Poster for the “Four Artists Many Wednesdays” exhibition (1987)

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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).

• Last of the quarehawks – an interview with Aidan Walsh

• More Gavin Friday production

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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.”

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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…”

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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.”

Poster at Carnegie Hall

Spin Magazine:
“Courtney Love, a longtime champion of Friday’s music, took the stage to read her description of seeing the Virgin Prunes live for the first time. Characteristically unpredictable and unapologetic, the Grunge goddess praised the band’s “sex, snarl, and raw power.” “When I saw U2 they gave me inspiration… but when I saw the Virgin Prunes they FUCKED. ME. UP.”"

Spinner.com:
“The night began appropriately enough with Friday, a gifted singer in his own right with the Virgin Prunes and several critically-acclaimed solo albums, crooning the beautiful ‘Apologia.’”

IrishCentral.com:
“The delicacy of that duet [ Antony/Gavin - Got What He Wanted ] was instantly obliterated by a jump out of your seats sensational announcement. The Virgin Prunes had reformed to sing “Caucasian Walk,” a sonic wall of rock power that vividly underlines why this band were and are so important to the genesis of U2. This lot rock out like no Irish band ever has or will. The well-heeled audience was astounded, and you could tell that suited this band just fine.”

New York Press:
“Some of the songs were powerful and some painful.That’s what happens when you invite everyone to the party. Some will make a mess, but there were some damn good voices and that so-called backup band sure knew their shit. Maria McKee and Friday gave a heart-rending version of “The Ballad of Immoral Earnings” from The Threepenny Opera. Martha Wainwright’s “You Made Me The Thief of Your Heart” was gorgeous. [...] Bono took his cues from Friday, but both were in fine form as co-hosts.”

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Full 30-minute interview with Gavin by BigThink.com.

Question: What was it like growing up in Ireland?

Gavin Friday: Well I was born nearly 50 years ago, so I was a child of the ’60s basically, which is a real blank. I really started growing up, I think, in the ’70s. I’m a glam-rock kid. But Dublin, Ireland in those days was a very dark place, as in it was a very poor, almost third world. Economically, the whole world is going through a recession at the moment. In the ’60s, ’70s, and the ’80s in Ireland was a real recession. It wasn’t a pleasant place. It was massive unemployment, we had huge political problems with the north and it was dull and gray. So I formed a band and tried to escape it all.

So it’s a great country; a really beautiful, great country, but it’s had its troubles. The last 15 years we had one of the biggest economic booms. We became — overnight, we became almost the wealthiest country in Europe. And last year, the bubble burst. But I think a few bubbles have burst in a few countries. So we are all going through the same things. But let’s say Ireland, in the ’70s and the ’80s was tough, but if you grow up with a tough background it makes you strong.

Question: How has Irish Catholicism influenced you and your work?

Gavin Friday: One of the biggest problems I found with Irish politics and the economic thing was after the war, after World War II, most of the European countries started to develop economically and socially, but whatever way the Catholic church they took a grip and they almost governed the country. I mean, we were almost like a dictatorship. There is good and bad, but we experienced an awful lot of bad, especially from the institutions that taught children the Christian brothers, etcetera. All those stories are all coming out now; not just in Ireland, in Canada, and all over the world. So it was pretty intense. The Catholic church [was] like our Edgar J. Hoover if you know what I mean. They ruled the roost. But it had a huge profound influence on me in that as you get older you realize that you can’t blame everything; that there is good and bad, and things get misdirected. So I would call myself a “black Catholic”. I still have this attraction to it because all religions I’m not a fan of. I’m a fan of sort of belief in spirituality. So I would be into Christ rather than the Catholics

Question: What were your main influences as a child?

Gavin Friday: I was a very shy child. I didn’t like football. I didn’t like the usual stuff that was shoved at. Sports were always down you and the Gaelic language, which I’ve actually disliked as a kid but as I grow up I quite like it. My real name isn’t Gavin. I was given Gavin Friday by my friends. I’m christened Fionan Hanvey, which is Gaelic and there is no actual English translation. I hated it as a kid but as I grew up I sort of went, “Now I like it.”

