Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves was recorded in the summer of 1988 in the East Village, New York, `because it is cheaper to fly to New York than to fly all those musicians to Ireland’. In New York Friday found the musicians he would not have had a hope in hell finding within the folk and rock scene of Ireland, Berlin’s noise industry or the U.K., where fashion and hype rule the business. Also, the New York atmosphere was stimulating. Friday wanted a challenge, he did not want to feel too comfortable. In New York you have to prove yourself, or else `they’ll stand on you’. Hal Willner, who produced albums such as Amarcord Nino Rota, Lost In The Stars – The Music Of Kurt Weill, the Thelonious Monk project That’s The Way I Feel Now, the Disney tribute Stay Awake and also worked with Marianne Faithfull on Strange Weather and Mathilde Santing’s Out Of This Dream, was called in for the production. He is a conceptualist who produces records as if they were films.
Hal Willner: `I always work by instinct and there was definitely something about Gavin beyond the material. The appeal of Gavin is that he’s a bit of a mix of street sense and theatrical sense. And he’s got a real history to him. He’s very strong and confident, but very smart about working with people. It was probably the smoothest record I’ve worked on — the perfect artist-producer relationship.’ Hours were spent discussing the mood and feel of each song but the actual recording did not take long. Fourteen days were needed to record fourteen songs; another fourteen days were spent mixing them, to ensure the spontaneity Friday claims is the most important thing in music.
Willner got together guitarists Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, bassist Fernando Saunders, drummer/percussionist Michael Blair and cellist Hank Roberts, all of whom he had worked with before. Gavin: `Some of the solos we worked out ahead of time, but mostly we allowed the guys to play what they thought was right, and then guided them a little.’ Willner was instructed to choose what he thought were the most honest takes, even if the singer would later beg him not to, which meant vulnerability came before perfection. Gavin thinks it is pure chance that the combination of two Irishmen recording their European influenced songs with American musicians worked so well. He refers to this clash of styles, this throw-it-together-and-see-what-comes-out-of-it as `culture fuck’. Although the result is harmonious, the sessions were a battlefield at times: `Sometimes you have got to point out to these musicians that the singer has the toughest job, also on stage. Musicians tend to be lazy, they need a good kick up their arse.’
The album wrestles with love, life and relationships in their many facets: Dazzle and Delight deals with obssesive love and addiction; Another Blow On The Bruise with giving and taking in friendships; He Got What He Wanted with loss of dignity; Apologia looks at the end of a relationship; Death Is Not The End at the end of life and what lies beyond; The Next Thing To Murder at love misused; Tell Tale Heart at love unspoken. Gavin: `What is falling in love? Falling in love — to fall is an error, you know, a mistake, you know, get your head broken, neck broken and everything. I much prefer to grow in love, make sure you have roots… much better. We fuck each other up, I hurt people in relationships, they hurt me… It’s trying to come to terms with that, I’m sort of amazed, bewildered, awed and confused by these things we call love, emotions and relationships.’
The title track refers directly to Oscar Wilde’s poem The Ballad Of Reading Gaol, which was the last creative thing he wrote. The poem is long and dark in its imagery, which is not surprising considering Wilde wrote it while imprisoned. It deals with the cruelty of the doomed murderer’s crime, the insistence that such cruelty is pervasive and the greater cruelty of his punishment by a guilty society. Wilde’s gloomy words are paired with music that is very `up’. Gavin: `We gave it almost a joyous, vaudevillian sort of circus type of a feel, because love is like a bloody circus, people running around like clowns after each other, falling in love, breaking their hearts and not knowing who or what they are or where they are going.’
The song was sung once before, by Jeanne Moreau in Fassbinder’s film Querrelle. On the b-side of the Each Man Kills 7″, Friday and Seezer re-arranged Peer Rabin’s music for it, so that it is slower, less joyous and more dream-like.
It was not the first time Friday used this Wilde poem, he used another stanza in the Virgin Prunes’ Theme For Thought: `He didn’t wear his scarlet coat / for blood and wine are red / and blood and wine were on his hands / when they found him with the dead / the poor dead woman whom he loved / and murdered in her bed.
Oscar Wilde has been a hero of Gavin’s since childhood. Gavin: `I believe that Oscar Wilde is as relevant today as he was one hundred years ago, whereas rock and roll culture is made up of hair-brained Americans. He was this wonderful aesthetic who let beauty exist. The whole Narcissus thing in Dorian Gray got my head flying, but it wasn’t just the sexuality like Each Man Kills… those words sum up any relationship, you have two people who decide they love each other, they’re taking something away from each other. We go around chipping bits off each other, every day.’
