Gavin Friday
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
He has been too long away from the stage, and even if his first solo show since 2011 doesn’t compensate for a gap filled with other work, it’s reassuring to see that Gavin Friday still knows how to command your attention.
Mere seconds after his intro music ends on Thursday night, Friday leaps into Lovesubzero, Ecce Homo (the title track of his most recent album) and The Church of Love. It’s clear that the days of mucky, bloodstained hands and the cathartic howls of his first (and only) band, Virgin Prunes, are long gone.
In their place is a svelte, sincere performer who channels Cabaret’s sweet-talking master of ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club, a shady vampire, and the voices of Leonard Cohen, Scott Walker and Jacques Brel.
Ecce Homo is a themed album that stitches together threads from his life: being bullied as a child, meeting his lifelong friends Bono and Guggi (“in old Ballymun”), glam rock, the Catholic Church, punk rock, Virgin Prunes, parents, sexuality. Its songs, which are the reason for Friday’s recent spurt of live shows, lay bare everything he has absorbed throughout his life, from predictable slings and arrows to the surprising salvation of love and music.
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There is occasional dissonance – a trip back to 1982 to revisit the Virgin Prunes’ Caucasian Walk causes more than several “excuse me” dashes to the bar – but mostly there’s a cohesive blend of layered avant-garde pop and the purposeful snap of Eurodisco/electropop.
It’s clear that Friday hasn’t lost his ability to throw a dart at certain things – as in The Church of Love’s “We pray in our own way, no pope, no Rome” lyric – but he tempers his pronouncements with a willingness to let the songs speak for themselves.
This homecoming show, which follows dates in Europe (including Utrecht, Porto and Lisbon), Britain (London) and Ireland (Dundalk), sees Friday as match-fit as one could hope for. Now and again he mentions that he’s 65, but there’s a wilful disregard for inflexibility as he throws shapes, hunkers down and lurches forward.
There is suppleness, also, in the four musicians on stage with him: Kate Ellis (cello), Carlsbad (vocals/guitar), Kevin Corcoran (keyboards, bass, programming) and Renaud Pion (bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet, among other instruments). If Friday is the focus, the musicians are the frame, and they serve each other perfectly across new songs such as When the World Was Young (which he dedicates to his Cedarwood Road friends “the boy from 140, the boy from 10”), Cabarotica, Stations of the Cross and Lady Esquire.
There is, thankfully, little overt nostalgia. A brilliantly caustic version of another Virgin Prunes song, Sandpaper Lullaby, is joined by Angel, Friday’s sole bona-fide hit from the mid-1990s, and a swooning Apologia, from his 1989 debut album, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves.
And then he gives a thumbs up and is gone, as singular a performer in 2025 as he was four decades ago.
