Demand for Gavin Friday, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill performing work by William Butler Yeats on June 30th was so great, the National Library decided to simulcast the event in the Library’s cafe. Gavin, approaching the material in his own inimitable way, read his personal selection of poems covering themes of romance, politics and celtic mysticism, using the full width of his voice to add light and shade to Yeats’ words, and body to punctuate his phrasing.

Hayes (fiddle) and Cahill (guitar) provided musical interludes and improvised on ‘The Stolen Child’, Yeats’ own tale of dazzle and delight. Although they had little rehearsal time and come from very different traditions, the artists managed to find common ground, and simply ‘clicked’. Hayes kept his eyes on Gavin throughout the performance following his lead while Cahill fixed on the fiddler. “I’m not from Sligo,” said Gavin, “I’m from Dublin,” and launched into a purposefully flat reading of ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’, accentuating his Northside Dublin inflection. It worked well with the ballad’s iambic trimeter: “I passed my brother and cousin / They read in their books of prayer / I read in my book of songs / I bought at the Sligo fair.” He ended with two encores picked on the spot and chose ‘Drinking Song’ because the title appealed to him and then closed with ‘Brown Penny’ (perhaps subconciously because it’s theme echoes his own classic ‘Tell Tale Heart’) the words of which sound particularly Fridayesque: “For he would be thinking of love / Till the stars had run away / And the shadows eaten the moon.”

The Library’s master of ceremonies, paraphrasing writer Colm Toibin in his closing words to the audience, said: “It wasn’t the guitar players and the fiddlers and the actors and the poets who bankrupted the country, who ran our country into the ground, but if we are to make it back, if we are to take it back… I don’t know about you, but my heart will be all that stronger, for tonight we’ve been in the presence of real art, real artists and it seems such a good thing that’s it’s in the heart of the National Library.” He then called for another round of applause. Later that evening, at the Merrion Hotel, the Library presented the musicians with 1st edition copies of Yeats’ books to thank them for their involvement in the Summer’s Wreath festival.

The poems

• September, 1913
• To a friend whose work has come to nothing
• To Ireland in the coming times
• He thinks of his past greatness when a part of the constellations of heaven
• He wishes for the cloths of heaven
• The stolen child
• The fiddler of Dooney—
• A drinking song (video)
• Brown Penny (video)

SEPTEMBER, 1913

WHAT need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

TO A FRIEND WHOSE WORK HAS COME TO NOTHING

NOW all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

TO IRELAND IN THE COMING TIMES

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland’s heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured guietude.

Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body’s laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind,
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!

While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
What measurer Time has lit above,
And all benighted things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth’s consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream at all;
For God goes by with white footfall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

HE THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS WHEN A PART OF THE CONSTELLATIONS OF HEAVEN

I HAVE drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies.
O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,
Must I endure your amorous cries?

HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

THE STOLEN CHILD

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
i{Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.}

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
i{Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild}
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.}

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,.
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
i{Come away, O human child!
To to waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For to world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.}

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
i{For be comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than you can
understand.}

THE FIDDLER OF DOONEY

WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

A DRINKING SONG

WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

BROWN PENNY

I WHISPERED, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

The single was recorded as part of a 70th Birthday Limited Edition EP tribute series to the Suicide vocalist Alan Vega. The download comes in two formats: mp3 and high quality lossless FLAC file. It includes the single’s artwork.

Buy the vinyl 10″ or Download ‘ Ghostrider’ . The limited edition vinyl 10″ of the song contans additional tracks by Thomas Brinkmann (‘Diamonds, Furcoats and Champagne’ ) and Alan Vega (‘Puss On Tha Time Warp’). It is also available as Limited Edition Radio CD.

Listen to the song on MySpace.

Leading names from the world of music, stage, screen, visual arts, politics, literature and academia are coming together at the National Library of Ireland this June for its annual month-long celebration of the life and works of William Butler Yeats. With the programme now in it’s 4th year, ‘Summer’s Wreath 2010‘ offers free public readings, reflections, lectures and performances and will feature many prominent female contributors this year echoing the passionate and complex relationship which Yeats had with women throughout his life.

Gavin Friday on Yeats
National Library of Ireland
Wednesday 30 June at 8.00pm

Admission is free but booking is essential. To reserve up to two places, please call +353 1 6030277

Gavin has been working on songs for a new studio album since 2008; co-writing with Cork based keyboard player Herbie Macken. The pair first collaborated for the Patrick McCabe play ‘The Revenant’ for the Druid Theatre Company in 2007.