He is alluded to again in Apologia, the title of one of Wilde’s poems. After having used it for a 1981 unreleased Virgin Prunes track, Gavin took up the name again and rewrote the last line of the third stanza: `Now sorrow it digs away at its own grave’.
Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of Gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day
Is it thy will – Love that I love so well -
That my Soul’s House should be a tortured spot
Wherein, like evil paramours, must dwell
The quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not?
Nay, if it be thy will I shall endure,
And sell ambition at the common mart,
And let dull failure be my vestiture,
And sorrow dig its grave within my heart.
from Oscar Wilde’s Apologia.
Apart from the obvious references to Oscar Wilde on Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, Friday borrowed from James Joyce for Tell Tale Heart. The line `to die with one’s mouth full of ashes’ refers to Stephen Dedalus, one of the main characters in Ulysses, who puts some of his mother’s ashes in his mouth while mourning her death, never having been able to show her his love while she was still alive. His mother’s ghost comes back to haunt him, bending over him, her breath `a faint odour of wetted ashes’, her eyes accusing him:`Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!’ This ties in with the theme of the song: the tendency of man to waste time when it comes to showing love and to play games instead of getting to the point, and of thinking too much instead of letting the heart speak. It will do you no harm / to call and try for love is Friday’s advice. As in Poe’s Tell Tale Heart the pounding tattle tell heart eventually gives the protagonist away. It is a theme Friday has dwelt upon before, Tell Tale Heart is his Pagan Love Song (…the love you give / is the love you get…) for the Nineties, replacing the former banshee scream with an equally effective whisper. The evolution of his vocals since the old days is remarkable. The voice has lost some of its nasality, and has gained in warmth and depth. Gavin: `As you get older, you sort of learn how to say the same thing a different way, and you move on. I’ve always loved singing, but I never took my voice seriously.’
Rags To Riches, with its Dublin late-night bar atmosphere not unlike Van Morrison’s Madam George, is a camp and humourous hotch-potch of clich‚s thrown together. This is typical for Friday, who always seems to manage to kick some life back into worn out words: `I’m a man in a million’, `That’s life baby!’, `Where do you come from, what do you do?’ It sketches a character Gavin finds both charming and repulsive, that of the beer swigging, lowlife, know-it-all macho. The kind that `pinches girls’ bottoms.’
`Here she comes now…
My queen of desire…
Tip my hat to this Oooh indulgence.
Come’re baby! Keep me warm!’
Friday likes to borrow from other writers, and from himself in particular. Very often, words or phrases that he used before return in later writings. For example, in Another Blow On The Bruise he uses: one touch of darkness / and you know where you are / for this is my old true friend / and they take you to a place / where you hide your disgrace which he had used in The Virgin Prunes’ Love-Hitler: one touch of Venus / and you know where you are / this is my old true friend and it takes you to a place / where love rules like Hitler in which one touch of Venus in itself refers to Kurt Weill’s musical.
The my heart is broken, little pieces line, used in the 1987 Friday/Carmody collaboration Blessings pops up again in Rags. In fact the whole idea of it might stem from a poem Friday wrote in Irish as a fourteen year old: ¢ t mo chro¡ briste / bh¡ scamaill is br¢n / mar chaill m‚ mo chro¡ / amach ar an br¢n , which translates roughly as: o, my heart is broken / there are clouds of sorrow / for I lost my heart / out of sorrow. Other songs on the album have roots going back as far as 1985. Dazzle and Delight, The Next Thing To Murder and Man Of Misfortune were all done live by the Virgin Prunes, but although there are similarities in text and sometimes music, those versions have little or nothing to do with their present incarnations.
For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die
Oscar Wilde
Dylan’s Death Is Not the End, a drop-out song for the `Infidels’ sessions, was unreleased when Gavin recorded it, but before Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves came out, Dylan put it on his 1989 album Down In The Groove. Gavin was contemplating doing a song on the theme of death, and originally intended to do Jaqcues Brel’s My Death. Don Was, who had heard demo tapes Gavin had done sent over a tape of Death Is Not The End and its lyrics and melody won out. Gavin thought it amusing that he would sing a song of that title after having done an album called …If I die, I die. His interpretation of the song gives it a slow New Orleans marching band feel, while the end of it borders on insanity — wondrous, angelic sounds reach us as we are marching all the way to heaven’s gates: `The Angel Of Death with her legs wide open, both frightening and tempting’.
