02-05-2025
Gavin Friday: ‘I wouldn't wish Bono's success on anybody'
Gavin Friday first demanded attention with the Virgin Prunes, the Dublin art rock band whose sensibility was more Jacques Brel than the blues. They shook audiences in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including one infamous appearance on The Late Late Show. 'They are unique and different,' said a clearly nervous Gay Byrne by way of introduction. He wasn't wrong. Friday often wore dresses and make-up before such things were popular or profitable.
Despite the Virgin Prunes' cult success, Friday left the band in 1986, turning first to painting before recording three albums with the multi-instrumentalist Maurice Seezer. One of these, Shag Tobacco, came perilously close to housing a genuine hit when the gorgeous Angel was included on the soundtrack to the Baz Luhrmann-directed film Romeo and Juliet.
Born Fionán Hanvey in 1959, Friday's dance card has also included a spot of acting, popping up beside Cillian Murphy in both Disco Pigs and Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, and he and Seezer have composed several high-profile film scores including their Ivor Novello-nominated work on Jim Sheridan's In America.
He released a solo record, Catholic, back in 2011, which stood alone until last October's follow-up, Ecce Homo. Friday also hadn't played a headlining gig in over a decade, but remedied that with some recent European dates and two Irish shows, including a night at Dublin's Vicar Street venue last month. The gig reviews glowed.
Today we are talking over coffee and cigarettes in Friday's beautiful Rathmines townhouse, where he moved a few years back after an extended sojourn in Killiney. At his feet sits his constant companion, the 15-year-old dachshund Stan (the Man). Stan's twin brother Ralfie passed away 18 months ago and both of them are celebrated on the song The Best Boys in Dublin.
'Life got in the way,' Friday says of his recording hiatus. 'And whatever came around the corner.' He details many 'great musical adventures … Then my ma's Alzheimer's got really bad and you just have to start looking after her.' Ecce Homo is dedicated to Anne Storey Hanvey, who died in 2017.
Talk turns to Friday's 'part-time job' as U2's creative consultant. He and Bono have been close friends since they were teenagers. Ecce Homo's elegiac When the World Was Young is dedicated to the U2 singer, and the visual artist and fellow former Virgin Prune Guggi. Bono, Guggi and the Edge were all in attendance at Friday's Vicar Street gig and were surely as mesmerised by their mate's performance as the rest of us. Having advised U2 on the right moves for decades ('I'm their biggest bullshit detector'), Friday was also one of the creative minds behind their recent Las Vegas Sphere triumph.
'I wouldn't wish Bono's success on anybody,' he says. 'We all felt a lot of pressure putting the Vegas shows together. We didn't know it would work but that's the greatness about them. U2 are the most supreme gamblers in the world. They break rules to try something different.'
Friday has never feared an artistic flutter either. A previous 'musical adventure' and 'one of the most challenging things I ever did' was Drifting and Tilting: The Songs of Scott Walker at the Barbican in London. Walker, who recorded four peerless baroque solo albums before detouring into the avant-garde, directed Friday singing Jesse. 'It's about Elvis Presley's stillborn twin. Hence the name Elvis, his mother took the word 'lives' and turned it around.'
Friday's Ecce Homo, a phrase meaning 'behold the man' attributed to Pontius Pilate as he presented a bedraggled Jesus to the angry mob, details the makings of Friday from the teenager getting high off shoe polish in the Gary Glitter-quoting Lady Esquire, to discovering the delights of European culture on the road with the Prunes, his version of going to college, to songs for his dear departed mother in both Lamento and Amaranthus.
Stations of the Cross is dedicated to Sinéad O'Connor, whose singing on 1993's beautiful Bono/Friday co-write, You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart, should have won every award going. 'Stations of the Cross is not about Sinéad, although she was going to sing on it,' Friday explains, citing a plan formed before O'Connor's untimely death. 'When her son Shane passed I saw a black hole which sadly she didn't get out of. The media never took anything to do with her health into consideration, they wanted her to be that 'mad person' and then suddenly she's our Joan of Arc? I felt they weren't sympathetic when she was crying out, so I was annoyed at that but very moved by the public reaction on her death. We lost a true soldier.'
• At home with Bono: 'I've always felt like an impersonator'
Friday's current single The Church of Love brings everything full circle, toasting today's more open society, which perhaps the young Fionán dreamt of when he fashioned himself as Gavin Friday. 'Back in the day I wore a dress as a shield, but also as a threat. It was my way of saying, 'I'm a queer? Sure, but I'll kick your head in.' Those days are gone, now you see young 'Gavin Fridays' all over the place and you don't blink. You couldn't have imagined that back in the 1970s. I'm overjoyed, because they look great.'
So much has changed that Friday has recently come out, in casual style. 'Someone asked me, who's this 'Patrick' that you dedicated the title track to?' No one had ever asked be about my sexuality before. I just answered: that's my partner. Yes, it was a quiet way but no one cared. There's the old saying, if it walks like a duck … We were wearing dresses, and the lyrics? I mean, hello?'
The single's B-side is a cover of the 1989 Desireless Euro-hit Voyage, Voyage, sung in French of course, because it's Friday. 'It's Euro trash but I embrace it, I did that for a laugh and a love.'
Laughter and love sums up an artist enjoying his adventures. 'I'm suspicious of anyone that's forever happy but I'm content,' he says. 'I'm fortunate I'm able to do this stuff but I want to concentrate on Gavin Friday, I want to bring out another album soon and tour again. I feel really comfortable on stage and I haven't done it properly on my own in years. Yes, I'm really excited about that.'