My main influences – I loved art. I sounds a little pretentious to say I was into art but I liked drawing. I liked music; music was my outlet from day one. I was giving you an image of Ireland being this dull, grey, massive unemployment, not much going on and the future was the dull queue or – and, for me, the window of hope was music and books. So I fell in love with sort of T-Rex and David Bowie very young. They sort of said, “Hey. You don’t have to live in this north side of Dublin that’s all grey and depressed. You can be a spider and go to Mars.” So music and books too. I read avidly as a kid. And that’s the beautiful thing about books and music and even movies, is that you can actually escape. You can go into other worlds.

Question: What was Lypton Village?

Gavin Friday: Lypton Village was an imaginary place really. It was a group of young guys that grew up around the same area. I grew up on a street called Cedar Wood Road and by coincidence my best friends that are around the age 10 became a guy called Bono and another guy called Guggi. And we just — it was music again. The fact that — that pulled us together. I lived at the bottom end of the street and they lived at the top end and I was quite shy as a little kid, but they found me quite interesting because I had the right albums underneath my arm. Those days where you carry the latest Bowie album or Roxie music album as you go to school. I mean you can’t play an album at school but you were being cool just showing, “Look what I got.” And I’m not into Meatloaf; I’m into Bowie. So I attracted their attention and I long hair and earrings when it was quite a risque thing to do in Dublin. We didn’t have the liberation that America and Britain in the ’60s but I did always look to England and America, mainly because of the music that came from there. But we became friends through music and we had real names, Fionan Hanvey and Derek Rowan — what a dreadful name. And Paul Hewson. We gave each other nicknames just the way most kids do, but the nicknames had more to do with how we physically looked or our essence and I had quite square features as a young kid.

Almost like there was this surge, this ad on the TV as surge pipe, called Wavin and it used to go, “Wavin Piping.” And this big square pipe would come. I can be full on at moments, so I was called Wavin for awhile, but I’m a bit softer — I’m a little softer than a surge pipe so they changed that to Gavin. I didn’t chose it, it was Bono and Guggi who gave it to me. And then Friday was added because I have a talent of getting on with most people. So it’s a bit of a man Friday thing. We gave each other these nicknames and then we didn’t — we had similar interests; we were into — it sounds really pretentious at 12, 13 year old kids were like into art and poetry, but we were. We weren’t into football, we were into making music or being into music and painting and stuff like that. And we called this sort of little gang Lypton Village and we made up imaginary games and this is one day we’ll form bands and one day we’ll make movies and one day we’ll do this and one day we’ll do that. But I think a lot of kids do this in their own way, except 25, 30 years later legend happens because some of us have become quite well known.

So the myth becomes magical. So I tend to sort of see it very practical for me. When I go out for a drink, Bono can buy the pints because he has more money than me. We’re the same guys, do you know what I mean

Question: What comes first when you perform: personality or musicianship?

Gavin Friday:That’s a tough one there. I’ve always — I mean, as a performer on stage, I tend to sort of throw myself into the character, whatever I’ve written about, so it depends on how I’m writing or what I’m writing about. A lot of singers don’t really know who they are. They have this massive insecurity and this massive ego and they are sort of pulled between both. I mean, why do you want a lot of people to look at you all the time and listen to you? There is something going on there, there is sort of need to express and attention. It’s not just ego, it’s some sort of complex thing and sometimes you create characters to say something you want to say and then you just throw yourself into that. In the last couple of years, I’ve been acting a lot more. I’ve done one or two movies; I’ve done a lot of work with the Roy Shakespearian Company and that’s been intense, baby I can tell you that.

I love the way an Irish man — they can hardly speak proper English — is doing Shakespeare. So I find that extraordinary as I get older. But I always see music, live shows, performances as moments and to really get there you’ve just got to actually get into the essence, flesh and the blood.

Question: How did you benefit concert at Carnegie Hall come to be?

