Gavin Friday is an Irish singer-songwriter, actor and painter, best known as a founding member of the post-punk group Virgin Prunes.
In the red-walled library of Gavin Friday’s home in Dublin city centre, a sacred heart hangs from the white ceiling. The glass totem was a welcome gift when Friday returned to the city centre about two years ago; it presides there as a reminder of his past and a lure for his future. Friday, now 64, began questioning Catholicism more than half a century ago, when he wondered why the teachers at his strict Catholic school, so-called servants of God, beat him and his classmates. This was just before witnessing the rise of glam and punk, before seeing Joy Division for the first time or crossing the Irish Sea to catch David Bowie in London. This was also just before he started the Virgin Prunes, his canonically transgressive post-punk band that scrambled perceptions of gender. And this was just before the acts of rebellion and questioning that created his singular career as a singer, songwriter, visual artist and actor merged into an astonishingly creative life. But there are some symbols and some stories that you can’t get over – or that you really don’t want to. ‘Maybe I haven’t grown up,’ he says beneath the sacred heart, winking. ‘Or maybe I am growing up.’
This alternation and tension animate Ecce Homo, Friday’s first album in 13 years and a captivating culmination of the life he has lived and the life he is now determined to build for himself. Driven alternately by thundering electronica reminiscent of the power of the Prunes and exquisite acoustics that reflect the beauty of his latest solo work and soundtracks, Ecce Homo is an ecstatic, no-holds-barred expression of anger and independence, of separating ourselves from the stereotypes of what we’re supposed to be, while recognising that our toughest battles are often the collective ones. There are love songs and fight songs, reflections on loss and reveries of nostalgia, hymns to solidarity and excoriations of the powerful. Friday reckons this is the most honest album he’s ever made; it’s also the most fascinating.