Gavin Friday is back with ECCE HOMO, his first solo album in 13 years, He talks to Alan Corr about his late mother, Sinéad O’Connor and U2
Sitting in a bustling café around the corner from his house in Rathmines in south Dublin, Gavin Friday is swaddled in a dark green army coat. He has the beginnings of a salt and pepper moustache and exudes a kind of raffish gypsy chic far removed from the angular art rock of his first incarnation over forty years ago as frontman of The Virgin Prunes.
The whole time, he is cradling Stan, his 15-year-old longhaired German dachshund, who is suffering from abandonment issues after the death of his litter brother, Ralfy, last year.
"I lived out in the Beverley Hills of Dublin for a while in Killiney but I got out of there about three years ago," Friday says. "Isn’t that what you do when you’re 65? I’m bringing an album out so I have to move back into the city to get the energy."
He smiles when I ask him were the neighbours giving him grief.
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That new album is ECCO HOMO and it is quite an odyssey. Dedicated to his late mother and several friends who have passed away over the last few years, it wrestles with typical Gavin Friday themes such as Catholicism, sex, and politics. A mix of high art and musical sleaze, it is the sound of the one-time art rock enfant terrible dancing away the heartache.
The title means "behold the man", Pilate’s mocking words to Jesus Christ when he placed a crown of thorns on his head. The new album is very much Friday re-introducing himself - and coming out - after a 13-year absence since his last album, 2011’s Catholic.
"It is me reintroducing myself but I am a singular type of artist and I’ve never walked the line," he says. "I’ve always walked on my own and I don’t do the conveyor belt even when I was a kid with the Virgin Prunes."
It’s not as if he’s been sitting around in his new house in his smoking jacket listening to Mahler. Since Catholic, he has worked on numerous soundtracks, a new animated film of Peter and The Wolf for the Irish Hospice Foundation, a Shakespeare collaboration with composer Gavin Bryars and then there is his work as "creative director" for his old friends U2.
"Sometimes I do sit around the house listening to Mahler," he says. "But I wasn’t not doing anything for the last 13 years. I’ve been really busy with side projects, soundtracks, my work with U2 because they got really busy gigging in the last ten years.
"We were rejected here. I remember the first big rejection was The Late Late Show, Gay said no. it was the same weekend as the Pope in Phoenix Park. They spanked us for a year."
"Real life things happened, too. My mother got quite ill and I had to take time there, time I wanted to take and then the pandemic got in all of our ways. I wasn’t slacking even during the pandemic. There is no element of retirement on the horizon."
ECCE HOMO came to life by degrees. It began when Dave Ball of Soft Cell, who had produced The Virgin Prunes back in the eighties, approached Friday to work on a cover of Ghost Rider for a tribute album to Alan Vega of New York band Suicide.
"Dave would send me stuff and I’d occasionally have a listen and eventually I decided to go to London and work with him," Friday says. "I still hadn’t decided to do an album. I like the minimalism at the core of the album but I wanted to pump it up. I just felt this anger with Trump that I hadn’t felt since Thatcher."
He then worked with Dublin music engineer Michael Heffernan, adding a lustre of strings and horns to the more experimental material he’d recorded with Ball.
From there, it grew into the final thirteen track opus but it was also borne out of a confluence of unfortunate events. His mother, Anne Storey Hanvey, passed away after battling Alzheimer’s, his old friend and collaborator, American music producer Hal Willner, also passed away and then Stan’s bother, Ralf, went to doggy heaven. Then his old friend Sinéad O’Connor died . . .
"These days, I'm excited to see young Gavin Fridays being able to walk around holding hands and not getting their heads kicked in."
"The people loved her and then one of my poor f***ing dogs died two days later. And then Hal and my mum was a struggle because it was a slow thing, Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. It takes away the spirit and soul."
ECCE HOMO is dedicated to Willner and his mother, as well as several other close friends of Friday who have passed away in recent years. Anna was one of Friday’s earliest supporters and made clothes for The Prunes’ outlandish stage shows and confrontational videos.
She’s the star of new track Amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding). "It’s named after the plants she used to grow," Friday says. "The lyric is about losing someone and not being happy about it. Mum was possibly my first big fan and supporter. She was the seamstress to The Virgin Prunes.
