Gavin Friday spoke to David Hennessy ahead of his first UK show in 17 years. Gavin spoke about his latest album, working with people such as Sinéad O’Connor, Shane MacGowan and U2 and why Trump makes him angrier than Thatcher.
Gavin Friday performs his first UK show in 17 years at London’s EartH venue on Sunday 6 April.
Gavin first became known as frontman of Dublin post-punk band, The Virgin Prunes.
After the band split up, Friday forged a career as a solo artist, but also songwriter and composer.
Ecce Homo, released last year, was his 6th solo album.
Meaning ‘behold the man’, the title comes from Pontius Pilate’s mocking words to Jesus Christ when he placed a crown of thorns on his head.
Friday has often used Catholic imagery in his work.
Loss is also a theme of the record.
His mother passed away after battling Alzheimer’s.
The American music producer Hal Willner, a friend and collaborator, also passed away.
Sinéad O’Connor who was due to sing on the album would pass without getting to.
Friday’s first album in over 13 years, it was produced by Dave Ball of Soft Cell, Michael Heffernan and Riccardo Mulhall.
Friday has also worked regularly with his childhood friend Bono of U2. One instance of this was on the soundtrack to Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father with both men writing the title track. For that same film they wrote the song You Made Me The Thief of Your Heart which would be sung by Sinéad O’Connor.
Friday also worked on soundtracks for Sheridan’s In America and Get Rich Or Die Tryin’.
Friday has also been known to act appearing in Neil Jordan’s film Breakfast On Pluto which was based on Patrick McCabe’s book of the same name, itself influenced by Friday’s own 1995 album, Shag Tobacco.
We caught up with Gavin Friday ahead of his live return to the London stage.
You’re playing your first show in London in 17 whole years. Can you believe it? Does that seem a bit strange?
“It does seem strange.
“I loved London in the 70s and the early 80s.
“I just idolised going over there in the punk days, and went over to see Bowie when I was a young fella, and just seeing all the bands.
“And my memories of Soho in its heyday in the early 80s, and the Kings Road and all the fashion and Vivienne Westwood shops.
“I just adored England as a kid.”
Of course you came over here back in the early days of The Virgin Prunes, what sort of reception did you get then?
“It was different times.
“The first time we ever played London was 1979, a little festival called A Sense of Ireland.
“There were three bands: The Virgin Prunes, U2 and a band called Berlin who were headlining, who didn’t deserve to headline but they were headlining.
“And then when we signed to Rough Trade in 1980 we played many, many times in Europe, in London town and all over England, but it was a very different world.
“Not only was Ireland and England dreaded with the troubles, so even getting across, it was nothing but an effort all the time.
“It was all quite tense.
“But it was also the start of England really changing with Thatcher and all of that.
“We had a few run ins with Mary Whitehouse, I remember.
“So it was never easy but they were exciting times.”
You just mentioned the troubles. Did you get the sense of an anti-Irish feeling at that time?
“Not really from the fans or the people at the gigs.
“It was quite a liberal time.
“So no, we got it from security and the fact that my real name is Gaelic, Fionán, I was always pulled in and strip searched, etc.
“So the authority, yeah. But England, no.
“I found it quite liberal and open minded, and the fans were great actually.”
If only Ireland could have been as open minded because your early music and its anger was very much born out of Catholic and conservative Ireland and how repressive it all was, wasn’t it?
“Totally but any young kid with a brain would have been kicking against the so called constraints of Catholic Ireland.
“We very forcibly went there and were very critical of the Catholic Church.
“We were breaking the rules.
“Some the Virgin Prunes stuff was re-released in the last year or two with BMG and I just saw a lot of the stuff we were kicking against, from domestic abuse to gender fluidity, to even mental health issues.
“When I looked back at that stuff I went, ‘We were actually quite articulate and maybe ahead of our time in what we were saying’, but totally misunderstood.
“It was a very, very repressed country then.
“We just didn’t fit in.
“Hence, we basically, musically emigrated to Europe.
“Ireland didn’t really start changing til the 90s and now it’s as contemporary as anywhere.
“But there’s troubles still coming back up.
“Politically the world is in a mess.
“I think it’s actually more f**ked up than when I was young.”
You just mentioned Thatcher there a moment ago, I think I’ve heard you say that Trump makes you as angry or angrier even than you were in the Thatcher times..
“As angry, maybe even angrier because Thatcher had a steel fist on everything, but Trump is affecting the whole world.
“I mean the political thing with these tariffs, God knows where that’s going to go.
“And the racism and the biasness.
