Born to be Weill-ed

Perverse logic, logical perversity. Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer mark their first high profile return to the live stage since 1996 not with material stockpiled for their forthcoming album, but with a selection from the Kurt Weill songbook. The pair, plus guests, will be staging Ich Liebe Dich (“I Love You”), a celebration of Weill’s work, in the Tivoli Theatre as part of the Eircom Dublin Theatre Festival. The show, which encompasses songs from 1920s Berlin to the Broadway musicals of the ’40s, will also be filmed and recorded for a live album.

“Last year they approached us to put on a version of the opera Happy End,” Gavin Friday explains, “and I said, ‘Nah, you must be jokin’, it’s too detailed, it’s too complex, a whole series of singers.’ And then they approached us in spring and said, ‘Well anything you wanna do based around Kurt Weill’s work’. And just on down time we started jammin’ arrangements, and I went, ‘This is actually a good way to break the silence: we’ve been threatening to play live, let’s go out and really find what we’re about’.”

For the show, Friday and Seezer have put together an ensemble that includes Michael Blair, the percussionist best known for his contributions to the blue-lit soundscapes of Tom Waits’ mid-’80s classics Swordfishtrombones and Raindogs, and also long-time Friday/Seezer collaborators such as multi-instrumentalist Renaud Pion and English avant garde/classical cellist Julia Palmer. The line up is completed by Irish jazz veterans Dave Fleming on double bass and guitarist/slide/banjo player Des Moore.

For Gavin Friday, Ich Liebe Dich is the fruit of a fascination that stretches back to the days of The Virgin Prunes.

“Agnes Bernelle came to see the Virgin Prunes in 1978 in McGonagles,” he recalls. “Guggi at the time was quite friendly with her daughter Antonia, and her mother dropped along to see what this young punk band were doing and was quite enthralled. Aggie invited us up for tea the next afternoon. So we went up for tea and she opened a few doors in my head and blew my mind. She started playing old recordings of Lotte Lenya way back from the late ’20s/early ’30s, and threw a load of books at me and said, ‘Learn young man!’ And it was the start of a great friendship on two levels, with Agnes and with Kurt Weill and Brecht.”

But after a decade of shaking off the cabaret trappings with albums like Adam & Eve (pop for aesthetes) and Shag Tobacco (after-hours at the century’s end), going back to Kurt Weill after all this time seems like something of a stylistic U-turn.

“It doesn’t fit and yet it fits totally,” Friday admits. “In a weird way this is totally logical. When we were told that we could bring in proper musicians and record and film it, it was almost like finally putting the nail in the coffin. Three weeks later we’re gonna be doing little gigs playing our own new stuff. So it’s as awkward and idio-centric as anything I ever do but that’s the way we do it. I hate the snobbery of so-called arts; I’m determined to make it so that if you’ve never heard of Kurt Weill you’ll be able to relate to this. It won’t be just art for art’s sake. It will be a headfuck.”

Or, if you like, an artfuck. Which, with the imminent re-release of The Virgin Prunes’ back catalogue on Mute, brings us full circle. And given Friday and Seezer’s activities over the past couple of years – scores for The Boxer and Disco Pigs, their collaboration with Pat McCabe on Emerald Germs Of Ireland, Friday’s narration of Peter & The Wolf – Ich Liebe Dich seems positively orthodox. Throw in Gavin’s appearance on the latest Howie B album, plus his and Seezer’s collaboration with Bono on ‘Children Of The Revolution’ from Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, and you have further evidence that the pair aren’t totally adrift from pop culture.

“Ich Liebe Dich is so on the Moulin Rouge trip,” Friday says. “I met Baz at the weekend and he was quizzing me about it, and I says, ‘I wanna bring people on a fantasy, a trip for two hours, sorta tiddle them and fuck with their brains at the same time’.”

Ich Liebe Dich runs in The Tivoli from Monday October 8th to Sunday 14th except Wed 10th