Friday on my mind
Gavin Friday is among the most artistically ambitious Irish musicians of the past thirty years. With a superb new album, entitled catholic, under his belt, he talks about the death of his father, the breakup of his marriage, the end of the Prunes, working with Naomi Campbell, Courtney Love and Cillian Murphy – and the making of his finest album yet…
Olaf Tyaransen, 12 May 2011
Speaking of which, last year Courtney Love told me she was scared of you.
“She’s scared of me?” he laughs.
She said that she found you intimidating when she played at your fiftieth birthday party/concert in Carnegie Hall.
“Unbelievable! She’s like a machine gun. But she’s so fucking smart. And so learned. I mean she fucking quotes Shakespeare, Yeats, Joyce, fucking you know Scorsese scripts’d be flying out. She is full-on and she’s fucking great. She really is what she is. Like, she wears her heart on her sleeve and shoots herself in the foot. I mean, there’s a similar thing there. I tend to really like full-on women. I think that’s why I got on well with Naomi. Naomi suffers no fools. She’d fucking box you out of it. And I get on really well… I say, ‘fuck off, no, we’re going out’. And we have that boxing match.
“I didn’t get to know Courtney until ‘94. I know that she saw the Prunes and was here in Dublin, and I think I’ve a vague memory of this American girl who used to write for the Hot Press and hang out in Trinity and drive us all mad. I didn’t know that was Courtney Love, but I had this image and then I meet her with Michael Stipe in Las Vegas at a U2 show and we got on like a house on fire. But I give her stick.”
What’s happening next for you? Are you going to tour the album?
“Yeah, well I can’t take any of this for granted. Eh, I’m in touch with what’s going fucking going on in music and it’s very different. The whole business. I mean, I don’t even know if rock ‘n’ roll has the same poignancy to youth as it did when we were growing up. It’s all shifting, but I believe there’s always great music being made. But, we’ll see, we’ll see. I want to tour. I’ve missed that. So I’m going to do
festivals first.”
You’re playing at Electric Picnic.
“Yeah. I’m going to do a whole load of those bespoke ones around Europe from June, July, August, September. But it won’t be a catholic thing because I don’t expect anyone to walk into a tent and they’re all having a fucking party there and I’m sitting there singing ‘Blame’ or ‘Lord I’m Coming’ (laughs)
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