Gavin Friday: It had nothing really to do with me. I was — I think it’s going back years. I think it was on some TV interview. A lot of people think, “Oh, what’s he at now. He’s doing this…” So what are you going to do next? And I say, “I don’t know.” What do you want to do? I say, “I don’t know. I just want to get better.” Who do you want to ****. “I don’t know.” And **** says, “Well where would you play?” I says, “Look. I’d love to play somewhere classic, somewhere legendary. A place where music was when music was; at Carnegie Hall.” I just said it like that. So it became this sort of — between my friends and different people — oh Gav’s going to play Carnegie Hall or Gav’s going to play Carnegie Hall. Blah, blah, blah. Oh maybe he’ll do Shakespeare in Carnegie Hall and it just became this thing over the years. Like a joke almost. And then my friends, as I was talking about, were all turning 50, slowly or quickly. And Guggi turned 50 in May. A gang of us went to a really nice hotel and had a beautiful weekend and we had a few drinks. My good friend Bono says, “Hey. You know what you’re doing for your 50th?” I said, “Do you know what? I don’t really care. Whatever. I want somewhere with my friends and loved ones and whatever. And he says, “I know what you’re doing for your 50th.” I says, “Really?” He says, “Yeah. You’re going to be working. You’re going to be making a show and you’re going to be working for Red.” When I have a few drinks on me, I can talk but I shut up for the night. So I was a little taken aback and it was sort of out of my control. I went, “What’s this about?” But the guy who is putting the show together, Hal Willner, I’ve worked with since 1988 and he’s a little bit of a genius, well that’s an understatement. He is a genius, in my mind. I’ve done many of his collaborations and shows and he says, “Let’s just see who wants to play with you and let’s throw the dice up in the air and see what comes down. I mean you’ve seen the cast. It’s pretty extraordinary.”

From Joe Grey to Rufus Wainwright to Martha Wainwright to Courtney Love to Maria McKee to Eric Mingus and Lydia Lunch to U2 as you’ve never seen U2 as it’s Bono, it’s Adam, it’s Larry, it’s Edge. To some ex-Virgin Prunes, Guggi and Dick to actresses, the incredible Elizabeth Ashley, Chloe Webb and more and surprise guests. Laurie Anderson and after I leave this interview, I go to rehearse with Antony Hegarty for a few songs. So what I am most excited about is a lot of music today is so over-rehearse, so worked out, so un-spontaneous; these events, we’ve got three days rehearsal and there’s been a lot of preproduction and thought and e-mails and letters and conversations, but you’re getting a group of musicians, almost like a workshop, that love music, that are like pushing it out there and spontaneously doing something. That’s a rare thing in these days. This — I don’t know what’s going to happen and I love that because in these days and age everything is so ordered and anal and music is about spirit and spontaneity. And that’s what we’re going to do on Sunday night.

Question: What do you want to achieve in your next 50 years?

Gavin Friday: Do you think I’m going to live until 100? I’ll have to — maybe Bono can arrange that. That would be interesting. Hey Bono, thank you for my 50th, can you make me live another 50 years? It’s just such a pleasure to be — and an honor. And you know what’s so great is that we’re making money for AIDS in Africa. There’s a lot of love and spontaneity, we’re doing something creative. That’s what I love about Red. It’s not just a charity, “Give us money, give us money.” It’s being innovative. Like here’s a show that you won’t see anywhere else and you can come and whatever you pay for your ticket it’s going somewhere. You can go and buy a pair of Armani shades, like Bono, but the money goes to Africa. It’s quite cool. But I’m actually quite modest. All I want is a nice car. All I want is a drink at midnight on Sunday night and I’ll be a very happy man.

Question: Why do so many successful artists come from Ireland?

Gavin Friday: That’s a tough question. We don’t have a long of natural resources as a country; we have a very beautiful country. Visually, I mean, everyone goes on about it’s green, it’s the mountains and the rivers and it’s clean and it’s not that populated. It is stunningly beautiful, but we’ve no oil. We’ve no coal. We’ve no money. We just have Ireland. But a weird theory I have is we come from a suppressed culture. We’re one of the most invaded countries ever. I think the British started it very early, it could be like 800 that decided to come and show us out; and the Danes in the north. We’ve had a tough time and pretty much a similar culture would be the Jewish culture; they had a pretty hard time. They were being kicked around for a long, long time.

So when that happens, and when people try to take your culture away from you, your essence of your culture becomes stronger. It’s like even in Africa. When you see African-Americans, they’re stronger because of what they’ve gone through. It’s even subliminal; I think it becomes in their genes. But our language was even taken from us. The Irish Gaelic language was outlawed and the religion was outlawed. Hence the religion later being stronger; stronger to a negative point of view. But our venge was — I mean if you listen to Irish language, it’s very complicated but it’s very poetic. To say hello in Ireland is Dia dhuit, which translated means “Sunshine of God on you.” That’s a lot nicer than “Hello”. Do you know what I mean? And goodbye is Go n-éirí an bóthar leat, which means “May the road rise with you,” which is a very well-known phrase. That’s a really nice way to say goodbye.

