Paul McGuinness

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I’ve known Gavin and his band the Virgin Prunes for as long as I’ve known U2 and for quite a while in the early days the Virgin Prunes were the obligatory opening act for U2, so I saw them many times. Perhaps more often than I liked. And on one occasion… the Virgin Prunes had some extreme theories: Dada, Theatre of Cruelty, things like that, which didn’t always mix with the… the rock and roll. But on one occasion I do remember after the performance, excellent performance, given by the Virgin Prunes, Bono arrived in time for the U2 gig and he said to me: Why are the audience in such a bad mood? And I said: Well, Bono, it might have something to do with the fact that your friend Gavin has just been throwing pigs entrails over them. They were a very unusual band and one of their earliest fans was Ms Courtney Love…

Courtney Love

Hi. I’ve never actually even been inside Carnegie Hall. I wasn’t asked to do this show, I demanded to do this show.

I didn’t expect the task of introducing one of the most important precious figures and bands and siren call that framed my rock and roll life for better or for worse. Nor do I have any idea of who I am speaking to, so I will just simply speak my truth about Virgin Prunes and about Gavin Friday.

Courtney Love - by Wout-er

I was a pudgy 15-year-old from San Francisco who thought randomly and maybe… I just, I don’t know to just go to Ireland and blag my way into Trinity College and become a theologian, seriously, and I would maybe get to meet that guy with the angelic voice that sung I will follow. Why I picked Ireland? I don’t know, accident or intelligent design… random, I don’t know, but it was one of my life’s great experiences. I saw the band with the singer with the angelic voice and the guitar player who I just knew from the I will follow riff was beyond words in their return of their station wagon tour of the States to do their show at Punchestown.

It was excellent, however a few nights later at a pub called McGonagles I had my ass truly handed to me. They were magnificent. Can I curse? Anyway, un- ff-ing genius they were, they would obviously take over the world. Swagger, charisma, shamanism, fury. I had never seen and have rarely ever seen since so much sex, snarl, poetry, evil, restraint, grace, filth, raw power and the very essence of rock and roll which was [ ? ] that night by the Virgin Prunes. The storm that raged on that stage astonished me. At that time their reputation was on a par with my own – minus the stuff that we should all just forget.

I loathe, I seriously hate this concept that rock musicians are somehow vulgar and stupid, idiots and that we’ve never read a book – and some of us haven’t – that we haven’t read Middlemarch or that we don’t know that Shakespeare’s last play was [ ? ]. The Virgin Prunes are geniuses. Lucifer; arch and cunning to U2’s Gabriel; angelic and gorgeous, I can honestly stand here and truthfully say U2 gave me lashes of love and inspiration and a few nights later the Virgin Prunes fucked. Me. Up.

So for the first time in 20 years from the council estate of Ballymun to the most prestigious venue in the world where one brings ones diamonds, I am so proud to present for the first time in many years per incendia ut astrum – which means through the fire to the stars: The Virgin Prunes.

After Courtney’s introduction, the original members of the band: Gavin, Guggi, Dik were joined by J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus) to perform two classic Prunes songs: “Sweethomeunderwhiteclouds” and “Caucasian Walk”. Later during the show, Courtney and Gavin sang Magazine’s “The Light Pours Out Of Me” together.

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.

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.”

Virginprunes.com: Mute Records has struck me as the ideal home for the Virgin Prunes’ back catalogue for many years. In fact, in 1986 I heard through the grapevine that they had been interested in releasing The Moon Looked Down And Laughed, though this never came to fruition – is this true?
Gavin: Mute are the perfect resting place for Virgin Prunes. In 1986 as far as I can remember there was interest from Beggars Banquet, but they only wanted to release an EP. I rejected the idea and foolishly went with New Rose.

How did the 2004 re-releases come about? For example, who contacted who, when did contact begin, what were the stages of the process from initial contact to final versions of the CDs in your hands?
It was about four years ago I discovered that the band had very slowly over the years got back the masters of most of our recordings. I contacted Daniel Miller at Mute Records, who said he was very interested, but Mute was far too busy at that time. About a year later Daniel contacted me saying he wanted to go ahead with the re-release of the back catalog, so roughly over the last three years.
Why so long? Many reasons. Mute went to EMI [via acquisition] which held things up at bit. Then legal affairs, missing artwork, re-mastering and digital restoration took a long while. Then my illness [Gavin underwent back surgery in February 2002] and my own work held things up. So, it took about three to four years.

Did you experience any major problems or delays while bringing everything together?
The case of missing artwork and tapes that I was told we had, but then could not be found??? The most distressing thing was that ALL THE ORIGINAL ARTWORK FROM ALL THE SLEEVES HAS GONE MISSING, along with many many pictures, not to mention some multi-tracks. I am still searching. Who mislaid them? Somewhere between Mary, Strongman and New Rose? I tried so hard, it held up things for close to a year. I finally decided to go to my own ’small’ stash of VP images and work from them.
Tape transfer was complex. A lot of the tapes had to be ‘baked’. Don’t want to go all serious on ya, you would be better off asking an engineer. In short, the getting together of this took a lot of time – it was at times like shitting a football. But then all good things take time… isn’t that right?

What is the expected audience for the An Exhibition promotional compilation – is it for the press, or will it also be released for fans to buy? Who chose the tracks and how were the choices made?
Press/promo at the moment. Yes, I understand it will be ‘available’ to fans and not at £250. We decided on two tracks off each album. I couldn’t choose, so Olivier, Our Blessed Curator, did the deed.

