Gavin Friday : The John Robb interview
The legendary former frontman of Virgin Prunes Gavin Friday has been prodding and shaping popular culture for years. In his teenage years in the late seventies he was the ringleader of the Lypton Village, an imaginary gang of punk rock glam freaks who wandered the streets of Dublin dressed to thrill and dressed to kill with dresses and make up that was the catalyst that helped reshape Ireland from a reactionary inward looking country into one of the most fast forward cultural spaces in the world in 2024.
The fact that the other band in the imaginary village was U2 may have put the spotlight on their gang with a fistful of napalm, but it was the Prunes and Gavin’s solo adventures that concerns us here. They were a groundbreaking post-punk band and an art movement. One of the two singers, Guggi, is one of the best-known artists in Ireland, and Gavin has helped to shape U2’s career as their art director and now has a new solo album out called Ecce Homo, which is co-written with David Ball from Soft Cell.
As expected, the album is a brilliant atmospheric work of death disco grooves where you can dance to the apocalypse and watch the lyrical barometer swing from love to hate. It’s a great late period work that pulsates from the dancefloor end of post-punk and is a triumphant work of the end-of-times electronica full of the echoes of the Prune’s own melodic adventures.
Gavin Friday : The John Robb interview Gavin talks to John Robb about his brilliant new solo album “Ecce Homo’ recorded with David Ball. He also talks about the Virgin Prunes, Dublin, Taylor Swift, William Shakespeare, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Lankum, The Murder Capital, Fontaines DC, Christianity, spirituality, the pagan, the quest, the Ogham stones and how post-punk changed the world.
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