So there was engrained poetry and then when you look back at our history and in the 20th century, the last century, probably the greatest writers of the 20th century were Irish. You go from Beckett to Joyce to **** to Shaw to Oscar Wilde; you just go “Jesus, what’s going on here?” All these guys and the most famous book in the world could be Ulysses, after the Bible. But that was almost like our revenge on how dare you take our culture from us. So it became our only weapon, was our poetry, our music. And if you listen to Irish music, I think we’ve — they say that kilts came from the middle east. So really I’m an Arab. If you listen to the way they — listen to the way someone like Sinead O’Connor sang. It could be Muslim. You know that angst that sort of seanos. That wail. I think it’s in our genes. I think certain stuff is in our genes, like nobody can dance like a black guy. It’s in their genes. So we don’t have oil, but we have poetry.

Question: How has the Celtic Tiger economy changed Ireland’s art scene?

Gavin Friday: I am not a huge fan of the Celtic Tiger; I was so glad that you could see people being prosperous, that you didn’t see people begging, that the city started looking good, that people had jobs. But it was almost like if you have such a hard time for so long, then you turn around and give a kid a check for a million quid, they’re going to go nuts. And we went a bit nuts, we went up our ass. Suddenly every one started sounding very American which freaked me out. The “Oh my God” syndrome kicked in really quick and I got a freight. The bubble has burst. Time tells; time tells everything. We blew it too quickly, but it wasn’t totally our fault because the big boys that run those banks they messed up America, they’ve been up Europe, they’ve messed up the world. Really it’s the start of the 21st century. We’ve got to re-think things.

Socialism and Communism don’t work, but neither does straightforward capitalism. We’ve got to get a new way of thinking and working. We blew it so there was good and bad about the celtic tiger. But we’re tiny. There’s four million in the country, do you know what I mean? We’re tiny. Four million in a country, how many is in New York? Seven? Ten? But we’re strong, so hopefully we pull through. And you never really know until you get perspective a couple of years away. But I really disliked the fact that our culture is what make us and made us and will make us. And when money came in, we rejected it so quickly. Not even rejected, we didn’t think. We just got lazy and all the girls started getting fat and that’s not good is it

Question: What is alcohol’s role in creativity?

Gavin Friday: Alcohol. I mean, I like a fine wine. Who can beat that? I’m not drinking this week because it messes with my throat. But I can drink for Ireland if I wanted to. I don’t think it helps writing; I think it’s a hinderance. It helps numb you. If you’ve been working your ass — like I tell you, I will be having a few drinks next Sunday after that show is over. So it helps bring you down and chill you out and have a laugh. You’ve got to use alcohol and not let it use you. I come from a country that’s been doomed by alcohol. The Irish could drink; they could drink Europe. And they’d have a good go at America, too. I mean, you guys — your alcohol is like not good, it’s weak.

So I don’t even think any stimulants really help writing. You talk to most guys and they say, “Hey. I wrote this.” And they’re out of their head or they had a few beers or a bottle of whiskey. You wake up the next morning, it’s usually pretty crap. But you know Dylan Thomas wrote some great poetry. Brendan Behan. You never know but ultimately I’d say you have to get up early in the morning and you’re usually sober when you write your good stuff; it’s hard work. So alcohol, keep it for chilling out, fun, and having a good time. Not for work.

Question: Had Ireland’s alcohol problem lessened with the Celtic Tiger economy?

Gavin Friday: Nt. We’ve got wars. Imagine having more money, you could buy more beer. Have you been to Dublin in its heyday like in the boom heyday at like 4:00 in the morning on a Sunday or Saturday? It’s like beyond New Orleans. It’s like St. Patrick’s Day every day. It’s not good. I don’t even like pubs anymore. I like going for a meal and having a bottle of wine. Be more gentle. You can’t go to a pub when you get old; well you can, I suppose, but you know what I mean?

Question: What advice to you have for young people entering into music?

Gavin Friday: I like the way that you said entering into music. There is a terrible thing that’s been happening probably for the last 20 years or so and it’s called the music business. And music isn’t really business; it’s work and you got to pay and you’ve got to buy your guitar or go into the studio. So there is a business side but when people say, “I’m going into the music business,” it’s not. It’s about expression. It’s about creativity. You don’t join music, in my mind, to make money. You join it because it’s in you; it’s in your blood stream. So if you want to be Justin Timberlake, go for it. But if you want to be somebody else, go for it but it’s usually very hard. You just got to believe in yourself, work hard. I’ve no advice, I did everything the right and wrong way. You make it up as you go along, but it has to be in your blood stream and it’s not a job. It’s a way of life.