Mute is calling these re-releases the first “official” releases on CD. Does this mean that the Rough Trade and New Rose CDs were released without your permission?
Rough Trade released only …If I Die, I Die and it disappeared almost as quickly as it was released. It never was distributed as far as I could see, so a half-hearted effort is not an official release in my mind. New Rose… these re-releases had nothing to do with most of the band except for Mary and Strongman. Once again they almost disappeared as soon as they came out. Were they actually released? No distribution as far as I can tell, a total joke. Then within a month or so New Rose went bankrupt and the back catalog disappeared up the arse of God knows who…? As for the artwork and sound quality on the New Rose effort, don’t get me going… shameful. So yes, I see this as the first ‘official’ re-release of Virgin Prunes.
The most initially striking aspect of these re-releases is the new sleeve designs. Only “… If I Die, I Die” is faithful to the original release and the others have changed quite radically. For some long-term fans it has been disorientating to see “the Pagan Lovesong cover” used for A New Form Of Beauty and “the Baby Turns Blue cover” used for Over The Rainbow. Of course there’s a logic to this – the picture used on A New Form Of Beauty is of Guggi in the Pig Children performance, for example, which is clearly relevant to A New Form Of Beauty – but why redesign in the first place rather than just use the original covers?

All the original A New Form Of Beauty artwork is gone/mislaid/stolen/destroyed – who knows? I have seriously spent the last two years searching. It breaks me heart. I had to resort to a small collection of photos I had kept. My hands were tied – the original drawing by Guggi was badly damaged and sadly, as we say here, ‘fucked’. So where could I go? ‘Pig Children’ was my first thought, which lead on to the Guggi shot a la Pagan Lovesong. The original shot looked too glossy for the feel/sound/vibe of the music, so it was treated.
Why orange??? Maybe it has got something to do with the Catholic in me, I don’t know. It just felt right and we did tend to over-do the Blue vibe. Believe me, I am a purist at heart… The inner shot was taken at Futurama 1981, the only time we ever performed Beast (well, what we were allowed to, as they pulled the plugs after five minutes, etc.) So that shot was in context. Also, I wanted all the sleeves to have their own unique look.

Pagan Lovesong ended up on the …If I Die, I Die CD, so I felt the picture of Guggi was too strong to be completely lost. The only other option was a plain white cover – we tried that and it felt all wrong. I am talking weeks of trying out covers – I broke Slim [the sleeve designer] Smith’s heart. What we ended up with is GREAT in my mind and so far it has blown a few minds. Sorry if it offends…
We never felt the 12″ ANFOB sleeve which was used by Strongman and Mary for the New Rose CD looked right, it just didn’t transfer down to CD size very well. That’s not to mention the unbearable quality of the transfer from 12″ cover to CD cover that New Rose did. Jesus, talk about bad artwork… Anyway, this the first time the complete musical side of ANFOB has all been released on CD. So it is ANFOB. The typeface was hand done, and rather beautifully I must say, by Slim Smith

For …If I Die, I Die, once again the original went missing, this was the closest image I could find. The blue border may have worked on the original, but we decided it was stronger without the border on CD format. I tried to re-create the Brown/Blue vibe within the booklet using many never before used photos. Slim did a wonderful job on the booklet. Thanks man!

On Heresie, the photo of me and the photo of Guggi walking up the stairs, these photos we had originally planned to use on the cover, but the French label L’Invitation au Suicide went with the still from a Gothic 20’s movie. We never liked it and when it came about to re-use it – even way back when it was released on vinyl in the late 80’s by New Rose – we were not allowed the rights to use the image. We had no ownership of the copyright of the writings in the original boxed set, so we had to re-invent. I used photos in the booklet that tried to capture the mood/intensity of the music and the image of the Kettle Woman [in the centrefold of the CD insert booklet] sits perfectly along side the vibe of Deirdre and Memory Lane. Most are photos never before used.

As for The Moon Looked Down And Laughed, this was ALWAYS from day one the cover for the album, originally to be called Sons Find Devils. When Guggi left, followed by Dik, chaos and confusion followed. We had such legal and money problems way back then. A nightmare… The album was released in 1986. My spirit was broken… We did a photo shoot with four remaining members – The Butlins Session, I now call it – a mistake, but I wanted the album released and the struggle to finish it was murderous. The end was nigh!!! As with some of the mixes and the running order, I tried to make the visuals into what the original line up had originally planned. Now, tell me what cover suits the music better? The Butlins shot or the G&G lace shot?

The Over The Rainbow art work for the vinyl version was a shot used from the original Moon/Devils sessions. As I made the choice to go back to the G&G lace picture for the Moon re-issue, it meant we could not use the original image – they are way too similar. I also took into context that this is a very different album to the Original Album. It has never-before-released-on-CD remixes etc. Also, it’s a double CD. A lot of the recordings on Over The Rainbow were recorded in the Beautifull House and that’s where the front cover photo was taken. Yeah, it was the cover of Baby Turns Blue, but it’s a great shot and I didn’t want it lost forever, I wanted people to see it. We tried the ‘Girl with Rabbits’ image on the front [from the Twenty Tens EP] but it didn’t feel right alongside the other four CDs. In the booklet I used images that are natural and unstaged and unused. There ya go…
Sorry if any offence has been taken, but to quote the band… ‘Nothing is ever the way they say it is… Nothing is ever the way you want it to be…’

In this second part of the interview, Gavin explains more about the process of remastering the recordings and takes us through some of the other changes in the format of the material.

Virginprunes.com: For Virgin Prunes completists, one of the most exciting things about the new CDs is the appearance of the previously unreleased track Fádo. It seems to be similar to the track Apologia that you recorded for RTE’s Dave Fanning show in February 1982. Why was this originally not on the album and why have you chosen to include it now?
Gavin: Yes you are right, it is similar to the track ‘Apologia’ from the Fanning session. We planned to record it fully but never completed the words. It was performed only once at The One Show, Project Arts Centre, with the line ‘Heaven holds a place for you’ repeated numerous times. In the studio we even tried to get Dave-id to sing over it but all he came up with was ‘A long time ago…’. We mixed the track in a ‘dub-like’ manner and put it out as the B-side to Baby Turns Blue. When I was working on the restoration of the tapes, I found this mix. I thought it was beautifull [sic] and renamed it Fádo, which means ‘a long time ago’ in Irish. To me, it bookends the start of the Blue side and the album ends with Yeo.
Apologia as mentioned above has nothing at all to do with the Friday-Seezer song of the same title… Blame Oscar Wilde!