Recording for the new album started last summer in Dublin, with producer Ken Thomas (Sigur Ros, Moby, M83) at the controls. The record was mixed and completed in the UK in earlier this year; and is currently being scheduled for a late summer release. It will be Gavin’s first solo album since 1995’s ‘Shag Tobacco’.

His recent work includes film scores for ‘In America’ and ‘Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. ‘Nothing Like The Sun’ with Gavin Bryars for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and ‘Drifting And Tilting’ with Scott Walker at The Barbican. Plus ongoing live and studio collaborations with long time compadre Hal Willner; and the very special “An Evening With Gavin Friday & Friends”, a unique event with a stellar line up at Carnegie Hall in 2009.

Gavin is in the process of putting together a new live band with a view to returning to the concert stage later in 2010.

http://gavinfriday.com
http://rubyworks.com

http://twitter.com/gavinfriday
http://twitter.com/gavinfridaynews

“This month, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology — of sorts — to Ireland to atone for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests whom those children were supposed to trust. To many people in my homeland, the pope’s letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country. To understand why, one must realize that we Irish endured a brutal brand of Catholicism that revolved around the humiliation of children. [...] Benedict’s apology gives the impression that he heard about abuse only recently, and it presents him as a fellow victim: “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.” But Benedict’s infamous 2001 letter to bishops around the world ordered them to keep sexual abuse allegations secret under threat of excommunication — updating a noxious church policy, expressed in a 1962 document, that both priests accused of sex crimes and their victims “observe the strictest secret” and be “restrained by a perpetual silence.” [...] Benedict’s apology states that his concern is “above all, to bring healing to the victims.” Yet he denies them the one thing that might bring them healing — a full confession from the Vatican that it has covered up abuse and is now trying to cover up the cover up.”

Gavin Friday supports these powerful words and respects Sinead’s courage to ‘kick against the pricks’.

Read Sinead O’Connor’s full letter on WashingtonPost.com.

Preachers Son are Kila’s Brian Hogan, Engine Alley’s Emmaline Duffy-Fallon and José Carlos Anselmo Flores. They recorded their debut album with producer Ciaran Cahill and it was mixed by Dave Bascombe (who also worked on Gavin Friday’s own “Adam ‘n’ Eve”). Their first single ‘X For Sandra’ is being released on Reekus on April 16th. The album is currently being mastered and will be out later this year.

Listen to Gavin Friday sing Lipstick in full on the band’s website.

Other contributors include Rod McKuen, who made If You Go Away famous; his daughter France Brel; Seasons In The Sun singer Terry Jacks; the French-Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan; Momus (aka singer Nick Currie); opera singer Toby Spence; Peter Straker; translator Paul Buck; singer-songwriter Robb Johnson, who released an album celebrating the work of Brel on his own record label; actress Elly Stone; and Jean-Michel Boris from the Paris Olympia, where Brel performed his last concert.

Part 1 – 16 March at 11.30pm – an introduction to Brel with a special look at Ne Me Quitte Pas.
Part 2 – 23 March at 11.30pm – examines the darker side of Brel, the poetry and the interest in death.
Part 3 – 30 March at 11.30pm – looks at Brel’s unconventional lifestyle.

You can listen to Radio 2 live online tonight from 11.30pm GMT. The programme will also be available on iPlayer for a week after it has aired.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio2

Rogue’s Gallery was conceived by actor Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean. The result was a compilation CD featuring pirate ballads, sea songs and chanteys.

Live, Rogue’s Gallery was previously performed at St Ann’s in New York, at the Analog Festival in Dublin, The Sage in Gateshead and the Barbican in London.

Tickets for the 2-hour show are $145 or $135 and can be booked through the following:

Sydney Opera House
Book Online or phone
02 9250 7777

Sydney Festival
Book Online or phone
1300 668 812

Ticketmaster
Book Online or phone
1300 723 038

• Read more at www.sydneyfestival.org.au
• View a slideshow of images from the London show
• View a slideshow of images from the Dublin show

‘Odyssey’ is Orbit’s first compilation. It features 42 tracks divided into 3 discs (see tracklisting). Discs 1 and 2 are unmixed, with many tracks reinterpreted to a greater or lesser extent, and Disc 3 is a continuous mix. Orbit has written sleeve notes on each track and invites fans to add their own memories and information on the tracks through Twitter (@WilliamOrbit) and his blog.

• Odyssey on Amazon.com
• Odyssey on Amazon.co.uk

Gavin Bryars, beautiful through-composed score weaves together eight of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the subjects of time, memory and music. It features five sonnet settings by guest composers including Antony Heggarty (Antony and the Johnsons) and Mira Calix. With Anna Maria Friman, John Potter and Gavin Friday.

Tickets:
£15.50, £13 (£13, £10.50 concessions) £7 Young person
Book now