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.

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Gavin Friday’s lifelong friend Guggi 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.

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Live interview promoting the re-release of Virgin Prunes albums on Mute records

An excerpt from a September 2002 Sunday Times’ Culture Section interview with Gavin, Gavin and Bono – promoting Guggi’s art exhibition in the Solomon Galleries in Dublin:
“To a large extent, all three of us are reactions to our fathers” says Gavin. “Bono has always spoken highly of his father, but he had the easiest time of the three of us when it came to fathers. In Guggi’s case, you don’t have to be Freud to see that the man with probably the longest hair in Dublin, who paints bowls, just might be a reaction to the father who inflicted the bowl haircut on him as a child. His upbringing and his partner, Sibylle have been his biggest influences.”
“The most important thing about his painting is its religious quality, which can be traced back to his upbringing” says Bono. “There’s a religious intensity to it, a monastic quietness, even in the canvases that look the least religious: a bowl is never just a bowl with Guggi-it’s the most intense bowl you’ll ever see.”
Gavin regards Guggi’s bowls as the equivalent of pop singles and can see him moving into more abstract work. “The bowls are immediate, they’re easily digested. Guggi has done the pop thing: the concepts album awaits.”
Guggi is not so sure. “Bowls are my language,” he says. They are no more important to me than they are to anybody else. They’re just shapes. But I’ve no plans to move out of bowls. I’d change tomorrow if I felt I should. But I see endless possibilities for the bowl.”

Gavin Friday, Maurice Seezer, Dave-id, Guggi, Bono and Andrea Corr and a full ensemble have been working with producer Hal Willner in a Dublin studio this past week. The impromptu ensemble came together to record songs for a tribute album of ‘chantey and seamen’s work songs’.

By Peter Murphy

Back in their terrifying heyday, they threw pigs’ heads around on stage, covered themselves in muck, provided Marilyn Manson with a career and wrote ‘Community Games’ for Aidan Walsh. Having escaped the clutches of a sinister born-again Christian turned transvestite, they’re now making movies with Neil Jordan, dining with Damien Hirst and consorting with Tony Blair. All in all, it’s been a long, strange trip for The Virgin Prunes

Pigs. Swine. Muic. Stuck like a pig. Bleed like a pig. Squeal like a pig. Pighead. Piggyback. Piggytails. Pig’s puddens. Pigswill. Pigshit. Pigpen. Pigsty. Piggy in the middle. Pig’s feet and hairy buttermilk. Piggy from Lord Of The Flies. Pig and Runt from Disco Pigs. Frank The Pig says hello. Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig. Trent Reznor singing, ‘Hey piggy-pig’ on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, recorded in a house whose walls the Manson acolytes daubed with blood. ‘Piggies’ from The White Album. Muic the winged pig, the last creature you see before vanishing into Dublin airport. The Pig Children, the first people you speak to on a Wednesday evening in London at the end of Septicember.

Welcome to Pigville.

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Gavin and Guggi are set to appear at a Virgin Prunes matinee in Brussels on October 30.
Organised by the Ancienne Belgique venue, the evening consists of the screening of unique Virgin Prunes footage, a live interview with Gavin and Guggi by Dutch DJ Lux Janssen (who will also play his favourite Virgin Prunes tracks) and two performances by the band Dez Mona. The evening ends with a DJ set by Gavin and Guggi.
More info at Virginprunes.com.