The sound quality is excellent, which I presume is down in part to the re-mastering and in part to more modern compression techniques. Sometimes older recordings sound disappointing on CD when played alongside newer material, but this all sounds great. For example, even allowing for the poor quality of the original cassettes, Din Glorious sounds much sharper than expected. How much work was put into polishing up the recordings and was this a fairly standard process with today’s technology or did you have to employ any special techniques?

I spent about six to eight weeks on the restoration and re mastering. Most of the tapes were damaged; seemingly a lot of 1980’s recordings are so because of a bad batch of multi-track tape. So you gotta ‘Bake’ – as I said, talk with an engineer… I wanted them to sound as fresh as the day we recorded them. Andrew Boland is the man who I put through the mincer to restore and what a great job he did – thanks Andrew. Not sure if he has recovered yet from spending three days working on Din Glorious… The Guys at the Exchange also did a great job at mastering. Brilliant Guys. Also THANKS to Mute, who went the whole hog regards the restoration and mastering. Not many care… they do.

There is some noticeable tape hiss on several tracks. Was there a conscious decision to leave this in place, or was it technically impossible to remove without compromising the clarity of the material?
It drove us fuckin’ crazy. It was technically impossible to remove the hiss. The early recordings were made so quickly and cheaply and in the strangest of ways – you wouldn’t believe if I told you… I had the choice of making them sound big and bold with hiss, or small and dead with a tiny bit of hiss. I went for the former. I was told by a cutting engineer once that if you hear the hiss you are not getting lost in the music. So… what hiss?

Out of interest, where were the original master tapes of the material stored – is it somewhere as basic as the top shelf of your wardrobe, or are there specialised storage facilities for this kind of thing? Did you have any difficulties locating any of the tapes?
Most are stored in Dublin, some with Mute. They are in a safe place. Some multi-tracks I am still trying to locate, along with the missing artwork. Yes, there was difficulties in getting them all together.

In Rolf Vasellari’s book The Faculties Of A Broken Heart, Dik explains that the band was unhappy with Colin Newman’s production of the tracks on the “blue” side of the original vinyl album version of …If I Die, I Die. Why choose him, of all people, to remix Baby Turns Blue if you hadn’t been happy with his original work for you?
Yes, at the time we were unhappy with some of the Blue side, especially Walls of Jericho and Caucasian Walk. We always loved Baby Turns Blue, as we saw it as a pop song. We all loved his production on it. The brown side is magic. It was the band’s aggressive vibe we felt was tamed down. Still, listening to the CD today, it’s pretty vibey. Colin did an amazing job all those years ago. It was no easy task working with the six of us way back then. Theme for Thought sounds amazing. So as regards the re-mix, he did a great job then, so better the devil you know… And the new re-mix is fantastic – simple, very stripped down and addictive. I love it.

On the re-release of … If I Die, I Die the “blue” tracks sound much stronger. Did you make a conscious effort to change the sound of these specific tracks, or was this just a side-effect of the overall sound enhancement process?
I wanted all the music to sound strong. It’s all down to the restoration and mastering. In many ways I feel the work in general was never properly mastered in the first place. To me, making the music sound the way we wanted it was by far my biggest goal with the re-issues.

Who is the “ILOVEYOU” woman in the Heresie CD insert’s centrefold?
Her name is Alice. She worked in the Iveagh Markets. Myself and Tommy the Bottle of Milk [a fellow Lypton Village member] befriended her. We used to buy second-hand clothes off her. We christened her ‘The Kettle Woman’. And yes, the only-performed-once (at The One Shows) ‘A Song for Alice’ was written about her. She is what we call in every sense a true ‘Virgin Prune’.

There was an early version of I Am God played in a 1983 BBC Radio One interview that included Guggi’s vocals rather than Lady Blennerhassett’s, did you consider using this mix or was that always just a demo version of the song?
Don’t know what interview that is, I’d love to hear it??? WOW? Burn us a copy? This was the only mix remaining that I could find. Guggi was no longer with the band when we got to [the] mixing stages. A very difficult DIVORCE album was the Moon…

Why rename “Don’t Look Back” to The Tortured Heart? It sounds slightly different, is this just down to the remastering or is it actually a different version of the song?
It’s a slightly different mix, only very slightly. It was originally called The Tortured Heart and for some stupid reason I changed it to the other. When I found the master tapes, written on the cover of the box was The Tortured Heart. So like the [album] cover, I went back to how we originally wanted it.

Why use the 12″ of Love Lasts Forever on the re-release of The Moon Looked Down And Laughed and put the 7″ single version, originally on this album, onto Over The Rainbow?
‘Our love will last forever until the day it dies’ was never a 12″ mix, it was the first and original mix Flood did for the album. It was how it was written. We loved it. Regards the ‘Moon’, this is the closest to how the whole album was to be before the band started to implode. I truly wanted the music to be as we as a band – a six piece band at that time – wanted the album to be. When we were finally putting the album out – and at that time not only Guggi had gone but also Dik – it was decided to put the edited version/more standard version on, for what fucked up reason I don’t know. Maybe the same fucked up reason that has me in a Butlins uniform on the cover. This was a very difficult time for the band. So ‘Our love will last forever until the day it dies’ is back where it really belongs, like Guggi on the cover – where he really belongs. And it sounds fantastic, don’t ya think? I put the single version on Rainbow in case anyone missed it.

