Click to watch Gavin Friday – Able – the video

Gavin Friday enlisted the expertise of highly acclaimed and renowned director Kevin Godley and producer Ned O’Hanlon for its making. Both Godley and O’Hanlon have both worked on many creative projects in the art and entertainment medium with star artists such as U2, Paul McCartney, Blur, Rolling Stones, Oasis to name but a few.

‘Able’ is a kind of declaration that comes with age and experience. Commenting on the video Godley added ‘Gavin is prevented from being a free agent by a shadow version of himself. Attached, like a growth, to every limb it slows him down, makes him stumble, twists and distorts him in any way it can to dominate and take control. It’s mission is to disable. Their fight is our film’.

‘catholic’ was released in April, the first album from Gavin Friday in 16 years.

Gavin Friday plays this years Electric Picnic, in Stradbally Ireland on September 2nd 2011 and the Crossing Border festival in The Hague, The Netherlands on November 18, 2011.

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Pat McCabe

In fact, if anything, it looked like Dodge City after the Hole-In-The-Wall gang had shot it up, or maybe Atlanta in the aftermath of the fire – with its own share of smooth-talking sharp-suited amoralists, our very own homegrown carpetbaggers, who were already in the process of slyly rezoning enormous swathes of it, these smug wolves, these ballad-singing ‘common-touch’ men of the people.

About whom enough already – we know where they led us, and we also know where we followed them, with our faces stuffed with burgers and ice cream and with not so much as a moral backbone to be found about the place, no more than you’d be likely to locate between the head and the tail of a pantechnicon-flattened iguana.

The first time I saw Gavin he was standing outside Burgerland on O’Connell Street – that blazing emporium where Radio Nova (“Broadcasting in the Bay Area”, no less) chewed incessantly on its Wrigley’s, snapping its fingers, urging everybody to say goodbye to Paddy, his wellingtons and the bog.

As I made my way past yet another new outlet, Baskin-Robbins’s ice-cream parlour (150 flavours!), along the Avenue of the Three Adulterers, as the main thoroughfare was christened by James Joyce’s father, I remember I was carrying a teacher’s briefcase and, at 25, with the burden of responsibility for which I was ill-prepared and to which I was ill-suited, was already feeling superfluous – superannuated. “All the hippies are dead,” a friend had only recently said to me, “our time is over.”

Gavin’s hands were nearly as big as his hair, I noticed, and he tended to wave them about, gesturing effusively.

As I passed him by, I couldn’t help overhearing him discussing the Beatles’ Taxman. He was comparing it to a current release by Paul Weller and The Jam. Which I thought was impressive – his knowing about it, I mean – for he seemed to me much younger than I was. Five years can mean a lot at that age – as I say, I was 25.

I spotted him about here and there after that – I had seen his band the Virgin Prunes a couple of times. Back in those abortion-obsessed days of the Eighties when Ireland seemed to have little to do but argue itself blue in the face about ectopic pregnancies as its infrastructure fell to bits around it.

An image returns, hysterically burlesque and simultaneously heartbreaking in its maddening innocence. As a punter whistles while upending a hopelessly buckled telephone-kiosk door, clambering in under it as if it were then most natural thing in the world, with sophisticated insouciance proceeding to make his call. Before crawling back out again like a squirrel and taking time to dust down his suit.

But there were good things too – Jim and Peter Sheridan’s Dark Space at the Project theatre – where U2 and the Prunes had played. Gavin’s screeching of The Walls of Jericho was good, as were the stage antics, much of which he’d learned from immersing himself in the performance art of Agnes Bernelle and Nigel Rolfe in the Project.

I didn’t see him for a long time after that – in the Nineties when I was living in London, in fact when he was recording In the Name of the Father.

We started to spend some time together – a lot of time, actually. That he liked disco music I was pleasantly surprised to hear – and his Behanesque combination of sensitivity and pugnaciousness was something to which I found I willingly responded – in the same way as I would, later on, to Shane MacGowan’s Pogues – delighting in their appropriation of the builder’s labourer’s dark Sunday suit as a garb of defiance.

I met a lot of his friends – and it was refreshing to observer that, no matter what the company, his views and attitude were rarely seen to change.

I approached himself and Maurice Seezer, his collaborator, about creating a tone-poem series for RTE. It was a blast. Based on my book Emerald Germs of Ireland, a quirky parody of old-time Irish music books which was a total and utter critical and commercial failure -we delivered what, I think, was an extraordinary work, a 10-part radio series, produced by the great Anne Walsh, and repeated three times by RTE at the time.

We used to like eating in the Alpha Café off Grafton Street – for ‘Mammy’ food as Gavin likes to call it. We wandered all around Dublin acting the maggot. One night I heard him experimenting with a riff, practically talking in tongues, and began to understand the instinctive source of his art. Irish folk and traditional were now entering the mix, with Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill attracting his attention.

"like Laurence Harvey in space"

I wrote some words too for his album Shag Tobacco, which I thought great then and think even better now. On it he looks like Laurence Harvey in space, louchely and mischievously smoking cigarettes.

It’s a defiant and humorous album, full of love and not yet middle-aged zest. catholic is different. Mature is not a word I like, and I certainly wouldn’t want to wish maturity on this artist.

But I suppose in the Eighties our parents were alive. The fight seemed worth it, there was someone to blame – and in Ireland the Catholic church has always been an easy target. The problem is even Irish atheists tend to betray small hints of their Catholicism. Ah for Jesus’s sake, how could God exist? It’s not the same in the UK. “What are you all fighting about over there?” the Cockney taximan routinely says – or used to.

For Friday it was a war between restraint and excess – Rococo in the ring belting it out with Protestant continence. Growing up on the border, I have always been intrigued by this particular set of tensions. It is no accident that Guggi and Bono, fellow musicians and long-time associates, are both non-Catholics.

But I never disowned my DNA – Catholic, Irish, Gaelic, call it what you will. And neither did Friday.

We were as Irish as anybody except we didn’t play Gaelic football and didn’t feel the need to be ashamed of saying it either. Aside from this anyway, its cultural wealth was there at our disposal and we wanted it.

With the result that anyone expecting all the usual Pavlovian responses to Irish Catholicism will be deeply disappointed with this newly compiled work over which there hangs the evocative fragrance of incense swirling throughout the ages. If we could mix up the epochs and recruit James Joyce and John McCormack for a session, I’d have O’Riada call up the Pope – then we could perform this opera in the Sistine Chapel. I don’t know what to say about catholic.

If Shag Tobacco wasn’t 100 per cent a masterpiece, it might have been because Gavin was too young to surrender. This time that tendency has come full circle and the ghosts of James Joyce’s short story Grace, these lay theologians who are so much a part of this Dubliner’s inheritance, have become more defined. Debating ethics and the secrets of consciousness, through yellow-brick streets carrying leather-bound missals and copies of Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, emerging like blinking hermits out of the shadows of history, as they part the curtain of a grey Liffeyside fog. Forming a small hunted knot of the devout, swinging a censer by the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery.

“Catholic,” they croak, wreathed in sin and shame and glory, redolent of blood, elevation and suffering.

catholic. With a small ‘c’. Reverently, on its knees, this new album has released an inner Monteverdi, and along with it a tidal wave of emotional complexity.

Ave.

–

About Pat McCabe

The author Patrick McCabe was born in 1955 in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland. He is the author of several novels including The Butcher Boy (1992), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction; The Dead School (1995), and Breakfast on Pluto (1998), the disturbing tale of a transvestite prostitute who becomes involved with Republican terrorists. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto (which McCabe dedicated to Gavin Friday) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and made into films by director Neil Jordan. His latest novels are The Holy City (2008) and The Stray Sod Country (2010).

Further Reading:

• Nigel Rolfe
• Agnes Bernelle
• Emerald Germs of Ireland
• James Joyce – Grace
• Thomas a Kempis – Imitation of Christ

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• Watch the new video for Gavin Friday’s ‘Able’
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Gavin Friday was interviewed outside Nou Camp stadium in Barcelona on June 20th where he is working on the production of U2′s 360 tour, which starts on June 30th. The brief interview was broadcast in U2Valencia’s podcast. Gavin discussed his role in U2′s production, calling himself an ‘aesthetic midwife’ and in a message to the listeners he sent his greetings and the news: “Next year I’ll be sending you my own music, as I will be releasing my record, which I haven’t done in 10, 12 years.”
Download the full podcast (mp3) which also features interviews with Catherine Owens and Bono. (Fan commentary is in Spanish.) or continue for a transcript of Gavin’s complete interview.
Pictures taken during the interview.

U2valencia: Is it possible to have a small interview?
Gavin Friday: Very small, because they go on stage in about 15, yeah?
U2V: Hi. We are with Gavin Friday, best friend of Bono. We know you have worked with U2 before, on Vertigo. What are you doing now, with 360? What is your job?
GF: What I always do. I… Let’s say ever since they’ve done Joshua Tree and most tours. Because we grew up together. I’m an aesthetic midwife, you know, when the baby is in the mother, I help the baby be born. I look at all the things… they’re on stage, they can’t see everything, so I’m their eyes and their ears, and I understand the four of them very well, cause I know them 30 years, or more. And so we speak the same language. I don’t blow smoke up their ass. Do you know what I mean?
U2V: Eh… you don’t smoke?
GF: I don’t *blow* smoke up their ass. Like… I talk the truth. I’m not afraid of them either. I’m just… the truth. But also… all the different departments, it’s such a big, complex show, so I help glue it all together. And then I deliver the baby and say ‘Bono, Edge, Larry, this is the bambino. I christen the bambino 360 degrees, and Padre Friday is going now, back to Dublin to work on his own stuff.
U2V: Do you think this one will be their best tour?
GF: I don’t know… the baby is still coming out. It’s not born yet. It’s born on the 30th of June. I think it’s like most U2 things, it’s always a challenge finishing a new thing. You look at U2, they keep taking risks, and trying to get better and better. What’s incredible about this, it’s that it’s so big, but for me it’s very intimate. The audience are going to feel this intimacy like I’ve never seen at a U2 show. But what is the best, what is the biggest? I don’t know, I just love it being what it is today.
U2V: Can you say a message to the Radio Vertigo listeners?
GF: Say a message? OK, this is Mr Gavin Friday, in Barcelona. Outside the stadium, a week before the U2 tour and I send you all my love and greetings and next year I’ll be sending you my own music, as I will be releasing my record, which I haven’t done in 10, 12 years.
U2V: Can you sing for us?
GF: Sing? Sing? Sing… I still sing, but… I’m shy, you make me shy and embarrassed. What could I sing? I’m trying to think of, eh, (sings) ‘Una Paloma Blanca…’

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“It’s like a painting, isn’t it? I might not understand everything literally, but I have the gist of it.”

Gavin Friday, Neil Hannon and Beirut’s Zach Condon talk to Graeme Thomson on the legendary Belgian singer Jacques Brel:

“Brel is sweaty, you can imagine him spitting on you if you’re in the front row. It would be good to bring the blood and guts, the smelly Brel, back into play.”

Read the full article on the Guardian website

Jacques the lad
Cruel, cynical, at times impossible to understand, Jacques Brel has inspired everyone from Bowie to Westlife. Graeme Thomson talks to today’s singer-songwriters about their hero
* Graeme Thomson
* The Guardian, Friday 6 February 2009
* Article history
First things first. Try to forget that Jacques Brel, the Belgian singer-songwriter, is indirectly responsible for Terry Jacks’s Seasons in the Sun. Forget also for a moment Scott Walker, whose obsession with Brel in the late 1960s tends to dominate discussions about the chansonnier, with largely obfuscatory results. Brel’s much-translated songs of sex, death, bruised romance and equivocal cynicism have influenced generations of artists, but to understand why, it’s necessary to return to the source.
Gavin Friday, the Irish singer and ex-Virgin Prune who has recorded several of Brel’s songs, recalls seeing him perform for the first time. “I didn’t know what the fuck was coming at me,” he says. “I just couldn’t believe the man. The kicking-against-the-pricks theory, that’s what I picked up on. It was like the next stage up from David Bowie doing Starman or Johnny Lydon doing Pretty Vacant on Top of the Pops. The physicality. The expression. I became obsessed.”
For the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, he was “beautifully ugly” – an odd, unreliable man who wore good suits and whose music set “a wonderful example of the absolute need to be yourself and say exactly what you think, regardless of what the public seem to want”. Marc Almond, a longtime fan who once recorded an entire album of Brel songs, says: “He’s in everything I do. Songs like Say Hello Wave Goodbye have a Brelian sense of disillusioned romance. As a singer, I’ve always looked at myself as an expressive storyteller rather than a technician, and that comes from him.”
It’s timely to return to Brel. The 30th anniversary of his death passed last year – he died from lung cancer, aged 49, in October 1978 – and a new compilation revisits his earliest recordings. Brel was born in Brussels on 8 April 1929, and his performance career was brief: he gave up singing live in 1966 and was in semi-retirement for the last 10 years of his life.
He first sang and acted in Franche Cordée, a Catholic youth organisation, before attaining modest success as a performer in Belgium. Only then did he head for Paris to conquer the music halls. He made two albums for Philips Records between 1954 and 1957, and it is this fledgling period of his career that is covered by the new collection, In the 50s: The Birth of Genius. Remastered by Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake, In the 50s is undeniably proto-Brel, the faltering footsteps of an artist still getting into his stride – though, as Blake says, “there are flashes of what’s to come”.
Almond argues that a singer has to have lived a little before he or she can really get to grips with Brel’s songs. Perhaps that applied to Brel as much as anyone. By the time the 60s began, he had piled up experience. His wife Miche and their three children had returned to Brussels, unable to cope with Brel’s philandering and disappearing acts. His religious belief also failed to survive; instead, he placed his faith in flawed humanity and the certainty of death. Experience made his world-view darker, his themes more uncompromising, but there remained a sermonising streak in his work: an identifiable moral centre among the pimps, prostitutes and disillusionment. Hannon describes the song Amsterdam as the “apotheosis of that mix of brutal honesty and absolute beauty: life is shit, everybody is horrible, but isn’t it wonderful!”
By 1959 and the release of his fourth album, La Valse à Mille Temps, Brel was a star in the francophone world, writing the songs that would ensure his legacy. Beyond their lyrical brilliance, La Mort (My Death, in its English version), Ne Me Quitte Pas (If You Go Away), Au Suivant (Next), Amsterdam and dozens of others are inventively arranged and rich in their use of instrumentation; they remain remarkably resonant today. La Diable (Ça Va) is a song about western arrogance, colonial ghosts and bombs exploding on railway lines; Fils De … is a deeply human anti-war song. There again, he was just as likely to sing about aeroplanes. Friday expresses awe at “the width of what he sang about – not just the poignant love songs, but his political songs. And he wrote about things that people don’t write about, like old people. There aren’t many people who cover that vast spectrum.”
Like many Brel fans, Friday was turned on by Bowie’s and Scott Walker’s performances of Brel songs. Walker first heard Brel in 1966 and plundered his songbook on his first three solo albums. The songs introduced the former heartthrob and Walker Brother to avant-garde euro-experimentalism, and he disappeared headlong into the possibilities. “I believe Brel had a profound effect on that man,” says Friday who, alongside Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn, worked with Walker during the recent Tilting and Drifting show at the Barbican. “I think it was Brel that tipped him into where he’s gone now. He ‘Europeaned’ him.”
Bowie, meanwhile, covered Amsterdam on the B-side of his 1973 single Sorrow and frequently played My Death in concert. The versions performed by Bowie and Walker, however, did not come from Brel, who wrote exclusively in French. Following Brel’s first appearance in New York in 1963, his songs were translated first by the poet Rod McKuen, and later by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman, who in 1968 put together the off-Broadway stage show Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Subsequent renderings by everyone from Tom Jones and Dionne Warwick to Judy Collins and Alex Harvey brought his songs into the mainstream.
The translations range from the superior to the woeful. Blau and Shuman’s rendering of La Mort, for example, is wonderful. Norman Blake picks out one particular line: “‘My death waits like a Bible truth/ At the funeral of my youth’ – my God, it’s astounding, absolute genius.”
