When we met Gavin Friday at a canine-friendly café near his current residence in South Dublin, the staff member who took our order asked him, “No dog today?”, to which he amicably laughed and replied, “No, she’s at home, today.”
From this little interaction, we see a Gavin that, much like the press surrounding him this century, seems to imply a more accepted and normative figure compared to the outspoken provocateur who shocked polite, mainstream Irish society in the 1970s and ‘80s as the frontman of the theatrical post-punk band Virgin Prunes.
Yet Gavin doesn’t really share in the notion that he’s a mainstream figure. When asked about his reception, he responded, “I wouldn’t say I’m that accepted. I think for the people who know me, yeah, but If I stood up in fuckin’ Tallaght or Ballybrack, they’d go, ‘Who the fuck are you?!’ [Laughs] I mean, Damien Dempsey is more respected than me, you know? Aslan. I’m still left-of-centre.
“People would like me. I did a Brendan O’Connor interview recently, and there were a lot of people… Even him, he was like, ‘Oh, my God. Look at this message from my mother…’, blah, blah, blah. He said, ‘People who would have scowled at you when you were a Virgin Prune, they’re like, “What a good guy”, and I was like, ‘Right…’ [Laughs]”
As a teen finding identity, Gavin was drawn to avant-garde music and European auteur cinema, which was not the easiest thing to come by in 1970s Dublin. “There was a place, where The Conrad Hotel is now, right opposite the National Concert Hall, that used to be a small, independent place called The Irish Film Theatre. A lot of people would join – because you’d have to join a club – and a lot of people would go in because you’d see a bit of tit or arse, [Laughs] because there were no blue movies or anything.
“But that’s where you’d see Fellini and mad films. That’s where I saw the Derek Jarman movies in 1979 – they were all banned – but it was like, ‘Wow! This is interesting!’ But we were a unique load; you’d see these guys with coats, pervs, and you’d see a lot of alternative kids. So, that was there, but, really, we had to go to England.
“One of my friends, Tommy, who now lives in Germany, his dad worked in the EMI, and he’d get free tickets to go over. You’d make a list. You’d go, ‘OK, I’m going over on Friday. It’s a one-day trip to Probe Records in Liverpool. Six copies of Cabaret Voltaire. Two of these. Three of that…’ and you’d make a list for your mates. So, we were basically being our own D.I.Y. distributors because they weren’t going to stock Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle at Golden Discs.”
Inspired by the punk movement’s assertive attitude and his love of experimental art, Gavin formed the post-punk project, Virgin Prunes, in 1977. While he admits that they were not the strongest musicians on the Dublin scene at the time, what really made the Prunes stand out was their oftentimes vulgar and demanding performances where they would incorporate shock tactics to make declarative statements on the ills of the perfunctorily polite conservative Ireland of the time.
Eschewing the hegemony of the Irish and British music scenes (the former being not a great match for them and the latter being too snobbish with undertones of anti-Irish sentiment for their liking), the Prunes mainly found success in the, at the time, more progressive-minded countries of France, West Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, where they toured consistently. But Gavin feels that the art they were making could only have resulted from living within a repressed country.
“We would go on the stage with severed pigs’ heads wrapped around our crotch and sing songs called ‘Come to Daddy’,” Gavin says. “We had exhibits of so-called abortions, as we were pro the abortion thing back in 1981. We had a piece called ‘I Am the Baby,’ which was an abortion. We had these dummies that we robbed from a fire in Hickey’s and we set the mannequins up on the stage.
“So, we were doing performance art, and I said, ‘You would not be allowed to have a pig’s head wrapped around your groin and walk on stage in front of 1,000 people in Paris.’ You just wouldn’t be allowed. You would not be allowed to have a thing called ‘I Am a Baby’ and it’s an abortion. You would be closed down, shut down.
“But that was the wilderness; the wilderness of a suppressed world. I watched something – it was really good, you should check it out. It’s pretty out there. It reminded me of the Virgin Prunes, too – it was a documentary last night on the BBC, called Queendom. It was about a guy stuck in Russia who identifies as a she and is a performance artist, dancing.