Question: What keeps you up at night?

Gavin Friday: Alcohol. If I open that bottle, I can stay up and then I love that if you go out and you have a great meal with friends and then you go home with a few friends and you have a late night disco. I mean, you’re not dancing on the table, but you open another few bottles of wine, you’ve great friends, and you’re playing music and talking rubbish. That’s a great thing on a weekend. So that keeps me up late. I tend to — in the last couple of years, because I used to live right in the city center, I’ve moved out to the sort of not the city center: county Dublin, near the coast. So I tend to get up early now. I’m known to get up at 7:00 in the morning. I like swimming because I have a bad back. I have no choice there. I write and I sometimes go to bed at 11:00 and then sometimes I go to bed at 5:00 in the morning. That’s when I go out. But worry, I get anxious but worry doesn’t really do any good. If something is broken or in trouble, you’ve got to bend down, pick it up and fix it. Worry just makes us get wrinkles. So try not worrying.

Question: What is the biggest career mistake you’ve made?

Gavin Friday: A mistake? I have shot myself in the foot so many times, I’m crippled. Look, I am not exactly Mr. Great Career Guy. I shoot actually what I think. In a weird way, I used to think that was really messed up. Now I think it’s okay. Mistakes, once you don’t repeat the same mistakes, have no regrets. Live and learn. We mess up, so what. But know why you messed up and don’t make the same mistake.

Question: Who are your heroes?

Gavin Friday: They’re all dead. I’ve lots of heroes. My mum is a hero. She had to put up with me and my dad. She is one of my heroes. Some of my friends are heroes. There are so many. But heroes usually let you down, don’t they? There is people I admire, people I respect.

Question: If you could choose, who would you have dinner with?

Gavin Friday: Oh, most definitely Mr. Oscar Wilde. I’d say the conversation would be mind-blowing. So Oscar Wilde followed by Groucho Marx. The two of them together and me would be interesting.

Question: Who are you wearing?

Gavin Friday: What am I wearing? I’m wearing a very funky pair of shoes. Shall I show you them? Even the cameraman here beside me commented. Can you see them? Yeah. As I’m getting older, I’m getting funkier. So that’s what I’m wearing. Funky shoes.

Recorded on: October 1, 2009

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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.

by Peter Hanan

Apart from all four members of U2 (who are down to do individual performances on the night), the cast also includes Courtney Love, Antony Hegarty (from Antony and The Johnsons), Scarlett Johansson, Rufus Wainwright, Andrea Corr and Shane MacGowan. Billed as “An Evening With Gavin Friday and guests”, the show will also include “Special Guests” who can’t be named in advance.

It’s a typically extravagant and fantastical Lypton Village gesture.Back in Ballymun, these Villagers would think big and dream bigger. For Gavin Friday, who was banned from RTÉ for an early “art performance” by his band The Virgin Prunes on The Late Late Show , who used to get beaten up by skinheads for wearing dresses and makeup around Dublin and who was regularly bottled off stage for his outré behaviour, headlining Carnegie Hall will be a breeze – and also the fulfilment of a boyhood dream.

Asked in an interview years ago what his musical ambition was, he replied that he’d love to play the fabled venue before he was 50. Earlier this year he and Bono had arranged Guggi’s 50th birthday party (the three are all best friends). During the evening, Bono asked Gavin what he had planned for his upcoming 50th. Friday said he was going to run away and hide from the milestone anniversary, but Bono had already made plans for him: “Gavin, you’re playing Carnegie Hall for your birthday.”

While Friday may be a well-known figure in art/music circles (and he does have a considerable reputation in Europe from his Virgin Prunes days) he wouldn’t have the same commercial traction as any of the other musical guests playing on Sunday. What he represents, though, in an Irish cultural sense, is that musically he was avant-garde before there was a “garde” to be “avant” of in this country.

Initially inspired by Bowie and T.Rex, it was only when whisperings of a new movement called punk rock reached Dublin in the mid-1970s that Friday found a license to put into practice his absurdist art-shock musical performances. Dadaism and Krautrock were the aesthetic backdrops for The Virgin Prunes, a band made up of fellow Lypton Villagers including Guggi, Dave-id Busaras, Strongman, Pod, Mary D’Nellon and Haa-Lacka Binttii. Some critics used to acidly note that their names were better than their songs. Dik Evans (The Edge’s brother) was so impressed by the band’s art-punk sound that he actually left U2 to join them – probably not something he needs reminding of.

