‘I wanted a title that said everything and nothing at the same time,’ says Friday about ‘Ich Liebe Dich’, a musical theatre show based on the work of Kurt Weill, commisioned by the Dublin Theatre Festival. ‘They asked us to put together anything we wanted once it involved the music of Kurt Weill.’

For their first performances in Ireland since 1996, Gavin and Maurice were joined on stage by Renaud Pion (wind instruments), Michael Blair (drums/percussion), Julia Palmer (cello) and Des Moore (guitars/banjo).
It is in some sense a return to their roots, as they have used Weill as a touchstone since their earliest collaborations (The Blue Jaysus, 1986). Friday was first introduced to Kurt Weill through the late great Agnes Bernelle, in 1978, and has included Weill’s songs in his live performance over the years, notably ‘Benares Song’ and occasionally ‘Alabama Song’ and ‘Mack the Knife’. Though the songs are of another era, they have not lost their relevance and many of the lyrics to Weill’s music fit the current climate.

Friday: ‘We’re working on about 21 songs and various instrumental extracts, but won’t decide on the final song list till mid band rehearsals. There won’t be much talking and I’d say that about 75 percent of the songs we’ll be doing will be from the Weimar era, with the rest coming from the Broadway era. There won’t be the same theatrics as there was in the Prunes, as in there’ll be no pigs between my crotch. But then again, I’m a theatrical whore — I was born with a spotlight on my head. Anything could happen.’

Fergus Linehan, director of the Dublin Theatre Festival on ‘Ich Liebe Dich’ in The Irish Times: “It is an “unsanitised” account of the world of Kurt Weill which promises to bring him “back into the gutter where he belonged”.

Tivoli Theatre, Dublin
October 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14 – 2001

Excerpt from review by Peter Murphy (Hot Press)
‘But really, you have to hand it to the man Friday; he shows no fear. It’s one thing to dominate an audience willing to be dominated, quite another to face the intimacy of a club with your Ich Liebe Dich hanging out.’
Review by Caroline van Oosten de Boer
Gavin, Maurice and the Friday/Seezer ensemble played their second to last sold out ‘Ich Liebe Dich’ show in the Tivoli theater on October 13th, 2001
Somewhere between madness and serenity lies the perfect performance. This was a night where the band was ready for anything and Gavin was in control.
A stillness fills the room, the singer’s on a chair in the middle of the audience, a single light outlining the man who is looking more and more like his 1983 Prune-self.
Renaud breathes into his instrument, conjuring a moribund rattle – a lonely foghorn. From the depths of his imagination, Gavin paints us a corpse, still drowning, a new form of beauty. Then, surfacing, he is Pirate Jenny – prodding people, that’ll learn ya, an I’m not me for the 00′s.
We were dragged along in Gavin Friday’s world where sex is always obsessive, love never bland. There’s never a meaningless note, and there’s an edge to every joke: ‘You are Irish, sir, you can tell by the jumper… sorry.’ Whether raging against the ‘Ibiza-mentality’, a loss of morals, or lamenting a lost love and exorcising the loneliness of an empty house, he’s 100% there. In the moment, living the song.
In the afternoon, at a public interview conducted by RTE’s John Kelly, Gavin stated he wants to ‘get lost in the music’. Consider us equally afloat.

Setlist:
Lost in the Stars
Benares Song
Alabama Song
September Song
Bilbao Song
Speak Low
Lonely House
Mandalay Song
Ballad of Immoral Earnings
Mack the Knife
What keeps mankind alive?
Pirate Jenny
The Drowned Girl
Cannon Song
Oh Heavenly Salvation
Lilly of Hell
Pirate Jenny.

When Gavin was asked to do a spoken word performance at the 1994 ‘Crossing Border’ festival in The Hague, The Netherlands, his manager asked him what on earth he was going to do there. He wasn’t too sure himself. Nobody did expect that in the end the man who once sang the line ‘words disobey’ was said to be the embodiment of the festival’s ideals of merging music and literature.

He decked the stage with carpets, tables, chairs, a TV set and flowers – a long settee, a stereo, a hoover, an ironing board. ‘I didn’t bring any musicians, so I brought my living room’. He played records – Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’ and bawled along to it before moving on to ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’. He talked about getting poetry stuffed down his throat, being Irish. But Kavanagh, cows and meadows never meant much to him, his muse was definitely Wilde.
The audience lapped up the inuendos of ‘Dolls’ – the words so much clearer than in their musical incarnation. And to top it all off, he broke a long kept vow of never to sing a Virgin Prunes song again. Lost for a suitable encore, he returned to the primal sounds of ‘Sweethomeunderwhiteclouds’.
A repeat performance was staged in Brussels, early 1995.
Shagging Tobacco
In 1996 Gavin and Maurice Seezer worked on a spoken word album, which would feature McCabe’s short story ‘Shagging Tobacco’ from the ‘Shag Tobacco’ cd booklet, set against its re-recorded and remixed music. The album was to appear in a spoken word series that Island Records were planning to release. The series would also feature Jah Wobble (reading William Blake), Marianne Faithful (from her autobiography) and poetry read by Bob Marley. Unfortunately, the people in charge of Bob Marley’s estate calculated it would take them four years to get things ready and work on the series came to a halt. In the meantime, Gavin and Island Records parted company. The ‘Shagging Tobacco’ album was shelved.
Closed on account of rabies
December ’97 however saw the release of the Hal Willner produced Edgar Allen Poe tribute ‘Closed on Account of Rabies’ (buy at Amazon.com), which features several artists reading the works of Poe. Gavin’s contribution is the poem ‘For Annie’: