Poster for the “Four Artists Many Wednesdays” exhibition (1987)
Topic: guggi
LP: Aidan Walsh & The Master Plan – A Life Story Of My Life
Born in Dublin in 1954, Aidan Walsh co-founded Temple Lane Studios in Temple Bar. ‘Ireland’s unlikeliest pop star’ recorded his 1987 album ‘A Life Story of My Life’ with the help of Gavin Friday, Simon Carmody, as well as Guggi and other members of Carmody’s band The Golden Horde.
Gavin sings backing vocals on various tracks, as does Guggi.
Simon and Gavin also appear in Shimmy Marcus’s documentary Aidan Walsh: Master of the Universe (2001).
The Blue Jaysus
Post-Virgin Prunes, Gavin Friday opened a Friday night cabaret club in Dublin called the Blue Jaysus.
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.”
Four Artists, Many Wednesdays
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…”
Gavin Friday and Friends at Carnegie Hall – Press Round Up
The reviews are pouring in. Here’s what’s being said in the press about ‘Gavin Friday and Friends’ at Carnegie Hall:
Jon Pareles of the New York Times:
“Mr. Friday has built a latter-day career as an eclectic, cabaret-tinged songwriter who hasn’t forgotten rock. The songs testify to romance and disillusion, while taking unexpected harmonic twists. They can be mournful and yearning, but more frequently turn bitterly cynical. They are haunted by death, wounded by love and often disgusted by daily life.”
Photo by tibetjb
“True to Mr. Friday’s repertory, the concert juxtaposed delicacy and brute force, intimacy and irony. It had tender moments, like Mr. Friday’s opening “Apologia”; duets with Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) on “He Got What He Wanted” and “Angel”; and Mr. Friday’s desolate “You Take Away the Sun,” with the shimmering backup of Bill Frisell on guitar, Hank Roberts on cello and Mr. Seezer on piano.”
Photo by tibetjb
“But the concert’s peak came early, with the reconstituted Virgin Prunes (Dik Evans, Guggi and Gavin Friday), including J. G. Thirwell on additional guitar and vocals, along with Mr. Evans and the singer Guggi from the old band. It bore down on two of its old songs — “Sweet Home Under White Clouds” and “Caucasian Walk” — as insistent, unstoppable drones and imprecations. Even at Carnegie Hall, sung behind music stands by men well past their teens, the menace came through.”
David Fricke of Rolling Stone:
“The silent star of the evening was composer Maurice Seezer, Friday’s longtime songwriting partner. He finally took a bow at the very end. But Friday, who always thought he belonged in Carnegie Hall, sang and acted out his lyrics as if he owned the place, swaggering across the boards, gesturing at the stars and jabbing his forefinger at the front rows with a panache that was part opera star, part Dublin punk. “Do we really need these pop stars?/There’s not enough of me!” he crowed in “Caruso,” a dynamic pairing with singer Eric Mingus. It was a song about the power and pleasures of transformation, sung by a man who took on every role in reach tonight — friend, lover, heathen, glitter boy, Irish poet — and was indisputably himself and in control in every one.”
Video: Big Think Interview with Gavin Friday
Full 30-minute interview with Gavin by BigThink.com.
Article: Prune power – Irish Times
From: The Irish Times, October 3, 2009
By: Brian Boyd
PROFILE GAVIN FRIDAY: He led an elite group of avant-garde chancers that included Bono and The Edge. A host of stars, including U2, will take the stage in New York to celebrate the former Virgin Prune’s 50th birthday
LYPTON VILLAGE was a little known area in Ballymun, Dublin. It only ever existed for a few years during the 1970s. Its residents included Fionan Hanvey, David Evans, Paul Hewson and Derek Rowan. You could never find it on a map because it was a virtual village – a psychological place of escape for its inhabitants. Lypton Village had its own laws: art, music and weirdness were good, everything else was bad. It had its own language and its members were christened with new names – which is why Fionan Hanvey, David Evans, Paul Hewson and Derek Rowan are better known today as the musicians Gavin Friday, The Edge and Bono and the artist Guggi.
Gavin Friday visits Guggi’s exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery
Gavin Friday’s lifelong friend Guggi (Derek Rowan) is currently exhibiting work at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. It’s Guggi’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and it runs through April 25th.
A catalogue featuring an introduction by the Irish-born American painter and Turner Prize nominee Sean Scully accompanies the exhibition. Scully writes:
“In his beautiful small studio he shows me chairs that are the same as the ones he sat on as a child that he managed to find agin and buy as a man. He also shows me the enamelled metal jugs that inhabit his paintings. These are the ones he hated as a child that he now loves. That he now affectionately draws into his paintings. And always with a deep love and restraint. This is an act of retrieval. I do this myself. I have a teapot that looks like a house that I bought for my mother when I was eight. I’d rather have a truck driven through one of my paintings than lose this. When I see this quality in another person, I see how futile it is and how noble to keep trying to put it right. To fix the train that left the station forty years ago.”
We accompanied Gavin’s second visit to the exhibition last week, away from the opening night crowds. He pointed out his favourites and some of the details on Guggi’s work while we shot a few pictures. Click the link below to view.
Virgin Prunes – ‘When art and anarchy collide’
Irish music magazine State.ie interviewed Gavin Friday about the Virgin Prunes for their most recent issue. The article, ‘When art and anarchy collide’ is available to read online.
Gavin Friday talks Lypton Village
1982 interview from U2 Info Service, by Geoff Parkyn
Apart from the fact that Edge’s older brother Dik Evans plays guitar in The Virgin Prunes, there are links between the two bands that go back to their childhoods, and recently Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes shed some light on their names: “The U2 connections were very strong at an early stage because I grew up with Bono, he lived a few doors down from me”.
The friends duly formed into two bands, sharing early gigs such as the Prunes’ 1980 UK debut at the Acklam Hall. Together, they invented a private universe for themselves, called Lypton Village, all initiates speaking “a second language”
“As kids, we used to be bored, we usen’t to go out much. Bono went out and formed U2, and what they were expressing was totally different to what we were expressing, so when The Virgin Prunes formed, although there was this closeness, it was in friendship rather than attitudes and ideas… Like the names: Bono’s name, Guggi gave him that name, and my name, and Davey’s, they’re all names from Lypton Village, and The Edge. It goes back ten years. But as the two bands developed we came to our own identities.
“People have always brought comparisons between the bands, musically. But we’ve never really gone together on musical terms. If I see Bono, I wouldn’t really talk to him about music really. I’d talk about other things. We hate it when people bring it up, cos they say, Hey, you’re in The Virgin Prunes, tell us all about U2. We get that a lot, so we hate U2 connections! It just gets a pain in the arse in this country.
“But there is a weird understanding between us. When we were younger one of our biggest pastimes was, Guggi and Bono were very quick with words, and they used to play a game. All these names, they were just because of the personality. Before the band was even formed I was called Gavin Friday. Most of us reject our names when we first get given them, like when Guggi got his name off Bono he didn’t like it at all. But we have a feeling that we have to accept our names whether we like them or not.
“And I remember once, Bono was going through some way out trip in his head, wanted to be cool, and he kept on calling himself Paul Vox, and we said, Don’t be stupid, Bono’s a really good name – Bono Vox. And eventually what’s natural you just have to accept”.
