Related news

• Hal Willner presents: An Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends
• Gavin Friday talks about ‘An Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends’
• ‘Look, we’ve actually shut Friday up!’

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.

Related news

• Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow!
• Tomorrow belongs to me: under the influence
• Tomorrow Belongs To Me – Unter dem Einfluß

Billed as “A One Man Show – For One Night Only”, Gavin built on the foundations of his Laurent Perrier talk to create a visual and vocal journey and an intimate recollection of his growing up in Dublin and the people, musicians and artists who influenced him including his parents, his ex-wife, Protestants, Oscar Wilde, Bowie, Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, punk and Picasso.

Related news

• Tomorrow Belongs to Me
• The flying mickeys
• The Blue Jaysus

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.

Related news

• Ich Liebe Dich: ‘Unsanitised account of the world of Kurt Weill’
• Ich Liebe Dich premiere
• Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer create Kurt Weill Tribute

“Muc The Flying Pig” started his fundraising tour of Ireland at the National Ploughing Championships in Mallow, Co Cork. With the help of the staff of AIB, Concern and the National Primary Schools of Ireland, Muc toured the towns of Ireland in a blaze of publicity and fun to collect money like a piggy bank for the Kosovo appeal in Ireland.

Standing 12ft high x 8ft long x 5ft wide, the creation of Múc was inspired by the phrase ‘if pigs could fly’ and was the symbol of hope and possibility for Kosovo. 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.

The sculptural installation of Gavin’s vision of ‘Múc the Flying Pig was designed by artist Laurent Mellet.

Educational packs were sent to 4,000 primary schools throughout the country. Boys and girls were encouraged to set up their own collections.

Gavin Friday: “This is a completely different approach to raising funds for Kosovo. The ‘Concern for Kosovo’ appeal involves a multi programme featuring the unique and surreal flying pig ‘Muc’. The programme, in addition to generating significant funds, aims to educate and raise the awareness of the continued plight of refugees in general.”

Related news

• Artists for Kosovo
• Three Wishes on RTE
• Three Wishes for Kosovo

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.

Related news

• Muc the Flying Pig
• Three Wishes on RTE
• Three Wishes for Kosovo

Dublin’s Waterfront rock café was situated right where the name suggests it was: on the quays of the river Liffey. It used to be a restaurant, The Columbia Mills, which wasn’t hugely successful because it was a bit out of the way. Then promoter Denis Desmond bought the lease of the place.

Gavin: “I said I want to start this club, I have ideas for songs, I have melodies, I have lyrics and I need to find a musician, but a good way to find a musician is to start this club… the Blue Jaysus. I might make some money. Denis Desmond had got this restaurant called The Waterfront but he complained nobody would go down to the area. I said to him: ‘Give me 150 quid and I’ll make it the hippest place in Dublin, everyone will be queuing. And he said: ‘I’ll hold you up on that’. I said: ‘Can I do anything I like?’ He said: ‘Anything.’ ‘Can I change the look of the place? Can I do that?’

Gavin took over The Waterfront and for a few months in 1987, every Friday night he created an antidote to its raggle taggle scene.

“The Blue Jaysus wasn’t like anything else that was going on in Dublin at the time: “We were infested with the raggle taggle disease. Hippies! And U2 were gods. I had this… no door policy, when it’s full it’s full, it opens at 10 and it closes at 3 in the morning, which was great. We had gingham table cloths, Georg Grosz slides, and I had a rule: no music other than music pre-Rock and Roll. Nothing.

“I had this table and I used to put a statue of Jesus, painted blue there and I’d go up and talk to bands and musicians and I’d say you can come up for 15 minutes, I want you to play, there’s no money but you get two bottles of wine. And you cannot play any of your own songs or any songs earlier than 1950. And they went for it. Loads of musicians were coming. And if someone was in town playing SFX, which was a big gig then, Denis would bring them down. If there’s some comedian on, he’d bring them down. It was IR£ 1.50 to get in. And it was packed.

“It was every Friday night, a two month run at one stage in its heyday. And then we did a revival. The thing I had… a theory, and I still have it, is that when you go out you’re not going to just see a band, you’re going to drink and chat and it’s a great idea for a club, I’d still do it. I always had the philosophy that you don’t want to hear a band play for three hours, you want to chat with your mates, so… doors would open at 10, at about 11.30 I’d go on, I’d do one song and talk and then I’d introduce a guest and then I’d do another song, and then a guest… we’d do twenty minutes, thirty minutes and stop. And then there’d be another 45 minutes before another act would come on and do a song.

Guests included members of the Hothouse Flowers, the Waterboys, Clannad, Maria McKee, comedians Ben Elton and Sean Hughes, Phil Chevron of The Pogues, Agnes Bernelle, Mary Coughlan, Simon Carmody and Des O’Byrne of the Golden Horde. Van Morrison even showed up one night.

“Def Leppard even fucking played, can you believe that? And the Thompson Twins… the place was packed, jammed… like, you couldn’t move. And every night the whole thing ended with Bernie and Attracta.”

Bernie and Attracta were actually Gavin and Guggi performing in drag, playing two old Dublin woman having surreal conversations and telling jokes.

“They were great days. They were just so spontaneous, you know. Mad stuff. Even the Aidan Walsh shit came out of that. Loads of people got their first break there. Sean Hughes, the first time he ever stood on a stage… he used to always go ‘I’m really funny, will ya let me on?’ And I’d go ‘I don’t think you’re funny, fuck off.’ Eventually we had no one and went ‘OK, get up’. The guest would sit at the table with the Blue Jaysus, the statue. And there was always a raffle. Bernie and Attracta would sell the raffle tickets. The same fucking jokes every week, but it worked. They were very, very treasured times.”

Related news

• Four Artists, Many Wednesdays
• Virgin Prunes matinee in Brussels
• Virgin Prunes – ‘When art and anarchy collide’

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…”

Related news

• Four Artists Many Wednesdays – poster
• Virgin Prunes – ‘When art and anarchy collide’
• Video: Big Think Interview with Gavin Friday

• 1987 – Four Artists, Many Wednesdays
• 1987 – The Blue Jaysus
• 1994 – Mr Pussy’s Cafe De Luxe
• 1999 – Artists for Kosovo
• 1999 – Muc the Flying Pig
• 2001 – Ich Liebe Dich
• 2003 – I Didn’t Come Up The Liffey In A Bubble
• 2006 – Tomorrow Belongs to Me

Hal Willner produced tribute events

• 1999 – The Harry Smith Project, London
• 1999 – The Harry Smith Project, New York
• 2001 – The Harry Smith Project, Los Angeles
• 2004 – Shock and Awe: The Songs of Randy Newman, Los Angeles
• 2006 – Came So Far for Beauty, An Evening of Songs by Leonard Cohen, Dublin
• 2007 – Forest of No Return: Hal Willner Presents Vintage Disney Songbook, London
• 2008 – Stay Awake Live: 20th anniversary of the classic recording of Disney songs, New York
• 2007 – Rogue’s Gallery, New York
• 2008 – Rogue’s Gallery, Dublin
• 2008 – Rogue’s Gallery, Gateshead
• 2008 – Rogue’s Gallery, London
• 2009 – An Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends, New York
• 2010 – Rogue’s Gallery, Sydney

Other

• 2006 – The Fortune Teller

Related news

• Tomorrow Belongs to Me
• The Blue Jaysus
• Muc the Flying Pig