THE VIRGIN PRUNES were like nothing this country had witnessed before: they dressed as gothic transvestites, adorned the stage with rotting meat carcasses and would specialise in doing a 20-minute version of The Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” – slowing it right down so it would take one minute to get one line of the lyric out. They came across like a northside of Dublin version of Throbbing Gristle and Devo.

For Friday, The Prunes were a reaction to the banal cultural wasteland of Dublin in the 1970s. “We were like a Third World country,” he has said. “If you go back to parts of the Eastern bloc of Europe now, that’s what Dublin was like in the ’60s and ’70s. Grey, dull, mass unemployment and complete poverty. Music became a lifeline to escape for kids. Punk gave you a licence to form a band with just an attitude. I turned 16 when punk kicked in and had plenty of attitude.”

If The Prunes came into being in order to épater la bourgeoisie , they soon developed a sizeable cult following. Signed to the coolest independent record label of the time, Rough Trade, they were one of the first punk era Irish bands to build up a fanbase outside this country – with Germany and Scandinavia at the top of the list.

As they toured their avant-garde travelling roadshow around Europe – shocking and surprising at most every turn (they were banned from many a venue for various sexual and scatological stunts) – the other, and at the time lesser known Lypton Village band, U2, were perfecting a very different music and type of performance as they warmed up for global superstardom. The links between the two bands are indivisible – both bands started playing together in Dublin’s Dandelion Market under the banner “U2 Can Be A Virgin Prune”; both bands had a member of the Evans family in their ranks (The Edge and Dik) and Guggi’s younger brother, Peter Rowan, is the child featured on the cover of the U2 albums Boy and War. Despite The Prunes having the early upper hand on U2, there has never been any rivalry between them. To this day, both bands see themselves as different sides of the same Lypton Village coin.

The Prunes stuttered to a halt in the mid-1980’s and Friday has been a freelance bohemian ever since. He’s had an exhibition of his paintings, I Didn’t Come Up The Liffey In A Bubble , in Dublin’s Hendricks Gallery; curated a series of cabaret nights called Blue Jaysus at the National Stadium and, alongside Jim Sheridan and Bono, he opened the short-lived Mr Pussy’s Café De Lux in Suffolk Street.

AS A SO LO ARTIST he has released three albums – Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, Adam ‘n’ Eve and Shag Tobacco – frequent collaborators including Maurice Seezer and the novelist Patrick McCabe. With Bono, he worked on the soundtrack for the Jim Sheridan film In The Name Of The Father , starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Acting wise, he turned in a very creditable performance as the glam rock singer Billy Hatchet in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto . He has narrated a version of Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf and toured with the Royal Shakespeare Company for a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He was last seen on a Dublin stage two years ago with his “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” show which was a personal tribute show about his lifelong passion for German music, art, literature and film.

As a sideline he has also been an “aesthetic midwife” on every U2 tour since The Joshua Tree . He gave Bono his “MacPhisto” character for the Zoo TV tour and says of his tour consultant role: “I look at all the things that they can’t see because they’re on stage. I’m their eyes and ears in the audience, noting down this, noting down that to improve the performance. I understand the four of them very well because I’ve known them for 30 years or more. We speak the same language and I don’t blow smoke up their ass.” He’s leaving the new U2 tour behind shortly to get back to Dublin to begin work on a new studio album – and there are also further art, theatre and literary projects in the pipeline.

This punk renaissance man now lives in Killiney, is an avid swimmer and is only seen these days on his regular Friday night city-centre drinking sessions with Bono and Guggi. The mainstream was never his friend; he is happiest on the artistic margins and along the way he has become a bit of a pop culture polymath.

It has been suggested that with his background in and knowledge of both the French chanson and the German lieder tradition, he would be an ideal, if eccentric, Irish choice for the next Eurovision Song Contest. We’ve had a turkey (in fact, quite a few turkeys) over the last few years – maybe it’s time for a Virgin Prune.

Back in the Lypton Village days, Bono and Guggi awarded him the title of “Being in charge of being in charge”. This Sunday night at the Carnegie Hall he will be just that.

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“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.

