Gavin friday biography

"I once believed in Jesus, now I can't believe in rock' n' roll." ex-Virgin Prune Gavin Friday may have his cross to bear, but this gadfly of the Irish rock scene isn't one to let the grass grow under his feet...

The city of Dublin is renowned for its poets, writers and musicians, with James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Van Morrison, Bob Geldof and U2 among its favourite sons. Another product of that tradition is maverick performer, wordsmith and entrepreneur Gavin Friday. A long‑standing friend and associate of Bono, Friday began his influential career by forming the Virgin Prunes in 1978. After achieving cult status throughout Europe, the Prunes dissolved in 1985, and Friday entered various musical collaborations with the likes of The Fall, Coil, David Ball and Maria McKee. Very much the renaissance man, Friday pursued a parallel career as an artist, culminating in an exhibition of his paintings, I Didn't Come Up The Liffie In A Bubble, in 1987.

Friday's next project was the Blue Jaysus club in Dublin, a cabaret/vaudeville‑style venue which he created. Through the club, Friday met the man who was to become his musical writing partner, Maurice Seezer. The duo signed to Island Records, and in 1989 released their debut album, Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves. A self‑contained collection of brooding torch songs, Each Man... established the Friday/Seezer penchant for piano/vocal compositions punctuated with accordian and bass wind instruments.

I actually hate the word 'demos', because I don't find they work — if you capture something, then you want to keep it.

The follow‑up album, 1992's Adam'n'Eve, drew upon Friday's adolescent pop influences and glam rock aesthetics, reinforced with production by Dave Bascombe and mixing from Flood. Followed by tours in Europe and America, the duo explored another avenue of music by assisting in scoring the soundtracks for both Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Jim She

Musical artist

Gavin Friday (born Fionán Martin Hanvey, 8 October 1959) is an Irish singer and songwriter, composer, actor and painter, best known as a founding member of the post-punk group The Virgin Prunes.

Early life

Fionan Hanvey was born in Dublin and attended primary and post-primary schools in Ballygall, a neighbourhood on Dublin's Northside, between Finglas and Glasnevin. When he was fourteen years old and living on Cedarwood Road, between Finglas and Ballymun, he met Bono and Guggi at a party to which he had not been invited. Bono said: "We caught him trying to steal something of the house. Classic teenage stuff... but we became friends."

Career

Friday was a founding member of the post-punk group The Virgin Prunes and has recorded several solo albums and soundtracks.

In 1986, after the demise of the Virgin Prunes, Friday devoted himself to painting for a while, sharing a studio with Bono, Guggi and Charlie Whisker. This resulted in the exhibition Four Artists – Many Wednesdays (1988) at Dublin's Hendricks Gallery. He, Guggi and Whisker showed paintings, while Bono opted to exhibit photos taken in Ethiopia. Friday's part of the show was entitled I didn't come up the Liffey in a bubble, an expression often used by his father.

His main collaborator between 1987 and 2005 was multi-instrumentalist, Maurice Seezer. They signed to Island Records in 1988 and released three albums together, before parting with the company in 1996. Later, Friday and Seezer composed the scor

More so than any other performer associated even tangentially with the lineage of goth, Dublin’s Gavin Friday (born Fion n Hanvey in 1959), the driving force behind the infamous Virgin Prunes, has evolved aesthetically to a level far beyond the white-face-and-candles shtick of his contemporaries. Like Leiber/Stoller or Bacharach/David, Friday and his keyboard-playing partner Maurice Seezer splice art song and pop music together seamlessly.

Drawing on everyone from Jacques Brel (“Next”) and Bob Dylan (an inspired reading of “Death Is Not the End”) to Oscar Wilde (whose words were used for the title cut), Friday and Seezer create an evocative cabaret of twilights and lowlifes on Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves. Producer Hal Willner (whose résumé includes albums by Tom Waits and Marianne Faithfull and tributes to Kurt Weill and others) understands Friday’s vision perfectly, framing his warm, smoky baritone with such expert session players as bassist Fernando Saunders and guitarists Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot.

If Each Man errs on the arty side, Adam’n’Eve swings in the opposite direction, aiming for the charts with dexterous aplomb. “King of Trash” is a bump-and-grind homage to Marc Bolan, while “I Want to Live” and “Falling off the Edge of the World” are everything a pop song should be: big, grand, emotional and, in the latter case, political. Those two numbers also benefit from backing vocals by Friday’s Dublin neighbor, Maria McKee. With the exception of the last few cuts, the eleven tracks are infused with a sense of glee that borders on dementia. Willner, Flood and Dave Bascombe share production duties, leaving just enough room in Seezer’s over-the-top arrangements for Friday’s growls and whoops.

Friday spent much of ’93 and ’94 writing music for films, including “A Thousand Years” for Annie Ross to sin