Who is the girl/woman in the white dress in the centre spread of the Over The Rainbow CD insert booklet?
It is Guggi and Strongman’s sister Gwen, taken on Cedarwood Road. The event, her reaction to first hearing Twenty Tens…

Some of the titles of the Din Glorious tracks are different to the titles given on the Italian vinyl re-release of Din Glorious from the 1980s (e.g. Bo-prune as opposed to Bodhran). The original cassette never contained any titles on its insert. Were the Italian album’s titles inaccurate, or have you chosen to rename certain tracks due to the fluid nature of the performance?
To be totally honest, I couldn’t get my hands on the Italian version. Anyone out there want to give Gavin a copy? [Before a million offers start flooding in, Virginprunes.com has subsequently obliged.] So all the titles came from memory. Put it down to me getting old, sorry about that. I was tempted to have no titles.

The baby’s face that you used as the logo for the Baby Records releases also appears in the Over The Rainbow insert. Is this a picture or a drawing? Where is it from?
Virgin Prunes ‘BABY’… It is an original Victorian painting I bought twenty-five years ago. It was first used as a flyer to promote early Project Arts Centre performances. We called our one off label after it. Basically it was the band’s mascot, it was always with us, on our stages and in the tour bus and in the recording studios. It survived a very extraordinary and difficult youth and now happily lives on the wall of my hall and it hasn’t aged at all.

What do you understand to be the commercial proposition for Mute re-releasing Virgin Prunes material in 2004? Is it expected to make a profit in its own right, or it is more a case of bolstering their overall brand value by enhancing their back catalogue? (In other words, are they doing it for love or for money?)
Who knows if the re-releases will make a profit or not. I am just so happy we found a true resting place for this work and that it looks and sounds GREAT and that it is available to all who want it. I am very proud of our past. Mute have been fantastic, it has been a true pleasure to work with such a professional team WHO LOVE MUSIC. Olivier, the project’s curator, has given his fair share of blood, sweat and tears. He’s a saint, a hero. Huge respect! A LABOUR OF LOVE. I think we fit in fairly comfortably with the Mute catalog. The rest is in the lap of the gods. If it does make money, well and good… and that will be a first for Virgin Prunes.
In the final part of the interview on Friday, we find out more about some of the characters and the “bo-prune” language in the songs, talk about what might happen next and ask Gavin for his thoughts on the band with twenty years’ hindsight.

If you’ve ever wondered about Jennifer and Mary Coote, or puzzled over the difference between a nisam lo and a vibe-akimbo, today your prayers are answered as we get stuck into the wonderful and frightening world of the Virgin Prunes’ songs.

Virginprunes.com: Time for some rapid-fire questions about the content of the songs. What was the argument about in Abbagáll? (It sounds like some kind of concern about harsh treatment of a glockenspiel.)
Gavin: It’s a row between myself and Strongman. As I was playing the glock, he kicked it over – on purpose – so the glock got thrown in the direction of his head… I missed… and Dik caught it all on tape. Strongman used to get off on making me lose the head in them days…

What was the “Emancipation Act 72/3/4″ mentioned in Caucasian Walk?
A date/quote a good friend/mentor of the band used very frequently in conversation. We never knew what it meant and still don’t. The late and great Bill Graham. We dearly loved that man. A true genius.
[Virginprunes.com suspects that it might be influenced by the infamous Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829.]
Is Jennifer/Mary Coote (from Down The Memory Lane) a real person?
Yes, they are both sisters. They live in an area called Bonnybrook, next door to Mrs Phillpots. Myself and Guggi were, and still are, massive fans of the Cootes and the Phillpots.

What does “Bau-dachöng” mean (and why the umlaut)?
It was part of a language myself and The Bottle of Milk invented, the language of the Beautifull People. Bo-Prune, we called the language. Bau-dachong… It means having the ‘knowledge’, a prune/village invention/ism. Very very complex, so can’t really go there.

What does “Ulakanakulot” mean?
This is the name of the ‘land’ where the Beautifull People first came from. An imaginary land, our Atlantis.

Was Abbagál the name of someone specific who you knew?
No. It means ‘curse’, or to put a spell on someone.

What does “Yeo” mean? (I note that it’s been used as the basis for the re-release CD catalogue numbers.)
Yeo was a phrase Dave-id always used and still does, especially if he is/was greeting you. Way, way before Hip Hop.

Was Deirdre the name of someone specific who you knew?
Yes, she was the little sister of Sean d’Angelo. Someone myself and Guggi took very fondly to, was little Deirdre.

What does “Nisam Lo” mean?
This means to have a dream or a ‘trip’.

While the meanings of “vibe” and “akimbo” are well-defined, can you offer any help with interpreting “vibe-akimbo”?
It is what it is: a vibe – akimbo.

Is Loved One named after the Evelyn Waugh novel of the same title, or is that just coincidence?

Coincidence. Didn’t read the book till the late 80’s.

The Mute biography says that Come To Daddy is “a frightening tale of incest”, but one of your interviews of the time seemed to suggest that it was about a housewife instead (“Come to Daddy looks at the things a woman has to go through – women who have had loads of kids and who find that love is now gone”)? Can you clarify this?
Not really about incest, more about sexual/mental abuse, but I like and always encourage people to think what they want.

I believe that the spoken section at the end of True Life Story is Fabienne Savoff, Mary’s wife. Which language is she speaking and what is she saying?
Yes it is Fabienne. She is speaking and singing in Chinese, a language in which she is fluent. The singing is an old Chinese love song. The angry narrative is pretty profane, like ‘your mother is a whore and she sucks dogs’ cocks’. Can’t remember exactly, but that type of thing…

The most obvious omission from the re-releases is the live album, The Hidden Lie. Why was this not included? Is it likely to be released in future?
Most of the band had nothing to do with this album. It was put out against my will. It is, in my mind, not really a Virgin Prunes album. Guggi and Dik had gone and the rest was dying on its legs.

