(Work in progress)

Tomorrow Belongs To Me was Gavin Friday’s two-night tribute to German culture, performed at Liberty Hall on July 27 and 28, 2006.

Sponsored by Beck’s, Gavin also contributed to the brewer’s label art project. Other artists participating included Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George and Jeff Koons.

Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer marked their first high profile return to the live stage since 1996 with Ich Liebe Dich (“I Love You”), a production based on the music of Kurt Weill. The show, which encompassed songs from 1920s Berlin to the Broadway musicals of the ’40s, was staged in the Tivoli Theatre from Monday October 8th to Sunday 14th (except Wed 10th).

The Friday/Seezer ensemble included Michael Blair, the percussionist best known for his contributions to the blue-lit soundscapes of Tom Waits’ mid-80s classics Swordfishtrombones and Raindogs, and also long-time Friday/Seezer collaborators such as multi-instrumentalist Renaud Pion and English avant garde/classical cellist Julia Palmer. The line up was completed by Irish jazz veterans Dave Fleming on double bass and guitarist/slide/banjo player Des Moore.

For Gavin Friday, Ich Liebe Dich was the fruit of a fascination that stretches back to the days of The Virgin Prunes. During his later days with the band, he “was travelling a lot in the early 80s around Germany and France, and I really started delving into the world of Brel, Brecht and Weill. I became an obsessive, getting every recording I could, finding different translations from American recordings, European recordings, whatever. I’m proud to say I must have one of the strongest collections of Weill’s stuff in the country. It’s just a labour of love.

“I wanna bring people on a fantasy, a trip for two hours, sorta tiddle them and fuck with their brains at the same time.’ And within that there are some incredibly evocative and emotional songs as well as some ridiculously camp and aggressive ones. It’s just like getting lost for two hours. I do think it’s quite of the moment in the way that Moulin Rouge is so out of kilter but it’s not. I love putting on a show or making an album as a form of escapism that haunts the fuck out of ya, makes you think, makes you feel happy/sad, or question shit, y’know?”

Ich Liebe Dich ran for six performances in The Tivoli in Dublin between Monday, October 8th and Sunday, October 14th 2001.

In 1999, Gavin Friday travelled to Kosovo on behalf of the charity Concern, to film a documentary highlighting the plight of Kosovan refugees. The 30-minute video documentary ‘Three Wishes For Kosovo’ was completed and shown on RTE television on December 17th, 1999.

Gavin: “Why? I don’t really know, it’s all too convoluted and to tell the truth, the `why?’ is not that important. Like most things in my life, I make it up as I go along. A planned accident. Over a few pints in May of this year, myself and a couple of friends, Anne-Louise Kelly and Sheila Roche, decided to do something constructive to help the plight of the refugees in Kosovo.”

Exhibition: Artists for Kosovo

Anne-Louise Kelly approached Concern and offered to help fundraise. There were lots of ideas, one of which was an art exhibition: “Artists For Kosovo”. Laura Magahy and Aileen Corkery of Temple Bar Properties jumped on board.

“Artists for Kosovo”, a slide-show of work by renowned Irish artists and the children of St Audeon’s Nationa School set to Friday/Seezer music, was shown in Meeting Place Square in Dublin’s Temple Bar from 27th July to 30th August 1999. It aimed to create awareness, and stimulate reaction to the inhumane situation in Kosovo. The 34 artists who contributed included Guggi, Perry Ogden, Maria Pizzuti, Claire Carpenter, Sibylle Ungers, Tom Matthews, Laurent Mellet and Rachel Ballagh.

Documentary: Three Wishes for Kosovo

Three weeks after the Nato ceasefire, on Concern’s request, Gavin and a film crew went to Kosovo to shoot a short film, as hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees returned to their homeland. Nothing could have prepared him for what he experienced over the few days in Kosovo:

Gavin: “From the moment we crossed the border at Macedonia, the tension and fear was enough to make one vomit. I was frightened, the film crew were frightened, everywhere looked and felt like hell on earth. Every village, town and city we went to was flattened to the ground. Everywhere we went, people asked us “do you want to film the dead bodies?”

On the last day of filming, the team spent an afternoon with a group of refugee children. They played party games and painted pictures and Gavin tried his hand at balloon magic.

Gavin: “I was crap. So much for my crash course with Joe the Magic Man. It was in this context that one could finally feel some sense of optimism. I asked the children if they had three wishes for Kosovo, what they would be. Nearly every child had the same wishes to have peace in Kosovo, to have a new house, to have things the way they used to be.”

Múc the Flying Pig

The third part of the project revolved around a 12ft high, 8ft long and 5ft wide metal pig with wings. ‘Múc’ enabled the public, but in particular children, who are excluded from the normal credit card appeals, to ‘feed the pig’ with donations towards the Kosovo Appeal.

Read more about Múc the Flying Pig.

In 1987, after the demise of Virgin Prunes, Gavin devoted himself to painting for a while, sharing a studio with Bono, Guggi and Charlie Whisker. The four friends would meet Wednesday evenings in Danesmoate, a mansion at the foot of the Dublin mountains. They had little in common when it comes to painting but found the same things funny and, in Charlie’s words: “We all seemed to enjoy being on two wheels.”

The sessions resulted in the exhibition called “Four Artists, Many Wednesdays” at Dublin’s Hendricks Gallery in 1988. Gavin, Guggi and Charlie Whisker showed their paintings, while Bono opted to exhibit photos he had taken in Ethiopia. Gavin titled his series of paintings “I didn’t come up the Liffey in a bubble”, an expression often used by his father. He says: “It was crazy, I made more money out of painting than out of six years with Rough Trade!”

Originally, the plan had been to research various characters and situations around Dublin, particularly street characters and religious soap-boxes. But in the end each worked on individual themes, though Gavin seems to have stuck close to the original idea: two of the paintings, “Sin E An La” and “Lady of the Flower”, were inspired by a woman, ‘a bit of a religious nut’ and a fan of Pope John Paul III, who used to frequent O’Connell Street announcing “the end of the world is nigh”.

Gavin: “That’s me being visually violent, not verbally or musically. It’s all about Dublinisms. I love this city…”