So says Gavin Friday of his often difficult relationship with his late father. That visceral honesty also pervades his new album, catholic, his first since 1995. A gregarious, frank Friday takes TONY CLAYTON-LEAin to his Killiney home
GAVIN Friday’s Killiney living room looks over a vista that is justifiably regarded as the Sorrento of Ireland, yet in my peripheral vision, just behind the singer, I notice a Francis Bacon lithograph of some warped, possibly cruel vision of humanity. How reassuring to know that little has changed in Friday’s world; beautiful, reclusive south Co Dublin is home to a man who has no problem describing himself as “an arty fucker”.
Friday is back in the game again with a new album, the serene, poised and elegant catholic (the lower case is deliberate), his first full release since 1995's in-your-groin Shag Tobacco. In truth, he has never really been away – he shoehorned himself in to a dizzying array of artistic activities. Looking as fit as a fiddle (following a serious back problem that kept him grounded for several months), he is in smart, gregarious form, surrounded by art that ranges from work by his longtime friend (and former Virgin Prune band agitator) Guggi to pieces by Damien Hirst, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. He is also surrounded by art-memoirs that display a touching regard for his origins and his creative touchstones: family portraits, images of rock and pop icons, and a Cedarwood Grove street sign ("rescued from a skip," he says, which proves you can take the man out of Ballymun/Glasnevin but not vice versa).
"Shag Tobaccowas released when Britpop started, and I thought I was back in the early '70s with Slade and Geordie. On the other hand, around that time were Tricky, Portishead, Björk, Nick Cave and Massive Attack, which I found to be more musically interesting. And then in America grunge was such a big thing."
Friday has never bothered with being in kilter with most things (“I’ve always been like that”), but he was becoming bored with what was going on post-Shag. He could also sense the record companies changing. “I recall I walked in to the record company offices and the framed pictures of Tom Waits were being replaced by images of boy bands. And then in 1998, on the same day, Island Records dropped me, Waits, Tricky and Marianne Faithfull. At least I was in good company.”
He could see the media changing, too. “So-called great magazines of the ’80s, early ’90s, suddenly became very tabloid-friendly, because they knew pictures of Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher could sell thousands of copies.
"Also around that time, Ireland was suddenly hip – but what sort of Ireland was hip? Our first big cultural hugeness was Riverdance; you couldn't really have put U2 in to any bracket because by the mid '90s they had been around for almost 20 years. And then after Riverdancecame successful boy bands, girl bands."
A creative self-defence mechanism kicked in, and Friday effectively went underground, scoring movies (including The Boxer, The Name of the Father, Get Rich or Die Tryin' –three ventures with director Jim Sheridan), throwing himself into theatre ( Peter and the Wolf, Shakespeare, one-man shows), radio ( Emerald Germs, a collaboration with Patrick McCabe) and acting ( Breakfast on Pluto).
Come 2006-2007, with his marriage in disarray and the knowledge that his father would not live long, he knew he had enough to throw himself back in to writing songs of substance. He also knew he wanted to play live again, sing his own songs again. “When you’re on a conveyer belt, which I was from ’88 to ’96, it was all about Gavin Friday, and what you’re writing about is not real life.”
He wanted, he says, to go back to basics, to “make a record like you had just signed to Rough Trade in 1979”. And because he’s known for collaborating with “names”, he wanted this to be a completely solo effort. The working relationship with his previous musical partner, Maurice Seezer, he says, “just filtered out”, and over the past few years he embarked on a new creative partnership with Cork-based musician Herbie Macken. The results are impressive – a svelte, subtle and idiosyncratic juxtaposition of Friday’s inner soap operas with luminous touchstones such as David Bowie and Leonard Cohen.
The album is Friday in middle-age, reflective mode – there is no obvious sign of the 20-year-old Virgin Prune whose arms were wrist-deep in muck and blood, whose head was full of conflict, and whose raison d'être was to confront. Is there more of who and what he really is in catholicthan in any other of his albums?
“I don’t overanalyse certain things,” he begins cautiously, “but I have found that the turbulent relationship I had with my father all my life ended when he died. We made peace with each other in the last couple of weeks in his life, in a very positive way, which I am really glad for. His death had a very strong effect on me. Certain people’s fists are up and they’re kicking against the world, and then when one of the people who they were kicking against is suddenly gone, you turn around and reflect on what a heavy person you were, too. You start being a little more objective.
“Like, my dad had Damien Omen as a son. To turn around at the age of 16 and tell your parents that you’re forming a band called the Virgin Prunes? This wasn’t light, but hard-core. So, yes, there is a certain visceral honesty about the record, but it’s calm, not so much in pain.”
And what about the process of putting his face about again? Despite his quite hectic schedule in the past 15 years (which included his stints on U2 tours as “cultural adviser”), Friday has lived mostly outside the public eye. There’s no doubt he has his finger on the pulse, little doubt that he looks at Lady Gaga and her meat dress and smiles ruefully, but what’s a 51-year-old with a beautifully slow-burning, yet against-the-grain album to do?
“It’s a strange one. But I’m doing it my way, which is something I’ve always done, even in the days of the Virgin Prunes. I think you have to be as excited, as vulnerable, as driven as you were when you were 18. The thing I miss about being that age is that you didn’t think too much, but now knowledge and wisdom kicks in, and you go ‘oh, that’s going to cost a fortune, and the audience will walk out halfway’. Back in the day you didn’t care if the audience walked out. The truth is, I won’t change my ways just to suit.”
Thus it ever was. He recalls the Virgin Prunes and their often startling, primal mix of shock, surrealism and sedition as “a gorgeous indulgence”. That’s what youth is, says Friday. “If you’re 20 and you feel hurt, and you’re able to express that pain, then that’s a very positive indulgence. I really encourage that. If you’re angry with the world and you don’t like the way things are going the best thing to do is to express rather than repress. That’s one thing I didn’t do – repress anything.
“We were so honest in our purity, madness and drive that we actually were in a bubble. There isn’t enough of that indulgence these days. Everyone is trying to make everyone happy now.”
He accepts that he has always been painted with pretentiousness by certain people (“I don’t think they actually know me, or have been listening to me”), yet clearly relishes the fact that for decades he and his mate Guggi have established themselves quite firmly in the art world on an international level.
“Us so-called illiterates from Ballymun,” he laughs with irony (laced, perhaps, with a splash of vinegar), “just because we didn’t do third-level education.” He pauses for breath, and lights what must be his fifth cigarette in the course of an hour. The sun bounces off the Irish Sea into a room full of art and life that brims with personality and achievement. He’s done okay for himself, this “illiterate from Ballymun”. Big smile. “Yes, I have, haven’t I?”
It’s always been a struggle, though, he adds, stressing there have been good and bad times, yet implying that through these there was always the life-saving grace of a communion, of sorts – or a dialogue – with music. “When I fell in love with music,” he concludes, “it was a relationship that told me I wasn’t alone, and that the person who was singing to me understood exactly where I was coming from.”
catholicis released on April 22. Friday’s one-day event Exposition takes place in Dublin’s Gallery of Photograph on April 26. He performs at Electric Picnic, September 2-4