Do you have much currently un-released material left from the original recording sessions? Would you consider releasing any of it?
Some unfinished works, some demos, various live recordings. Don’t know… Let the re-released albums spread their wings and see what happens. Time will tell…

Do you have any access to the tracks that you recorded for the Dave Fanning show on RTE, some of which have never been released in any form? Would you release them if you could, or were they works in progress that were never intended to be preserved for posterity?
As above. Maybe… Not negative. Not sure if RTE will let us have them. We’ll see.

It’s really great to see A New Form Of Beauty 4 (Din Glorious) being released on CD at last. What happened to parts six and seven of the project, the book & video? Were they ever completed or do they remain unfinished? Are they ever likely to be released (finished or unfinished)?
The film may see the light of day, it was never finished. We have all the footage. We handed over to Mute a lot of visual footage of the band. There is talk of DVD release. Time-wise, I couldn’t say. There is a lot to sort out. There will be a DVD, just don’t know when.
The book… Never finished and may never be. Jesus, that’s a frightening thought??? Who knows…
What is the situation regarding the Sons Find Devils CD and video/DVD? Do you anticipate the rights for this transferring to Mute in time?
No comment, the affair is in the hands of our solicitors.

Was any material ever recorded after the Sons Find Devils / The Moon Looked Down And Laughed sessions? I’m thinking of songs performed live, like She, My Dependence On You or Song For The Heartless. If so, would you consider releasing this?
‘Song for the Heartless’ was an unfinished song from the ‘Moon’ sessions. Not sure if we would release demos. We’ll see. Demos/work in progress, I see as very private affairs. The other songs were only ever played ‘live’, never demoed or recorded.

Are there any plans for Mute to release any post-Prunes work (e.g. Gavin’s & Dave-id’s solo albums, The Prunes’ albums)?
No plans at the moment. That’s not to say I don’t like Mute. Mute have been amazing, a real joy to work with.

Most of the pictures and video footage of the band are now over twenty years old. How do you feel, looking back at them?
OLD… A difficult one, very personal, lots of memories. I am a romantic fool. Surprised by the music, it has aged well. Visually I think we look pretty GREAT, especially when I see how most bands nowadays look…

Earlier this year, the team behind Virginprunes.com purchased on Ebay the paperwork for a development deal contract that you and Guggi signed in 1979 with an organisation called World Showplace Music, Inc. Can you tell us more about this? What was the proposition and did it lead anywhere or was it a blind alley?
Yeah, we signed some bullshit proposition way way back in ‘79, I think. The guy was a con man, it led nowhere. We didn’t get ripped off, actually I have a memory of myself and Guggi being treated to a very posh dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel.

What do you think were the Virgin Prunes’ best and worst moments?
Best? Don’t know, not for me to say? Worst? The fucked up way we all dealt with the band breaking up.

What are the various ex-members of the band doing these days?
Guggi paints. Dik works with computers and makes music. Dave-id makes music. Mary teaches and makes music. Strongman works with antiques.

Where, if anywhere, do you perceive the Virgin Prunes’ legacy and influence on contemporary music to lie?
In an Irish context: the most important band ever to come out of the country. As for the rest, not for me to say.

Complete this sentence: everyone should buy the Virgin Prunes re-releases because…
No, no… can’t do that???????????

Gavin, thank you.

Thanks.

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.

The location, a welcoming old thespian drinking haunt sunk underground in the W1 district. Here you will find a pair of ex-Virgin Prunes – singer Gavin Friday, denim-clad and sporting extravagant sideburns, and artist Guggi, who looks like a cross between the lost Stooge and a Franciscan calligrapher – holding court with several of the staff from the Mute label: Paul, Olivier, Zoë and Robert (a Romanian gentleman who, for reasons that have become murky with the time elapsed and the drink taken, has been dubbed ‘Boo-Boo’ for the night – the Lypton Village tradition of rechristening is obviously still in effect). Mute are handling the lovingly remastered and exquisitely packaged reissues of the Prunes’ back catalogue, and it’s a suitable marriage given that the label’s roster also includes Diamanda Galas, Einsturzende Neubauten, DAF, Throbbing Gristle and the Bad Seeds’ extended family.

Gavin and Guggi have been in London for three days now, attending to radio appearances, signings and sundry other promotional duties. Over this time they’ve struck up something of a rapport with Brit-pack artist Damien Hirst, whom they’ll join for dinner in a couple of hours with Bono, himself fresh from addressing the Labour Party conference in Brighton. Neither dining partners should surprise. The Prunes were putting on Hirst-ute animal carcass atrocity exhibitions a long time ago, and Bono for his part capsules his old friends’ legacy by asserting that everything Marilyn Manson is now, the Prunes were in a late 70s Ireland still flinching from the leather strap and the hurley stick.

After midnight, Gavin and Guggi play a half hour DJ set at the Nagnagnag night in the Ghetto, a Falconberg Court club around the back of the Astoria. Backstage before the show, the dressing room is crowded with long time Prunes fans, mostly fabulously adorned gentlemen who thank Gavin for the things he’s said and done over the last 20 years. The guest list includes such unlikely bedfellows as Tony Blair, Shane MacGowan, Tim from Ash and Banshees guitarist Steve Severin (no show from the former, but the latter three will arrive in time to hear Aidan Walsh’s ‘Community Games’, The Stooges’ ‘Down On The Street’ and Siouxsie’s ‘Christine’.) Out front, the red décor is running with sweat, the ambience decadent but benign. Later, the night shudders to its conclusion down the road in the Groucho, with MacGowan and Keith Allen swapping verses on a karaoke ‘Whiskey In The Jar’.

