Gavin Friday is in a reflective frame of mind. You get like that, he says, when you’ve reached his age and experienced the inevitabilities of life: love and loss, worry and relief, contentment and heartache. No one is untouchable, he implies, as he sips tea from a delicate cup and eats a posh sandwich at an upmarket hotel in Dublin. It is the day before his 65th birthday, and he looks as distinctive as ever, part punk, part model, a human switchblade sheathed in designer finery.
Friday, who was born Fionán Hanvey, is about to release his new album, Ecce Homo, and will shortly begin a tour that will include shows in Dublin, Europe and, he hopes, the United States.
Ecce Homo is not just the best record of his significant solo career but also an account of a life less ordinary. The songs are bracing electro-shock jolts that join the dots between the Virgin Prunes, his boundary-shattering band from the 1980s, and his more-nuanced film-soundtrack work.
The lyrics trace his life from growing up on Cedarwood Road in north Dublin with childhood friends such as Derek Rowan, who become the artist (and fellow Virgin Prune) Guggi, and Paul Hewson, aka Bono, of U2, to proclaiming his sexuality and mourning the deaths of his mother (Anne Storey Hanvey, one of the people to whom the album is dedicated) and of Sinéad O’Connor.
The song that spurred such recollections was the easiest one to write, Friday says. When the World Was Young, which is dedicated to Bono, Guggi and Lypton Village, their teenage collective of glam-rock and punk-inspired misfits who sparked each other’s imaginations, ponders the nature of friendship (”Ol’ troubled me meant the best for you”) and how life went stratospheric (”The lights, the shining lights away from Cedarwood”).
“It’s reminiscing but not in an overtly emotional way. I was looking around at how great the young kids of my friends are, and how they’re all turning into successful artistic adults,” he says. “And then I asked myself, ‘What was probably the most beautiful thing we had as kids?’ I’m talking 13, 14, 15, 16. We had this great camaraderie, this friendship, and we actually believed in crazy things – ‘Of course you can do this, so let’s do it.’ It wasn’t an easy place back then to go out and be the Virgin Prunes or U2.”
Friday has managed to recall formative days while avoiding teary sentimentality. It helps that the music is mostly as hard as compacted ice, but there is also no denying the tenderness he has for the past. Ecce Homo is littered with autobiographical references, its songs triggered by his memories.
Lady Esquire is a sly allusion to the 1970s brand of shoe polish that kids sniffed for a few pennies a go (”We’re on the hill near the Seven Towers. Hey, man, do ya wanna see the buildings dance?”).
Amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding) is particularly meaningful. Named after the flower loved by his mother, the song includes the final voice message she left him (”Happy birthday, Fionán”), the dramatic arrival of Alzheimer’s (”Gone to a place, a place unknown, your bad brains and broken bones. The lights are on, no one’s home”) and a snippet of the 19th-century song Daisy Bell. “Her favourite song in the world was ‘Daisy Daisy, give me your answer, do.’ I sang it at her funeral,” he says.
Friday’s father died during the making of Catholic, his 2011 album. “My mum was never really the same after he died. Around 2016 I just knew that Alzheimer’s had moved in. It was hard. I have two brothers that live here and one brother that lives in America. We worked a system where we’d be around her a lot, but when it got worse we had to bring in carers, beautiful Philippine ladies. And then we’re living with that in the house.
“It was soul destroying, seeing the woman disappear as she was still there. The soul goes. The eyes go. How do you explain the fact that people look the same, they’re kind of there but not there?”
She was a goth fan, he recalls. “She was making all these clothes for the Virgin Prunes – and also, whenever Siouxsie and the Banshees were on the telly, she’d shout up the stairs, ‘Siouxsie’s on – quick!’ That kind of memory comes back to you over 40 years later when she’s got Alzheimer’s.”
Friday is aware that his mother understood him as a young man much more than his father did. It’s complicated, he says. To try to loosen the knots you need to look at things from a different perspective. “When you’re older you should do that, because you can’t blame just one person. My dad’s dad died when he was six. It was during the second World War, and to have no man in the house and all of that was difficult.
“A lot of men didn’t know about affection, and that’s interesting, because when you look at When the World Was Young, which is sort of a love tribute to young boys growing up, it’s also about three dysfunctional fathers’ relationships with their sons. That was probably the biggest bond subconsciously that myself, Bono and Guggi had. We didn’t know that at the age of 14, but we kind of knew we were the same. So my dad wasn’t there a lot, and my mum was the boss.” He understood his father better after he died, he says, “but let’s just say from the teenage years it was a war”.
If a young person wants to be called ‘they’, ‘them’ or whatever, what’s the big deal? Call them that. Call them whatever they want. They’re only growing up, only learning, only finding out who they are. People need to respect that
From the late-1970s to the mid-1980s, few people in Ireland knew how to react to Friday’s almost joyfully confrontational approach to the expression of his sexuality. Two years ago he told The Irish Times that wearing dresses from the age of 18 was “very much part of what we wanted to express … From the age of 12-13 I was bullied and beaten up, but when testosterone kicks in, at around the age of 16-17, your response to certain things is to say, ‘F**k you.’
“My reasoning was along the lines of, ‘You think I’m a f**kin’ queer? Well, I’ll f**kin’ show you!’ So even though it brought more attention to me, it became a shield, a defence mechanism. When people say we wore dresses, everyone conjures up images of Boy George or Bowie, but it wasn’t like that. It was closer to Rasputin with fishnets and Doc Martens.”
Friday’s sexuality is neither here nor there except for the fact that for the first time, via the promotional material for Ecce Homo – an intentionally playfully titled album – he acknowledges his “long, loving, and stable relationship with another man”. He says he merely replied to a question put to him by the American journalist enlisted to write the press release. “No one had ever asked me, but he did, and so I answered.”
The album’s opening song, Lovesubzero, which is dedicated to his partner, Patrick, is a response to the heterosexual perception of gay love as “colder … It’s actually the warmer love,” he says. He shrugs his shoulders. “I mean, who cares?”
Another song, The Church of Love, embraces Friday’s gender-fluid aesthetic. “Here comes King Princess. I told you not to wear that dress,” he sings. “The love that dared not speak its name now is the love that knows no shame.” You sense that his anger has morphed into a blend of simmering resentment and embrace of changing attitudes.
It’s troublesome for any young person to experience intolerance at any level, he says, “even though it’s less so in this era. But if they want to be called ‘they’, ‘them’ or whatever, what’s the big deal? Call them that. Call them whatever they want. They’re only growing up, only learning, only finding out who they are. People need to respect that.
“But, to get back to the press release, the guy just asked me the question, and when he sent the finished work I read it and went, ‘Why not?’ I just thought, ‘Why not support people?’”
Waiters are circling, and the tea has long since gone cold. There has been scant mention of Friday’s close friends in U2, for whom he has been a creative consultant for almost 40 years. That omission is deliberate. “They’re working on an album. They’ll disappear into the making of it, the writing of it. I’m much more involved when something is happening, so when they come back I’ll be called in,” Friday says.
Then he puts on his coat and readies himself to step outside for a quick smoke before he gets into a taxi. “It’s a different thing when you’re older, isn’t it? I think if I hadn’t experienced the Virgin Prunes I might have died. I might have gone to London and ended up on drugs or something or got Aids. I don’t know, of course, but I know this: the Virgin Prunes were a great shield.”
Ecce Homo is released via BMG on Friday, October 25th. Tour dates will be announced on gavinfriday.com
