Pat McCabe and Gavin Friday will both be on the Marian Finucane Show on RTE’s radio 1 on Saturday morning, July 21st between 11 and 12 GMT.
Listen to the interview.
Topic: pat mccabe
Messrs McCabe and Friday on Finucane show
Friday and Macken compose Dreamland for McCabe play
Gavin Friday and Herbie Macken have composed the music for the new Patrick McCabe play entitled ‘The Revenant’. The play’s main theme is entitled ‘Dreamland’.
‘The Revenant’ is set to open for the first time as part of the Galway Arts Festival on July 16th, 2007.
This will be the first public airing of an original Friday/Macken composition.
We expect to hear much more from Friday and Macken in the near future as they have been writing together prolificly over the last few months.
McCabe: ‘He instinctively understood the character.’
Peter Murphy talks to author Pat McCabe in Hot Press magazine and asks: ‘How was it revisiting Breakfast On Pluto ten years after?’
“Like anything we’ve ever done, Neil does most of the architecture, he’s made so many movies, he knows instinctively what you shoot and what will work. I wouldn’t change a word of the book, it’s completely and utterly done, not a word I could add or take away that would improve it, and I know that for a fact ‘cos I spent so long on it. But that’s not true of a movie script, you’re always adding to it right up to the end, actors and designers bring so much to it. Gavin Friday for example, the invention of Billy Hatchet, that’s him, he came up with all that. It’s almost 30% of the movie. I spoke to him a little bit about it, but he instinctively understood the character.”
Breakfast on Pluto soundtrack details
Neil Jordan on the music used in Breakfast on Pluto – the movie based on Pat McCabe’s book:
‘In a way, Patrick saw the whole world through songs, didn’t he?’ says Neil Jordan, who chose the soundtrack selections. ‘He kind of believed in the naïve sugary hopefulness of the lyrics of pop songs. So I decided that the whole burden of the soundtrack would be carried by songs from the era.’
The title phrase, Breakfast on Pluto, comes from a ’70s song by Don Partridge, a one-man-band folkie who still goes by the name of ‘King of the London Buskers.’ The flamboyant music scene of the day is reflected not only in song selections: for example, smooth rock crooner Bryan Ferry is cast as a sinister Mercedes-driving assailant; the bar band “Billy Rock and the Mohawks” synthesizes various strains of entertainingly wretched pop, and Billy is played by onetime punk hero Gavin Friday. Even the mascara and elephant-bell flares that Patrick sports as a young teen conjure up Marc Bolan and early Bowie.
The film has no conventional score. Jordan says: ‘Sometimes it seems that scores drown out the emotion in films these days.’
Songs used in the film include:
Sugar Baby Love – The Rubettes
You’re Such a Good Looking Woman – Joe Dolan
Breakfast on Pluto – Don Partridge
Me & My Arrow – Harry Nilsson
You’re Breaking My Heart – Harry Nilsson
Running Bear – Gavin Friday (production)
Wig Wam Bam – Gavin Friday (production)
Honey – Bobby Goldsboro
Sand – Gavin Friday (production)
Me & Mrs Jones – Billy Paul
Fuck the British Army – Paddy’s Irish Clan
Everyday – Slade
The Moonbeam Song – Harry Nilsson
Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep – Middle of the Road
The Wombling Song – The Wombles
Freelance Fiend – Leafhound
Tell Me What you Want – Jimmy Ruffin
Feelings – Morris Albert
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes – Billy Livesey
Windmills of your Mind – Dusty Springfield
Caravan – Santo and Johnny
Children of the Revolution – T-Rex
No More White Horses – T2
For The Good Times – Kris Kristofferson
Dream World – Don Downing
For What It’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing – Jerry Vale
Makes You Blind – The Glitter Band
Rock Your Baby – George McCrae
In the Rain – The Dramatics
Madame George – Van Morrison
Cypress Avenue – Van Morrison
Fly Robin Fly – Silver Convention
How Much is That Doggy – Patti Page
Emerald Germs of Ireland repeated
The radio plays Emerald Germs of Ireland by Pat McCabe, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer are going to be repeated on RTE radio 1 at 7pm on Thursday starting 7th Sept, 2000.
Emerald Germs of Ireland
Nine radio plays adapted from the Patrick McCabe book of the same name were aired on Ireland’s RTE radio 1 in July 2000. The music was devised and arranged by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer.
- The Turfman From Ardee
- Whisky On A Sunday
- Old Flames
- South Of The Border
- The Garden Where The Praties Grow
- Love Story
- Stop! Hey, what’s That Sound?
- Three Lovely Lassies From Bannion
- 21 Years
The plays featured a high profile cast including Niall Toibin, Pauline McLynn, Pauline Flanagan, Pat Kinevane, Joan O’Hara, Mick Lally, Mikel Murfi and Gina Moxley. They are based on the life and times of Pat McNab, who lives with his mother on the house on the hill outside Gullystown and within a striking distance of Tommy Sullivan’s Select Bar.
Each story has a title of a well-known song or ballad ranging from ‘Love Story’ to ‘The Garden Where the Praties Grow’. The first play in the Emerald Germs of Ireland series is ‘The Turfman from Ardee’. It stars Joan O’Hara, Pat Kinevane, Niall Toibin, Séan Rocks, Pat McGrath, Ciaran Owens and Kathy Downes. Don Cockburn returns to read the news and Jimmy Magee and Lorna Madigan also make an appearance.
Emerald Germs update
Gavin and Maurice are currently working on the score for 9 radioplays written by Patrick McCabe. The plays will be aired on RTE radio later this year.
Emerald Germs continued
‘Emerald Germs’, the project with Pat McCabe involving 6 radioplays for which Gavin and Maurice will write the score is set to go ahead next year.
Gavin will be appearing at the Harry Smith night in New York tonight and tomorrow. More information at the Harry Smith archives.
AIDS Candlelight Memorial Service ’99
Gavin and Maurice will perform Freddie Mercury’s ‘These are the days of our lives’ at the AIDS Candlelight Memorial Service in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday 23rd May.
Gavin will be the first celebrity for RTE radio’s new classic FM station ‘Lyric FM’. Each week a celebrity rings and answering machine (pretending it’s a friend) and tells them about 3 cultural things that they should go see or do.
On Thursday 22nd April, Gavin and Maurice will be interviewed in Galway by Pat McCabe for the Galway Arts Centre (Cuirt International Festival of Literature)
Emerald Germs radio plays
Gavin, Maurice and writer Pat McCabe are collaborating on a collection of surreal Irish tales: a series of McCabe’s stories set to music. McCabe in a recent Hot Press interview:
“It’s called Emerald Germs. The boys are doing the music for it, and we’re hopefully gonna do it with RTE radio, and maybe a CD after that. It’s a collection of 15 stories named after songs, some of them Irish ballads, others ones I’ve made up. There’s a James Bond spoof in it called ‘Don’t Say Whenever, Whenever’; a kind of blaxploitation thing called ‘Wakka Wakka’; and ‘Voodoo One’, which is set in Haiti by way of a tiny Irish village. There’s also one called ‘Island Of Dreams’ about this guy whose mammy turns up, except she comes out of the wardrobe in a Haitian mask, drums, all this.” Another story is a Taxi Driver spoof entitled ‘Tractor Driver’.
