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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Maria McKee is an American singer and songwriter. She is best known for her work with Lone Justice and her 1990 UK solo chart-topping hit, “Show Me Heaven”.

In the 90s, Maria moved to Dublin where she befriended Gavin Friday. He guested during a live performance of hers in Dublin in ’88, performing Sweet Jane. She later returned the favour during one of Gavin’s early 90s USA tours, singing Esther and Ari Ofarim’s Cinderella Rockefella which they’ve since performed on various occasions, including shows in aid of the Dublin Aids Alliance. Another song they have performed multiple times is Kurt Weill’s Ballad of Immoral Earnings.

Maria McKee sings on Gavin’s song “Falling Off The Edge Of The World” on the Adam n Eve album.

In 2009, Maria performed alongside Gavin at his 50th birthday show at Carnegie Hall.

Listen to Gavin and Maria singing Ballad of Immoral Earnings on the Gerry Ryan unplugged show.

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Single sleeve

Irish Radio DJ Tom Dunne has been playing Gavin Friday’s duet with Maria McKee ‘Falling off the Edge of the World’ (lyrics) on his radio show for this ‘vinyl only’ month. The song proves to be popular with the listeners as many are texting and tweeting Tom to ask where they can get a copy of the song.

‘Falling off the Edge of the World’ is on Gavin Friday’s album Adam ‘n’ Eve and was released by Island Records as a 7″ single, 12″ and CD single in 1992. The album and singles are unfortunately no longer distributed on CD and have never been available for download. However, there are some copies of the album available on Amazon.co.uk.

You could also try a search for the album or singles on eBay, or on the vinyl and CD rarities site Gemm.com.

Search eBay.co.uk for Falling off the edge of the world
Search eBay.co.uk for Adam ‘n’ Eve
Search Gemm.com for Gavin Friday

Lyrics for ‘Falling off the Edge of the World’.

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Question: What have Laurie Anderson, Andrea Corr, Courtney Love, Lydia Lunch, Maria McKee, Shane MacGowan and Rufus Wainwright got in common with Larry, Bono, Edge and Adam. Answer: They’re all fans of Gavin Friday and they’re all taking part in a one-of-a-kind show in New York next week, set to raise funds to combat AIDS in the poorest countries.

An Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends, on Sunday October 4th at Carnegie Hall in New York, is curated and produced by Hal Willner, someone with an unrivalled track record in one-off musical events inspired by maverick artists from Leonard Cohen to Kurt Weill, Tim Buckley to Thelonius Monk.

Gavin, of course, has been hanging out with the members of U2 since before they were the members of U2 and is invariably to be found with them in the studio when an album needs to be finished… or out on the road, when a tour is about to kick off. Right now, he’s working on songs for his own next solo album due in 2010. We caught up with him in Dublin to find out more about the Carnegie Hall show:

“Believe it or not, this was not born in my head. I think I was on some kind of TV show, maybe 12 years ago, and I was asked about my musical ambition and I said I’d love to play Carnegie Hall before I’m 50. That was the seed of all this. Then earlier this year a gang of us went away for a day to celebrate the 50th birthday of Guggi and at the party, Bono, who turns 50 himself next May, said to me, ‘Do you know what you’re doing for your fiftieth ?’ I said I didn’t have a clue and that I’ll probably run away to avoid the attention. He said he did know what I was doing, that I was playing Carnegie Hall.”

“A couple of weeks before, Bono had met up with our mutual friend Hal Willner and they’d decided on this event to celebrate my birthday and to raise funds for RED, the organisation which fights AIDS in Africa. And I was so taken aback at the idea that a very rare thing happened – I was completely silenced. I couldn’t believe it. I think everyone found that quite humorous: ‘Look, we’ve actually shut Friday up!’

Hal Willner is the moving force behind the whole thing, he puts these kinds of events together and I’ve often worked with him on them. They’re like creative extravaganzas where a whole gang of musicians come together to pay tribute to someone, like he did this incredible homage to the work of Leonard Cohen, another to Kurt Weill. More recently Bono and I worked with him on ‘Rogue’s Gallery’ an album of pirate ballads and sea chanteys.

There’s always this extraordinary twist that he brings – like his tribute to the music of Walt Disney where he had Tom Waits singing ‘Hi Ho Hi Ho’ and when we did it live, he had me singing the ‘Siamese Cat Song’ from Lady and The Tramp. I remember turning up one day for a Harry Smith tribute to find Jimmy Scott, the jazz singer, at the piano with Mary Margaret O’Hara and Nick Cave. Two days later we were performing it on stage.

We’ve already got an amazing bill lined up for Carnegie Hall, I can hardly believe it. We talked about the kind of people we wanted to take part – those who influenced me over the years and some that I might have influenced. Some are very well known and some I hope will become more well known – like Eric Mingus, an unsung genius and the son of Charlie Mingus. Or Flo and Eddie, who many people don’t realise are the backing vocalists on all those great T Rex songs that people like me remember from being young.

Anthony from Anthony and the Johnsons will be something else and then Maria McKee, what a talent she is, and goes way back with our musical community in Ireland. She’s always been close to us, she lived here in the 1980′s and we often recorded with her. And Courtney Love, Hal bumped into her in New York and she said she’d love to be part of it. Laurie Anderson doesn’t need any introduction and we’ve also got Rufus and Martha Wainwright and, not surprising this, a big Irish contingent with Shane MacGowan, Andrea Corr and of course the Royal Family – Larry, Edge, Bono and Adam.

The thing with those four is that I know them all individually, so they’re all taking part but what’s unusual is that they aren’t going to be U2, so I think we’ll see something pretty different, which is something that always happens with Hal’s events.

Dik, Edge’s brother will be there, who was in U2 before they were U2, and Guggi of course, so I would love Dik and Guggi and myself to do some Virgin Prunes songs – it won’t be the Virgin Prunes reuniting because we don’t do that, but let’s see what happens. When Hal is involved you never know how it’ll work out.

He pulls together this potpourri of musicians for a day or so of rehearsals, which are like this musical workshop, very organic, where you never quite know what you’re going to produce. The spontaneity is what I love about it, it’s precious and so rare these days, when everything is over-rehearsed and over-marketed. The next day you have a soundcheck and before you know it you’re playing live in front of an orchestra and an audience.

I still don’t know what to say about it, I’m 50 not 80 and I’m not an icon but it’ll be a celebration of music and a beautiful thing to do for a friend. Hal for me is a real touchstone of a person, an inspiration and he creates quite unique musical moments, It won’t happen again, this collection of artists won’t be together like this ever again… which I love. It will be an unrepeatable night and I’m planning on enjoying it.”

Source: U2.com

Tickets are available now from Carnegie Hall.

Previously:

• Hal Willner presents: An Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends
• Q&A with Gavin about the event

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