In little more than 24 hours from then, Gavin Friday will suffer a five o’ clock call to be on the set of Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Pat McCabe’s Breakfast On Pluto, playing a showband singer fronting a reconstituted version of The Indians – hence the sideburns. Friday had a cameo role in Kirsten Sheridan’s Disco Pigs a couple of years ago, but this is a more substantial part that will see him vie for billing alongside Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson. Bizarrely enough, there’s also talk of a walk-on from Bryan Ferry, who’ll eschew the gold-toothed lounge lizard act of yore for the part of a rather more unsavoury character with a taste for underage flesh.

The Pat McCabe connection is hardly fresh news; he and Friday struck up a rapport in the mid-90s, the writer supplying the sleeve notes to Shag Tobacco, Gavin and Maurice Seezer returning the favour by scoring the Emerald Germs radio series. More to the point, McCabe’s best known book The Butcher Boy reads like the literary equivalent of a Virgin Prunes show, with its rural gothic gumbo of pigs, abattoirs, faeces, muck, blood and juvenile delinquency.

“What frightens the fuck out of me,” says Gavin, “is Breakfast On Pluto, which I’m acting in, is dedicated: ‘Do Fionan agus R.’”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It might be wise to pause the tape and establish a little retro-perspective before we proceed.

A hybrid of performance art, avant garde and outré rock, The Virgin Prunes were a lurid hairy star that appeared over the medieval landscape of Irish music in that millenarian – if not downright Millerite – post-punk era. If early U2 were Dorian Gray by way of Stephen Hero, the Prunes were Lords Of The Flies daubed by Dali, malformed doppelgangers skulking in German Expressionist shadows. Mind you, there was more correspondence between the two acts than many might have thought (lend an ear to ‘Sandpaper Lullaby’ off the debut, or contrast ‘The Children Are Crying’ from Over The Rainbow with ‘11 O’Clock Tick Tock’.)

The Prunes were Gavin (Fionan Hanvey), the lone Catholic among the Protestants; the Rowen brothers Guggi (Derek) and Strongman (Trevor), the product of a Plymouth Brethren upbringing; Dik Evans, brother of Edge, on guitar; Dave-Id (David Watson) who later released his own recordings in tandem with Pelvis (featuring another Rowen brother, Johnny, managed by Strongman – confused yet?) and Mary d’Nellon, who succeeded Pod and Haa Lacka Binttii on drums and after the band’s demise moved to Paris with his wife Fabienne (who can be heard speaking fluent Chinese on ‘True Life Story’ from the Prunes’ final album proper).

By the turn of the decade they’d signed to Rough Trade and recorded early landmarks like A New Form Of Beauty and If I Die, I Die, and in contrast to their peers and contemporaries, eschewed the machinery of London for Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin. They peaked around 1983, thereafter enduring a painful three or four years of protracted falling apart, culminating in their swansong The Moon Looked Down And Laughed (produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball and engineered by a young Flood), much of which telegraphed Friday’s growing interest in splicing Weimar cabaret, Brecht, Weill and Brel with punk and glam. By this point Guggi had already left to pursue his calling as a visual artist.

Listening back to the Prunes’ canon reinforces the received notion that the band had virtually no aesthetic allies at home apart from U2, perhaps Phil Chevron, and later on Kevin Shields (who remains indebted to the band for a list of contacts that allowed My Bloody Valentine to find their own identity in Berlin before moving to London). But viewed through the wide-angle lens of Europa in its entire, they were not entirely in exile. The wailing vocals, primal tribal rhythms and embracing of dissonance and discord (on the live Heresie set, Dik impresses as one of the great anti-guitarists in the Rowland S. Howard mode) placed them in the same postal district as PiL, The Pop Group, Einsturzende Neubauten, The Fall and The Birthday Party – with whom they once endured a gruelling nine-week tour.

The Prunes and U2 of course emerged from the Lypton Village clique/secret society on Dublin’s north side, the product of the progressive Mount Temple School, and later on, the Shalom Christian prayer group, one of many born again and Charismatic organisations that thrived in an era maligned by petrol shortages, economic meltdown, Three Mile Island and the onset of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. These were a precocious and perverse lot, whose obsessions (Bowie, Bolan, punk, Dada, Warhol, the Surrealists) were defined as much by process of rejection as acceptance.

“I have to say, our biggest thing was to get away from football,” Gavin says. “Football was the enemy. Unemployment, the IRA, the civil service, all the clichés. But when I saw Bowie in ’72 on Top Of The Pops, it fucked my head up. I was sitting in north side Dublin at the age of 12, goin’, ‘He understands me. I don’t understand him.’ The first time I saw Bowie live was ‘76 in Earl’s Court, Station To Station.

“That was the great thing about music. You’d pick up an album and you’d go: ‘‘The Jean Genie’, what’s that?’ And then you’d walk into a bookshop and see Jean Genet, and you’d pick up The Miracle Of The Rose and go, ‘I don’t fuckin’ understand anything.’ I remember seeing Bunuel, the opening of ‘Station To Station’ was this slitting of the eye, and thought, ‘Fuck’. And they played ‘Radioactivity’; the first time I heard real German music, Kraftwerk. I’m quite obsessive as a human, so if I get into something I get into it. These were the days when you’d sleep with sleeping bags in tube stations just to go and see someone. Now, the lazy arseholes, if they can’t get it on i-Tunes they’re not interested.

“But the thing is, we’re all revisionists. I mean, I’m not a wanker saying at 16 I was into Sartre, Bunuel and I’d a big philosophy on Dada. Bollocks. I was makin’ it up. It’s like the way you go, ‘Look at his hairdo!’ That’s all it was. We were taking from the visual. And then slowly you start educating yourself. We weren’t pretentious, we were the most honest band ever to come out of our country.”

