘kill a cop’ thing was just my brick through their window.”

That kind of taunt is what Fatima Mansions is all about, and “Viva Dead Ponies,” is full of them: There are the Brecht-like caricatures of officious drones in “Mr. Baby,” “The Door-to-Door Inspector” and “More Smack, Vicar.” Or the brutal, nose-thumbing send-off to the executed Romanian dictator, “Blues for Ceausescu,” with Coughlan snidely screaming “Ciao, Ceausescu” over booming, Stooges-like rock riffing.

There are also musical taunts, as the band studiously avoids establishing an easily identifiable or describable sound: gently mocking here, furiously rocking there, keyboard-centered at one moment, guitar-noise-based the next. The band’s upcoming Southern California shows probably won’t clear up the matter: Oct. 29 and 30 dates at Bogart’s and the Roxy, respectively, will show the hard-hitting rock side, while a special, invitation-only Oct. 31 show at Molly Malone’s will spotlight an acoustic approach.

“With this band we fall between so many categories and we don’t fit any,” Coughlan said. “We’re out on a limb and I don’t make any apologies.”

The Mansions’ approach can be traced to Coughlan’s earlier band, Microdisney, which he founded in the early ‘80s in his native Ireland and later moved to London. Microdisney was a subtle parody of the gentle pop of the day--so subtle that most people missed the point.

Coughlan learned his lesson. “I’m not pulling punches and trying to be clever and ironic anymore,” he said, chiding artists who play it safe. “You’re fed a line that pop music is a marginal thing, and the logical extension of that is you can do anything you like and the mainstream isn’t going to take any notice. It’s the parasite’s revenge, as I see it.”