“She gets out to Paris, eventually, but you go, ‘That’s from conservative Hell, this radical expression. This scream, where the only way the person can really do it is through performance art. It’s weaponising its sexuality.’ So, I go, ‘Is it the repressed world – the really repressed world – that fight harder and kick harder?’”
But times change and Gavin notices how Ireland has progressed in social acceptance, anecdotally reminiscing on seeing a same-sex male couple, adorned as he once was with make-up and dresses, walking around together and no one batting an eyelid.
Gavin’s latest album, Ecce Homo, was released just before Halloween. Now that Irish society seems to have caught up to the level of acceptance that the Prunes had nearly a half-century ago, the album seems to attempt to observe those days as objectively as possible.
“I think it just happens when you’re older,” Gavin says of writing about the past. “I didn’t go out with the intent to write a reflective album. The first tunes that came out of it were quite contemporary, as in ‘Ecce Homo’ the title track, and ‘Lovesubzero,’ and ‘The Church of Love.’ They were the first things, and they were all very much of today.
“Then a melody happened, and maybe it’s emotions, the fact that a lot of people were dying – my mother, Hal Willner, for instance – you do get reflective, but you’re reflective about… The first real thing when I started writing this, I said, ‘Songs and melodies are like snowdrops. They just come, and you have to capture them really quick,’ and this melody just came and the words just happened, When the world was young, and I wrote these words.
“I love the idea of innocence and not knowing, when you’re 15 and 16, and just jumping and going and going and not knowing what the fuck you’re doing, and we didn’t. And you go, ‘Wow! Fifty years later, and we’re sort of still doing that.’ So, I wanted to write about that, and I went, ‘This is not just about me reflecting on when the world was young for a young Gavin Friday, Guggi, or Bono, but that’s what 15/16-year-olds have to do, today.’”
There was a notable sabbatical between Ecce Homo and Gavin’s previous record, Catholic, which was released in 2011. Explaining the gap, Gavin says, “Obviously, I was doing other work. Numerous stuff, soundtrack stuff, work with Gavin Bryars in the Shakespeare Company. A big, personal project I did was this tribute to Roger Casement, a sound design piece, in 2016, to honour him in the centenary of the uprising. And I’ve been working with other musicians and writing other stuff. So, I tend to file things on the shelves.”
Produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball, the making of Ecce Homo was marred by a lot of deadlocks, including personnel availability, late rewrites, new material, and a global pandemic, eventually expanding its production timeline to nearly half a decade.
But it was worth it, as, upon release, the album was lauded by both the musical press and mainstream outlets nationwide and abroad. When we asked the famed iconoclast if he cared about this approval, Gavin responded, “Well, of course you care. I mean, what I find difficult is it looks like journalism has been hijacked. I got a review and I was like, ‘It’s five lines!’ And I go, ‘OK, it’s a positive review.’
“I’m really relieved it’s out and relieved that it’s distributed properly, but most people listen on their phones, so God knows. But I am excited it’s out, and I want to play live, which I’ll be doing next year, but I just don’t know. To me, it looks like journalism is dead. It’s almost like you write a press release and you’re repeating it for the next two fuckin’ months! You go, ‘Jesus! Can we have different interviews, coming from different aspects?’ But everybody’s on an algorithm.”
Gavin has a roadmap for his future plans but he admits that will be subject to change based on interest. He concludes,“It’s not going to be thirteen years before I make a new album, Aaron, because I’ll be fuckin’ 78! [Laughs] I won’t be able to walk! So, I have a plan where I want to bring out one in a year or two, and I want to tour more, but I’m very singular. I don’t go by the straight-and-narrow of the way other artists do it. But that’s because if something more interests me than making another album or whatever. But I’m not doing butter ads just yet! So, let’s wait and see!”
Gavin Friday’s latest album, Ecce Homo, is out now. Gavin will perform at the Spirit Store, Dundalk on April 8th and Vicar Street, Dublin on April 10th. You can purchase his music and tickets at gavinfriday.com.
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Images: Barry McCall