So how did such a diverse mob of Prothelics and Cathestants and Plymouth Brethren, whose first gig was in a Methodist hall, end up as part of the Born Again movement?

“When we got involved in born again Christianity, we were searching,” Gavin maintains. “We went along with it for a while, but when they decided you shouldn’t be going out with that person, get rid of your earrings, don’t wear make-up, can you change the name to the Deuteronomy Prunes . . . (Turns to Guggi) I mean, you left before I left.”

Guggi: “I got my ass out of there really fast, well before you left I think, Gav. You and Rene were kind of behind me. I had a Christian upbringing and still have, y’know, the same simple faith. But the Christian thing is a situation where they were absolute good people, and they were preaching what I believe is the truth, but they realised that they really did make an incredible impression on so many young kids, and these guys, I guess the leaders at the time, their egos started taking over, they couldn’t believe their luck that they had so much power, and so many ears were cocked for everything they said.

“And I think it’s happened so many times in situations like that, where someone comes out with things like, ‘God said this woman has got to be with me, he told me last night’, and they started sussing things for their own benefit and I smelled that very early. And then when exorcisms started and that kind of stuff, I didn’t like the feel of it. And yeah, I was the first out.”

Gavin: “Hence ‘The Beast’ and all that speaking in tongues stuff which you hear on A New Form Of Beauty. It was fundamentalism, which is an evil. It was power. These guys, suddenly it was like, The Virgin Prunes were goin’ off, U2 were goin’ off, we went to these Christian meetings and suddenly there was a lot of people goin’.”

Guggi: “We left, and it always seemed to happen over the Ha’penny Bridge, this guy, he was one of the leaders, you’d hear his voice screaming, ‘GUGGI, ARE YOU RIGHT WITH THE LORD? IS YOUR LIFE RIGHT?’ Screaming it on the street. He’d pull ya, ask you to explain yourself. And this was the guy who’d handpicked his favourite chick at the meetings to be his wife. She became his wife, they had children.”

Gavin: “But the big, big tale was years later, when I opened up Mr Pussy’s Café Deluxe, Bono’s older brother Norman, who ran the restaurant, said, ‘There’s a few geezers down here who want to meet you.’ I was upstairs with Bono and Guggi having fish and chips. And I come down, there’s a big table of six transvestites – bonnets, bad wedding outfits – and I sit down and go, ‘Howya lads. What’s your name? I’m Gavin.’ And this one guy says, ‘No you’re not. You’re Fionan.’ And then I went, ‘Say that again.’

Guggi: “He had a very distinctive voice.”

Gavin: “You’re talking about someone in his mid-50s with a bonnet and a pink outfit, and he looked like . . .”

Guggi: “Crap make-up. Unshaven.”

Gavin: “Frightening. Yer da in drag. And then he goes, ‘Praise the lord.’ And I went (mimics panic attack), ‘Oh my god, it’s . . . Yer a fuckin’ trannie.’ It was the leader of the Christian movement.”

Guggi: “He’d left his hand-picked wife with a load of kids out in a Corpo house, and he was sitting with all the lads in a pink flowery frock and a little hat. He was always on about changing rooms and don’t get undressed in front of another man. He was talking about his own problems, I think. He’s died since.”

So, in one anecdote, we go from The Deuteronomy Prunes to Breakfast On Pluto. Which is where we came in, talking Pig-English. More specifically, Olivier from Mute was quizzing Gavin about the improvisational section of Virgin Prunes performances known as The Pig Children, a sort of reductio ad absurdum regression pageant, Freudian fairytale and pagan mass involving loincloths, pig’s heads and fake muck.

“It was self raising flour with a bit of food colouring, a bit of blue and yellow, a bit of water,” Gavin explains. “When we first did it we improvised and we used actual clay and muck, but it gets stuck in the hair of your chest and under your arm. The self raising flour and the food colouring actually works better!”

“And indeed, any three colours makes brown,” adds Guggi, ever the artist.

“So what else did you have?” Olivier asks. “Dead meat?

“Dead meat,” Gavin nods. “Raw meat. We always threw leaves on the floor. But I think where it came from, and why, was the fact that when we first used to perform and play live, we used to play very randomly, like every three months, we had so much time in the late 70s and early 80s to develop. But with If I Die, I Die, which was the first produced record, suddenly we started selling records and people were turning up at gigs and we were booked for nine weeks, two weeks off, nine weeks again. It was actually the death of The Virgin Prunes to be honest.

“So we always said at the end of each show we would do 20 minutes of improvisation based around The Pig Children. And that was myself and Guggi letting loose, trying to get through to the honesty, that children and animals are more honest than adults. We took off all the clothes, took off everything. This sort of sounds wanky, but . . . maybe the fact that I worked in a slaughterhouse brought it on. Lord Of The Flies, the book and the film, blew our heads. Imagine stripping yourself of all intellect in front of an audience of one or two thousand and just being naked and vulnerable. Imagine going, ‘I don’t give a fuck about lyrics, I don’t give a fuck about anything, just get your kit off, get a pig’s head between your groin and go for it!’ It was that easy!”

Guggi: “It’s incredible in photographs, the light would make a pig’s head the same colour as you, and it looked like an extension, it always looked amazing.”

Something about the Virgin Prunes’ fetishistic infantilism and regression (see disc one of Heresie) unsettled a lot of people. Did they get that impression from watching the audience?

Gavin: “I dunno. Did you get disturbed?”

I never saw The Virgin Prunes.

“What age are you?”

35.

“You should have. No one at this table has seen The Prunes? Boo-Boo, have you seen The Prunes?”

Robert: “Of course not. I was in Transylvania at that time.”

Gavin: “That’s a quote! Let’s see yer teeth, ya fucker!”

A New Form Of Beauty, If I Die, I Die, Heresie, Over The Rainbow and The Moon Looked Down And Laughed are out now on Mute.