To learn more about Guggi’s work:

• Listen to an interview on RTE’s The Arts Show
• Watch Guggi on the Late Late Show (Near the end of the stream) (April 3, 2009)

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Get your own – Open publication

The Virgin Prunes
By Phil Udell on Tuesday, 21 July 2009

From coming up from the same inner city Dublin streets as U2 to defecating on plates, urinating in wine glasses, getting bottled off stage supporting The Clash and generally getting right up the noses of 1980s’ Ireland – of all the bands to come out of this country in the past 30 years, few have been shrouded in such myth as The Virgin Prunes. Much of it may have built up outside of their control but, as Gavin Friday would be the first to admit, they were also responsible for much of the whirlwind themselves, acknowledging that the band never made it easy for either themselves or their audience.

“The second gig we ever did was just me and Guggi,” he recalls, “with U2 as our band, when they were The Hype. I worked in a slaughterhouse and I got a load of white coats and mesh which we used to cover them up. We did a 20-minute version of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, slowed right down so that it would take a minute and a half to get one sentence out. It was totally provocative. After that gig, Dik Evans, who was Edge’s older brother, left The Hype and came to work with us.”

No matter how inauspicious it might sound, that gig led to a third live outing for the Prunes and a slightly more high profile one at that – supporting The Clash at The Top Hat in Dun Laoghaire in October 1978. For Friday, it was a memorable night. “We came on: Guggi was wearing a tiny skirt and I had a plastic suit made out of raincoats, no jocks underneath, and a pair of Docs. We’d only played two little gigs before that. Steve Averill from The Radiators From Space played synthesizer with us. The crowd just went apeshit. They thought Guggi was a chick.”

“The adrenaline of all these people pogoing kicked in and I started jumping around, the next thing this plastic suit that my ma had made me split completely. I was standing there totally bollock naked, except for a pair of Doc Martins. I turned around and Guggi’s skirt had come off and you could see that he was a bloke. All hell broke loose, there were bottles flying, they were setting the curtains on fire. We were reefed off the stage by The Clash’s tour manager and fucked out the door. We had no money and had to walk with all our gear, back from Dun Laoghaire to Ballymun.”

Such was the world of The Virgin Prunes, a world where art and chaos collided, a world where you would do anything to break the boredom of living in mid-‘70s Ireland. “We were like a Third World country”, Friday remembers. “If you go back to parts of the Eastern bloc of Europe now, that’s what Dublin was like in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Grey, dull, mass unemployment and complete poverty. Music became a lifeline to escape for kids. Punk gave you a licence to form a band with just an attitude. I turned 16 when punk kicked in and had plenty of attitude.”

There was a fair bit of attitude kicking around Ballymun in those days, as a group of teenage friends formed their own strange society (Lypton Village) and gave each other nicknames – Guggi, Gavin Friday, Bono, The Edge. These guys were a band before they’d even picked up an instrument. “The name Virgin Prunes had been hanging around for a while”, says Gavin, “since the early ‘70s. You’d see odd people walking around and we’d call them prunes. Virgin prunes were quite innocent. We always said if we ever had a band, we’d be called that. The name was there. I was a big, big music fan. Guggi was more a visuals person. When punk happened, it was a godsend. It was like we were two bands just waiting to pick up an instrument. We weren’t really into football, we lived in a wasteland, the only release was music.”

That release would lead to the formation of not one but two bands, as has been well documented. Were the Prunes and U2 two sides of the same coin? Friday takes a sip of tea. “U2 formed at the same time but there were no similarities whatsoever,” he muses. “There was a link between the two and still is but because they’ve become so successful, the myth has got bigger. There’s nothing weird about a group of mates hanging out together, forming bands, having ideas. It’s when all the ideas become reality, that’s when the myth gets bigger.”

So the story that they made some sort of commercial vs artistic pact isn’t true? He laughs. “We didn’t have a fucking clue. It’s down to what people are. Bono’s far more diplomatic, I was far more angry and using music as a way to get through that anger, getting rid of it.” Plan or no plan, it can’t be denied that The Virgin Prunes were as artistic as they were musical. “Guggi painted, I painted; one of the few things I was good at was art. We were always called pretentious pricks simply because we were into the avant garde. I remember when we were 16, it used to be a big deal to come into town and hang out at McDonald’s. One day we walked in and saw the performance artist Nigel Wolf naked with paint all over him and a huge stream coming off his mickey pulling these rocks. We were going, ‘What the fuck was that?’”

