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
Did you ever try therapy?
“I should have been in fucking therapy at ten (laughs)… imagine that, it would have been in shock treatment and everything. They did that to Lou Reed actually. Yeah, I went to talk to people. I usually fucking walked out because… it’s like you have to talk to somebody that you feel is as smart as you
or smarter.”
Instead, music became a form of therapy. All of these bittersweet experiences have fed both directly and indirectly into catholic. He likens the album to “waking from a deep sleep, of letting go and coming to terms with loss.” It’s by far the most reflective and emotional collection of songs he’s ever recorded.
“That just happened,” he says of the title. “I didn’t plan it. It’s not religious, but there’s a religiousness to the music. There’s almost like a mantra
prayer thing.”
Do you believe in God?
“Yes, I do. But I wouldn’t practise Catholicism. I mean, I’ve dabbled. I fought with God and the devil for years. But I do believe in God.”
The first songs on catholic began to flow soon after his father’s passing.
“Some sort of urgency to write a song came back to me. But I didn’t have any timeline. The week after he died, I was in working with Quincy Jones and Maurice Seezer, and Jim Sheridan on the 50 Cent film.”
Soon afterwards his creative partnership with longtime collaborator Seezer began to gradually
filter out.
“It wasn’t a direct fallout,” he explains. “We worked so intensely together from around ‘86, and really prolifically. And then when the Shag Tobacco period ended, we went even more intensely into soundtracks. But soundtracks are really fucking hard. Because you’re not the boss. You’re not the lead singer. You’re not even the fucking drummer. The director is the lead singer. The fucking actors are the band and you’re this glue that has to get in there. And also, the movies we were working on were very big; they were big budget Hollywood things and it’s a fucking cruel hard business.”
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