"She ended up in this brilliant care home and me and my two brothers would visit three times a week and I came in one day and there she was sitting in her room with black nail varnish and black lipstick, blue eyeliner . . . she’s become a Virgin Prune again."
Grief and anger gives ECCE HOMO a raw urgency, both lyrically and musically. It’s Friday’s most strident sounding record and on some songs it sounds like he’s speaking in tongues amid the brash industrial soundscapes and electro punky goth.
He picks over his past on When The World Was Young, a song dedicated to Bono and Guggi of the Prunes, who is now a successful artist, and the Lypton Village crew of Finglas in the seventies.
Then there is the ghostly glam rock stomp of Lady Esquire, which is about the hallucinogenic properties of a1970s brand of shoe polish that kids sniffed ("We’re on the hill near the Seven Towers. Hey, man, do ya wanna see the buildings dance?").
"I didn’t plan to write about all that retrospective stuff but that’s what happens when you turn 65," Friday says. "I dedicate the song When The World Was Young to Bono, Guggi and the Lypton Village crew but I think we wandered . . . we didn’t even know what was going to happen.
"We were rejected here. I remember the first big rejection was The Late Late Show, Gay said no. it was the same weekend as the Pope in Phoenix Park. They spanked us for a year.
"Then we went to London and we had a kind of culty following but it was almost like `how dare you not be typical Irish’. We didn’t look like The Blades or U2 or The Vipers so we went to Europe and totally embraced it. These days, I’m excited to see young Gavin Fridays being able to walk around holding hands and not getting their heads kicked in."
"Sinéad was almost scourged at the pillar and crowned with thorns because of what she did with that picture of the Pope. She was really unfairly treated by media worldwide and especially in America."
Ralfy and Stan are eulogised on The Best Boys in Dublin and the opening track, ecstatic love song Lovesubzero, is dedicated to Friday's partner, Patrick. However, one of the album’s most powerful moments is Stations Of The Cross, which is dedicated to Sinéad. Both she and Friday had their own experiences of Catholic Church in Ireland, her’s far more traumatising than his, and both used Catholic iconography in their work since the very start.
"That catholic imagery is in my DNA," says Friday. "If you walked into a certain room in my house, you’d think I was a priest."
Has the church atoned or can it ever atone for its sins? "I think everyone has to atone and can," Friday says. "That question is like putting a poker in a fire with me. I did ask Sinéad to sing Stations of the Cross with me. When Catholic came out, she rang me up and said `why didn’t you ask me to sing on it?’ and I said because the last time you didn’t turn up.
"Anyway, we did some shows in Dublin around the Catholic tour. I’d bump into her around Dalkey over the years and I said I have a song you might like and she said I’ll sing it with you, this is before lockdown and then mercilessly, her son passed and then she passed . . . "
"Sinead was almost scourged at the pillar and crowned with thorns because of what she did with that picture of the Pope and then really unfairly treated by media worldwide and especially in America. She was one of the first people who really confronted the issue of mental health publicly. She was living it, sadly.
"When I use religious imagery it’s not disrespectfully. A thirty-year-old person in Ireland now, he or she would not understand what we are talking about, what happened in the sixties and seventies and god knows what happened in the fifties. We were living in a dictatorship."
Of course, there’s always been a huge degree of camp theatrics to everything Friday does, but ECCO HOMO also sees him bare his fangs. The title track sounds like nothing less than his very own The Second Coming by Yeats crossed with Fire Over Babylon by Sinéad. Friday’s anger at the rise of political strongman boils over into apocalyptic rage.
"Everybody is going to be waking up on November 6 going `f***ing hell! If that guy gets back in what will happen . . . ?" he grimaces. "I’m really scared. I also worry about Putin. Sadly, I see the Middle East as an eternal problem. I don’t think that’s ever going to be fixed. So much s*** is emerging at the same time."
Which seems a good time to ask Friday what he makes of Bono’s perceived silence on Palestine . . .
"I think the man will say something but there is so much noise out there," he says. "No matter what he says, they’re going go for him and I don’t want that to be the headline but that’s sort of the way it is. He is deeply, deeply stressed about the whole thing, I know that. But I don’t know what to say . . . I think what Ireland is doing is quite admirable. The far left in Ireland think it’s not admirable enough but it’s complicated world out there.
"My bottom line is this - human beings have to talk. Talk to each other, don’t talk to Facebook or Instagram."
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