“Suddenly there’s all this anti-refugees, anti-immigrants, anti- trans, anti-gays: What? In this day and age?
“It really is mind boggling.
“God knows where this is going to go in the next couple of months or years.
“Yes, I would be quite angry.
“I mean, even his aid that he’s cut off to the rest of the world.
“They reckon there’s millions of people going to die of HIV in Africa alone just from that him stopping people getting HIV drugs.
“It’s just disturbing.
“And the rise of this right wingness which even is creeping in in every country.
“We have a f**king eejit called McGregor who was shooting his mouth off in the White House on Paddy’s Day.
“He has no right to speak on behalf of the Irish people.
“For God’s sake the Ukrainians that are over here are over here for a reason.
“There’s a war and it’s mainly women and children so I just don’t understand, especially from an Irish point of view when we were a repressed country, that we aren’t sympathetic to refugees and immigrants.
“Yes, there’s abuses there that have to be dealt with but at the same time, we’re very forceful on Palestine.
“The country is very pro-Palestine so there’s good and bad, but let’s wait and see.
“I just don’t know what’s around the corner.
“None of us do but the economic travesty that Trump and his likes are stirring up will lead to more troubles because when people have no money and when economics get bad, they usually turn on minorities.
“It’s just history repeating itself.”
You just mentioned Sinéad O’Connor, someone you’ve worked with who sadly left us a couple of years ago.
You even asked her to sing on your latest album although it never came to pass, isn’t that right?
“That’s correct.
“I know Sinéad since she first entered the music scene.
“Nobody could sing like her.
“You could hear a pin drop when she performed.
“Just an extraordinary singer, extraordinary.”
“My last album was called Catholic.
“Sinéad rang me up and says, ‘Why didn’t you ask me to sing on that?’
“It was about four years ago, during lockdown, I met her for a coffee and I played her the track (Stations of the Cross).
“She loved it and says, ‘Absolutely. I’d love to sing on this’.
“But sadly, as soon as I was about to get moving on to finishing the album, her son passed away and she was gone a year later so she just wasn’t able to and for that reason I dedicate it to her because I think she was quite a unique talent and quite an icon really for Ireland.
“She fought against an awful lot of things and she was way ahead of her time on the Catholic church being corrupt and way ahead of her time on mental health issues which she got a hard time from the press for.
“They slagged her a lot.
“Whenever she was having issues, they weren’t very kind to her.”
It’s a shame they weren’t as kind to her in life as they were in death..
“I just think they should have apologised for treating her sh*t.
“They just celebrated her where nine months earlier, they were slagging her off as a mad woman.”
Of course we lost her the year before last, the same year we lost Shane MacGowan who is another one you performed with.
You had a lot of admiration for Shane, didn’t you?
“I did.
“I knew Shane well.
“Shane really was a punk.
“Ireland had his heart and he was just one of our great poets.
“It was a shame that he went so young but he was on that sort of driven track.
“I don’t mind people drinking or doing drugs but when it actually starts taking your life and you’ve such a talent, I don’t condone that and people tend to celebrate that side of him where it was a bit sad. He was in a wheelchair for the last 10 years of his life.
“But I love him and I think he was amazing.”
I understand you also sadly lost your mother not so long ago…
“I dedicate it to her.
“I’m in my 60s now so life gets tough at times and you lose friends.
“I lost a good friend during COVID as well.
“Hal Willner who was a producer. He passed away and that really shook me and that was very soon after my mam died.
“I tend to sort of write or sing about what happens to me or what affects me.
“Some of it is about the world I see now and the other is the world that’s mine or what I’ve been through in the last couple of years.”
Ecce Home was your first album in 13 years. You were obviously busy in between but could you believe it was as long as it was?
“Life just goes so fast.
“I didn’t plan for it to be 13 years.
“When I finished Catholic and I toured on and off for two years I said, ‘Okay, I’ll make an album next year’.
“But something came around the corner.
“Then my mam got sick.
“So life gets in the way.
“But I’m not going to leave it this long anymore.”
You mentioned U2, yourself and Bono have been friends since you met as schoolchildren, isn’t that right?
“I lived on the same road as him.
“I didn’t go to the same school because my dad sent me to a Christian Brothers school to straighten me up, knock sense into me which it did the opposite- I formed the Virgin Prunes, but I met Bono when I was 14 on Cedarwood Road in Ballymun.
“A very deep friendship started there and we formed bands around the same time.
“We’ve always sort of looked after each other.
“I’d be the guy that tells him what I think where other people tend to blow smoke up his a***.
“It’s what friends do.