Less astounding are the disastrous transformations where, like some drunken game of Chinese Whispers, the original meaning is obliterated. In the hands of McKuen, the acerbic Le Moribond – a bitter, briskly cynical farewell from a dying man to his unfaithful wife and hypocritical friends – became the saccharine Seasons in the Sun, last heard being trilled by Westlife. Zach Condon of the band Beirut, who often performs Le Moribond in concert, dismisses Seasons in the Sun as a song where “the dagger of his words has been taken out: ‘I can see you all crying and wiping your noses above my grave, and I laugh at you.’ That’s all gone.”
The fact is, Brel’s humour, verve and honesty are tamed by the English language. One of the worst sufferers is Ne Me Quitte Pas, perhaps his most famous song. It was translated by McKuen as If You Go Away and covered by everyone from Nana Mouskouri to Frank Sinatra. Almond first became familiar with Dusty Springfield’s “toned-down” version, but when he wanted to record the song himself, he went back to a “truer” translation of the original, which addressed Brel’s affair with Paris impresario Suzanne Gabriello. “It becomes a pleading, desperate song – voyeuristic, sexual and sinister,” he says. “The English translations have become the [accepted] versions of his songs, but you always lose something.”
Because Brel has been translated so often and his songs sung by such a wide variety of artists, it’s common for English speakers to enjoy his work by proxy. Yet it’s arguable that no translation really does him justice. “I’m close to fluent in French, but Brel was the first to really prove to me that you can’t just directly translate songs,” says Condon. As for Hannon, he recalls his French teacher struggling to explain what some of the lyrics in Amsterdam meant: “There’s a line in the first verse, a metaphor about the flags hanging from the buildings across the canal, and the way they drooped was like the atmosphere or something. It was hard even for her to understand it.”
The best way to get around the problem is to watch Brel in action. Visit YouTube, or get your hands on Comme Quand On Etait Beau, a DVD of Brel’s collected TV appearances. “His magnetism breaks down the language barrier,” says Almond. “You don’t necessarily have to understand every word he’s singing – he makes you understand the story through the way he delivers it. He lives inside his songs.”
A word of warning, however. Anyone expecting echoes of Scott Walker’s Adonis voice and lush orchestral pop will be in for a shock. Brel’s sturdy baritone is technically ordinary but emotionally compelling, and the songs tend to zip along, propelled by flailing arms and guttural exclamations. Watching him sing is a physical, visceral experience. “Brel is sweaty,” says Friday. “You can imagine him spitting on you if you’re in the front row. It would be good to bring the blood and guts, the smelly Brel, back into play.”
For musicians such as Friday and Hannon, the stark, grown-up realities of Brel are appealing when the posturing faux-rebellion of rock’n'roll starts to pall. “Britain has a terribly snobby attitude to continental Europe and its musical traditions,” says Hannon. “But I vastly prefer most of it. We need it now more than ever; we have to admit that mostly everything this last decade has been complete rubbish. Rock’n'roll has had a good innings, but we don’t have to be tied to that template. We can move on.”
Deviate from the orthodoxy of the traditional rock lineage, the one that starts at Rocket 88 and ends somewhere around Smells Like Teen Spirit, and it’s not hard to see Brel as a father figure to some of our greatest, most emotionally expressive songwriters. He comes through loud and clear, both musically and lyrically, in the early songs of Leonard Cohen; he’s there in the torch songs of Tom Waits, all grubby dockside glamour. He’s there in Jarvis Cocker’s words and in Joan as Police Woman and in Rufus Wainwright’s defiantly non-rockist tilt at pop drama. Even in translation, he expanded the vocabulary available to pop songwriters, yet he remains woefully underappreciated as an artist in his own right.
True, language may be a barrier, but Friday has an answer: “It’s like a painting, isn’t it? I might not understand everything literally, but I have the gist of it.” In other words, with Brel you either trust your French or you trust your gut. Either way, the effort is richly rewarded.
• Jacques Brel in the 50s: The Birth of Genius is out now on Poppydisc

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Rehearsals at the Irish Cultural Centre

View the slideshow large.

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Drifting and Tilting review from The Guardian: “Gavin Friday tackles Jesse – a song Walker envisaged Elvis Presley singing to his stillborn twin brother – hamming it up magnificently.”"

Photo by www.eleventhvolume.com

Photo by www.eleventhvolume.com

Photo by www.eleventhvolume.com

Nigel Richards, Gavin Friday, Jarvis Cocker. Photo by cvodb

Gavin Friday and Jarvis Cocker. Photo by cvodb

?, Michael Henry, Owen Gilhooly, Nigel Richards, Gavin Friday, Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn. Photo by cvodb

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Gavin Friday – Angel. Video directed by Mike Lipscombe, released September 22, 1995.

Gavin Friday – Angel as used in Baz Luhrman’s movie Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Lyrics:

Angel

angel…. hold on to me, love is all around me
angel…. hold on to me
oh come…. closer to me…. don’t go, don’t leave me
angel…. hold on to me, love is all around me
so silent your love, like the stars above
so silent your love…. hold on…. hold on…. to me
angel…. hold on to me, i call, call out to you
its paradise, you take me to
’cause my love for you love will always be

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