TD 1
hen 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 postpunk 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-ofcentre.” “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, 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 BNI, 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 16 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, antidotally 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 “We would go on the stage with severed pigs’ heads wrapped around our crotch and sing songs called Come to Daddy”