“That’s how it started, just as teenage kids, ‘That’s a great song’, ’No, it’s not’, ‘The lyrics could be better’, ‘Why don’t you rewrite it?’”
There is your work with The Virgin Prunes, your solo work and work on soundtracks for classic films, what makes you most proud?
“Well all of them in a different way.
“When I was in the Virgin Prunes, it was the most important thing in the world and then we broke up in late ‘84/ ‘85 but when I was re-releasing it and remastering it and putting it back out with BMG, I became so proud of what we did all those years ago but in a different way.
“I look back and I see it as still relevant, believe it or not.
“Some people would disagree but at the moment, I’m really proud of it.
“It tends to be what you’re putting your blood, sweat and tears into.
“I’m really proud of Ecce Homo.
“And some things that you mentioned, In The Name of the Father, I’m very proud of that because I think it rings stronger than just the song.
“It was about the Guildford Four and the whole repression of the Irish back then.
“They got their justice in the end but things like that, they mean an awful lot.”
I would say it was a very proud night when you played Carnegie Hall for your 50th and you were joined by Shane MacGowan, Lady Gaga and many more.
Was that a great night for you?
“It was intimidating.
“It was Hal Willner and Bono that organised it, and they just got all people I’ve worked with and respect.
“The names you said, Shane and it was Courtney Love and Lou Reed, all of U2.
“I had to sing with them all.
“It was a two and a half hour show and like, ‘Next up’.
“I was f**king on a stretcher at the end of it.
“It was hard work but it was really, really great.
“I wish I was able to sit back and do it again.”
Religious symbolism comes up a lot in your music.
You’re not religious yourself but I don’t pick up a disrespect for the religion either..
“I use Catholic imagery even though I don’t like the Catholic Church because it’s probably in my DNA.
“I don’t really believe in organised religion but it’s sort of the world I grew up in.
“I use it more as an analogy and description, more of a metaphor rather than belief.
“And the title Ecce Homo, it’s the last thing Pontius Pilate said before Christ was crucified.
“What he said was, ‘Behold the man’.
“That’s what it means and I’m sort of, ‘Here I am. Behold me. I’m my own man’.
“I don’t want to knock the Catholic religion.
“There’s great, great priests, great, great people there but they actually had a stranglehold over the country.
“All the horror stories of the institutionalised children, that’s just a nightmare so I’m glad that’s gone.
“But when I was 18, there was no contraceptives, homosexuality was illegal, gay marriage was illegal, divorce was illegal, abortion was illegal, books were illegal, certain films were.
“It’s just like, ‘Jesus Christ, we’re in another world’.
“It was like a dictatorship so all of that is phenomenal in the last 15, 20 years.
“I mean, who would have thought less than five years ago Ireland had a gay Taoiseach that was from immigrant background?
“Would you believe that? I wouldn’t.
“Well, that happened.
“There’s so much liberation and expression in Ireland.
“I really I love this country. I love it.”
Are you excited by the music coming out of Ireland now?
“I actually think the Irish music scene is the best it’s been possibly ever.
“What I really find exciting is the Irish so called nu folk and trad where you have bands like Lankum and Oxn and they’re not doing paddywhackery diddly eye music.
“They’re playing really deep, heartfelt music.
“I love artists like Lisa O’Neill who’s a brilliant Irish writer, she’s almost like a punk poet and then there’s a band called Ye Vagabonds.
“There’s so many great trad bands and then the rock scene.
“One of the biggest up and coming bands is the Fontaines, and The Murder Capital.
“There’s a brilliant scene for a tiny country.
“I’m a big fan of what’s happening in Ireland at the moment.”
I’m sure you have been pleased to see one Irish actress come to prominence, that is your goddaughter Eve Hewson..
“I am proud, biased too because she is my god daughter.
“Yeah, I adore her because she’s my goddaughter.
“When she was 12, I think she wanted to be a drummer in a band and I bought her a gift for her birthday, acting classes in the Gaiety School of Acting for three months during the summer of her 12th year, and she took it seriously.”
Before you go what can we expect from this show coming up?
“I’ll be playing a lot of Ecce Homo but I will be playing some of my older material, Gavin Friday, and I will be playing some Virgin Prunes songs but a very contemporary new take on them.
“It won’t be your average, ‘Here’s the songs’.
“It will be a feeling, an event, an experience because I really love putting theatricality into a show so I hope to make something very magical.”
Gavin Friday plays London’s EartH venue on Sunday 6 April.
He also plays Vicar Street, Dublin on 10 April and the Spirit Store, Dundalk on 8 April 2025.
For more information, click here.