Music has certain healing properties and they never were more clear to me than when I was told the following story. A friend, whom I first met in Dublin, upon her return to Germany had to face the death of her colleague’s nine year old daughter. She died while she was playing: choking on a little piece of plastic. Monica, my friend, went to visit the child’s grave. She had brought her walkman, and was listening to a tape of Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves which I had sent to her. She did not know the exact location of the grave and so she was walking around wondering how on earth she was going to find it when suddenly she felt a pull towards a particular grave. At the same time, Death Is Not The End started playing through her headphones. It was the grave Monica was looking for and as she stood there crying, the song provided some comfort. In an attempt to cope with their grief, the mother and father joined a support-group for parents who have lost a child. Monica brought the song to their attention, translated the words into German, and found out that they too found some comfort in Death Is Not The End as well as other songs off the album.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
Oscar Wilde
Man of Misfortune is Gavin’s tribute to rock and roll, and to T-Rex in particular. With it he gently mocks the institution and ridicules himself. It also helps to lighten the alleged darkness and the ponderous `carry the world on your shoulders’ feel of the album.`Are you the boy with the stars in his eyes?’ refers to Marc Bolan: `He was so sensitive. A lot of people said his lyrics were bullshit. They weren’t. I freaked out when he died. I remember the day exactly. He was more true than even Bowie was, more honest. Bowie was too much of a chameleon. Bowie had his great moments, but what he’s doing now is so upsetting. It’s disgusting. But Bolan was one of my big heroes.’ Bowie is alluded to in a less reverent way: `Are you the boy who fooled the world? is Gavin’s parody of The Man Who Sold The World, Bowie’s 1970 album. There is another reference to Bowie in Love is just a word, a song that wallows in its own misery and seems to be no more than a sketch, a poem out of a child’s album of verses: God knows I’m good is a song Bowie recorded in 1969.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
Oscar Wilde
Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves is no rock and no roll, but it is seductive as hell. It is dark, personal and introspective, but never drags the listener down in the gutter. It attacks the TV evangelist who strangles with the hands of love and gold, but it does not moralize. It is rooted in days long past, but it has a timeless quality. Anton Corbijn’s sleeve photos capture the atmosphere of the album perfectly, visualising the sort of beauty there is to be found in things dark and decaying and the charm of glory past. The naked couple embracing on the cover of the album, the idea of which stems from La Vie, a painting Picasso did in his blue period, refers to an Edith Piaf song not on the album, but often sung live: Lovers For A Day. The song was Piaf’s greatest success at the Olympia in Paris in 1956. At the time, Piaf said she was fond of songs in which someone dies at the end. In the song, the narrator is washing glasses in a caf‚, reminiscing about the day two lovers came to rent a room and were found dead the next day. On the sleeve notes of Lovers Of Paris, Ralph Harvey wrote:
It is often a subject for discussion amongst
critics of poetry and Piaf fans alike. Lovers For
a Day, described by one of the critics as a
working-class Mayerling story with an after-taste
of mysticism. It is no less a perfect union of
words and music. The setting, a tawdry hotel in a
Parisian slum, is in the minor key whereas the
lovers themselves are in the major, their suicide
providing a way of escape to love in Eternity.
In the summer of 1989 a poster of the `nude embrace’ was put up all over Dublin, no lettering, just the photo. A teaser, but an annoying one to the more conservative inhabitants of the city. Many of the posters were defaced.
Friday claims his work appeals to women and sensitive men mostly. `Macho men usually say: what are they on about? Why don’t they fuck off?’ Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves was widely praised by the critics, it did well in The Netherlands and in Canada and sold around 90,000 copies world-wide. It could have been far more. Out of the 40 friends and acquaintances that I supplied with copies, only one person admitted to disliking it, which to me is proof of the album’s potential mass appeal. That it did not sell more has little to do with a lack of women or sensitive men. I put it down to lack of promotion.
Its second single You Take Away The Sun, (Friday’s song to match Brel’s If you go away: If you go away/ on a summer’s day/ then you might as well/ take the sun away.) got quite a bit of airplay in the Netherlands, even if it made a few of the less sensitive DJ’s terribly uncomfortable. They made such comments as: `Hmm, well, that was a bit depressing, wasn’t it?’ or laughed nervously through the song’s fade-out. One of the funnier, although mis-informed announcements was: `Here’s a song by a man who used to perform with a candle up his bum, but now prefers them on the tables of establishments that serve good wine.’ Well, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Oscar would have approved.
from: The Light and Dark by cvodb