Virgin Prunes – A Terrible Beauty Re-released
Blame it on the Prods and the Plymouth Brethren…
Blame it on the Christian Brothers and the GAA…
Blame it on Georgie Best and the cider drinking Boot Boys….
Blame it on Sister Nora, my career guidance officer at St. Kevin’s C.B.S.
Blame it on Oscar Wilde and David Bowie…
Blame it on the Northside and Cederwood Rd…

“Take me back to ‘72, my Cooca Choo“ Caruso/Shag Tabacco
The year was 1972 when I, Fionan Martin Hanvey, first befriended Derek Karl Rowen and Paul David Hewson…..we all lived on Cedarwood Rd. ….we loved music, we had a similar surreal sense of humour, we liked painting, ….we had no time at all for football… we looked and dressed differently … we didn’t want to be cowboys we wanted to be Indians. We didn’t fit in and we didn’t want to.

“Is there life on Mars?“ asked David Bowie We knew there was… so we went there, and all of a sudden.. Fionan became Gavin, Derek became Guggi, Paul became Bono….and the dull and grey streets of Ballymun became the glittering boulevards of Lypton Village.

“ From baptism to alcohol, in a land suffocatingly green. Hey ! the myth is magic…Do you know what I mean?“ My 20th Century / Shag Tabacco.

Music was always the driving force. For me personally it was Religion…a Godsend. And then in 1976 / `77 Punk Rock spat into our faces and whispered into our ears “U2 can be a Virgin Prune” ……… and a Terrible Beauty was born.

The first actual performance of the Virgin Prunes took place in a Methodist Hall in Sutton, Northside Dublin late 1977. Myself and Guggi on lead vocals and an incognito backing band … “ Adam“, “Edge“, “Larry“ and “Dik“…Lambs dressed as Mutton. At the time I worked in a Dublin meatpackers slaughter house, so myself and Guggi dressed the band “ head to toe“ in gauze usually used for covering meat for exportation. The backing band looked like four sides of beef playing bass, drums and guitars awaiting delivery to Saudi Arabia. We played one song – a 15 minute slow motion version of, “I Can Get No Satisfaction”. After the gig Dik left U2 and joined Virgin Prunes this was closely followed by Guggi’s brother Strongman joining on bass, Dave-Id Busaras on narration and Pod on drums. Pod was replaced briefly by Haa-Lacka Binttii…then permanently by Mary d`Nellon…

Ladies and Gentleman to whom it may concern … Virgin Prunes.
We hadn’t a clue what we were doing but knew exactly … It was like a planned accident. We were making it up as we went along “ We’re so pretty, oh so pretty vacant and we don’t care“ snarled Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. We did care… we cared so much we were fearless and yes anger was most definitely an energy. The Ireland of the late 70s was a very, very different place to the Ireland of today…

“I haven’t fucked much with the past but I’ll fuck plenty with the future“ ranted the Punk poet Patti Smith, and man did I take her seriously…

“Should I talk the way you want me to talk, say the things the way you want to hear them? I know a lot of people like that…Why should I Be like you? Be like you?“ Theme For Thought – … If I Die I Die.
October 2004 sees the re-release of the Virgin Prunes back catalogue on Mute Records through EMI worldwide, most of the recordings released for the first time ever on CD. It’s very difficult for me to be objective about the Virgin Prunes… They were my baby. I was their Daddy-Mammy Prune who in 1984 / ‘85 put this beautiful angry child into a retirement home for the musically and artistically disturbed. And now 20 years later it re appears screaming at my hall door … dressed in black, a pig’s head hanging from it’s groin, face painted white, vomit dripping lips kissing me passionately on the mouth. The Prodigal Son in Drag. Welcome home Frankenstein! Come on! Come to Daddy!

A New Form of Beauty
After releasing two 7 inch EPs in late 1980 Rough Trade Records approached us with the offer of recording an album. We instead came up with a New Form of Beauty. A seven part multi media project. A 7 inch single Sandpaper Lullaby followed by a 10 inch EP “Come to Daddy“ followed by a 12 inch EP “Beast“ followed by a live cassette “Din Glorious“ followed by a 2 day exhibition / performance / installation at the Douglas Hyde Gallery followed by a book followed by a film. Ambitious to say the least. The book was never finished, the film was never released. The film will most likely see the light of day in the next year or so, it documents the 2 day Douglas Hyde exhibition.

Heresie
Originally released as a double 10 inch boxed set in a limited edition of 75,000. The “studio“ album was a totally improvised recording, the “live“ album was extracts from the band’s first live performance in Paris, France. Using the themes of “Insanity“ and “Religion“ the concept was to push ourselves to the edge of…well … Insanity. All the music was written during the day and recorded during the night a process that saw the band go without sleep for three days.

.. If I Die I Die
1982 and the band decided to employ a producer Colin Newman of Wire. This album whilst less experimental and perverse than previous recordings, still showed the band’s obtuse approach to instrumentation. If I Die I Die saw the band dabble in a dark post punk sound alongside a more mystical Celtic feel and surreal pop. It became the band’s first big selling album.

The Moon Looked Down and Laughed
Produced by David Ball of Soft Cell. The Band’s most lush and melodic of all it’s recordings yet still quite twisted in essence. With the release of if … I Die I Die, the band toured Europe extensively which opened them up to a whole new world of musical influences, a radical more musical direction was planned… despite the band’s huge popularity in Europe the band members started to pull in different directions. This one could call “the Divorce album“.

Over the Rainbow
A compilation of rarities from 1980 – 1984. Over the rainbow includes all the band’s early singles / EPs / 12 inch mixes and Album outtakes, most of which have never seen the light of day. This album shows how varied and diverse the band’s musical approach was from Glam to Industrial to Punk to Pop to Krautrock to the more experimental…