Perhaps unexpectedly, The Prunes did start to attract record company interest, although more predictably, they weren’t prepared to play ball. “Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis said it was time we made an album but we said no,” grins Gavin. “He said it was time we worked with a producer, we said no. We told him that we wanted to do a 7”, 10”, 12”, cassette, do a gig, release a film and publish a book (the ‘New Form Of Beauty’ project). This was in 1981 and we had no money. We almost did it. We have the film but it was never released and the book never happened, but we did it. We released something on the first of each month: it was quite a strategy.”

Surprisingly, Rough Trade weren’t put off and still The Virgin Prunes continued to lead them a merry dance. “They gave us £10,000 for an overall budget for the album – producers, studio, everything. We went out and spent £6,000 on photographs and they went fucking insane. We were saying, ‘But it’s really important’. There was a certain amount of shooting ourselves in the foot going on.”

How did the band get on with their Dublin contemporaries? “Not particularly well,” admits Friday. “We were very arrogant. I was, certainly. There was that cockiness you have when you’re 17 or 18. A lot of bands were just playing jazzed up r’n’b. Everyone talks about The Boomtown Rats: they were a great pop band but they were never fucking punk. The Atrix were, Stiff Little Fingers were, The Radiators were. The Virgin Prunes were fucking punk. We were arty, we were visual, we were avant garde, but when it came down to it, we were punk. U2 were a new wave rock band. We were there from the start. We never would play and never did play The Baggot Inn ’cos it was for old hippies. That element of arrogance was allowed.”

Somehow, though, this bunch of cross dressing, make-up wearing punks found themselves appearing on The Late Late Show, the epicentre of traditional Irish values at the time. How the hell, we wonder, did that happen? “They asked us on”, says Friday simply. “We were never afraid of publicity but I think we were set up in a naive way. Gay Byrne knew what he was doing, I mean it was the same weekend that the Pope was in town. We were banned from RTÉ after that, although it didn’t help that we were robbing costumes from the dressing room. When we went in to sound-check in the afternoon, we didn’t wear the make-up, I didn’t scream. I just read the Oscar Wilde poem and that was it, we didn’t even bring the chicks in. Then when we came back that night, we went hell for leather. They weren’t expecting it but we were definitely set up. Gay Byrne had a massive response on his radio show and we had massive queues at our next show. The song basically said ‘why should I be like you, be yourself’. That was our whole stance.”

A huge element of their visual style was the cross dressing element, guaranteed to cause a stir in early ’80s Ireland. Gavin laughs. “It was fun. When people say The Virgin Prunes wore dresses, it was never like Boy George wore dresses. I remember going to the Blitz Club in London in 1981, where the whole Steve Strange /Boy George movement was kicking off, and they wouldn’t let us in. We looked more like Rasputin: you weren’t sure if we were going to kiss you or kill you. It wasn’t like we were trying to look like girls.” Or indeed, lock you in a room full of faeces?

“We did some extraordinary shows in Dublin, they were more like art exhibitions. We set up a big dining table and each one of us did a shit on a plate and pissed in a glass, then we left it there and turned up the heat. The smell would kill the audience then we walked in: then we locked them in. There were pieces about abortion, one saying all women were pigs, stuff just to provoke people. We were called anti-feminist so we did that to wind them up. It was childish and it wasn’t thought out but we wanted to provoke a reaction.”

Despite their image, the hassle, the music industry, despite everything the Virgin Prunes enjoyed a level of success with their If I Die, I Die debut and soon found themselves caught up in the traditional method of promoting a band at that time – constant touring. It wasn’t a good move.

“It basically killed the band. Without even knowing it, we became this machine. We started getting freaked when we would play gigs and you’d see all these Gavin and Guggi clones in the front. That was happening everywhere. There was nothing solid in the band. My brain was jumping around, Guggi was into the visuals, Dik was quite avant garde. The rhythm section wanted to be in a straight rock ‘n’ roll band and Davey was from Mars. Things like girlfriends started to become an issue. People got people pregnant. We were drinking too much, there was too much shit going on. It just imploded.” The end was nigh. Guggi and Dik Evans were the first to go and although Friday would keep it going long enough to release a second album, The Moon Looked Down And Laughed, by this point he too had had enough. By 1986, The Virgin Prunes were no more. Regrets? Not for Gavin Friday.

“It always had to be a short lived thing,” he admits. “There was a total purity there, which often was construed as arrogance. We were always shooting from the hip, blindfolded to reality, just going for it. I love that. I think we were one of the purest bands ever to come out of this country.”

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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”.

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