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Tues 8th April Gavin Friday
Tickets on sale Fri 1st Nov at 10am
https://www.ticketmaster.ie/artist/740930?venueId=199411
In celebration of his new album ECCE HOMO released on BMG Records on 25th October. Friday will perform an intimate show at Dundalk’s Spirit Store on Tuesday 8th April and a long awaited hometown show at Dublin’s Vicar Street on Thursday 10th April.
Friday’s first solo show in his hometown since November 2011 is not to be missed.
“Gavin has developed into an exceptional singer and he is also a brilliant performer with a deep and fearless understanding of the theatrical side of the rock'n'roll circus”- Niall Stokes, Hot Press
On the subject of his return to the live stage Friday remarked, “Performing ‘live’ is probably the place I feel most comfortable with myself - it's been an age and I cannot wait to get back on stage especially now that you've heard Ecce Homo - ‘live’ you can see it, smell it and let it kiss you”.
Tickets go on general sale on Friday 1st November at 10:00 with exclusive presale access for gavinfriday.com subscribers from Wednesday 30th October at 10:00am.
ECCE HOMO:
In the red-walled library of Gavin Friday’s home in downtown Dublin, a sacred heart hangs from the white ceiling. The glass totem was a housewarming gift when Friday returned to the city’s centre about two years ago; it presides there like a reminder of his past and a lure yet toward his future.
Friday, now 65, began to question Catholicism more than a half-century ago, when he wondered why the teachers in his strict Catholic school, so-called servants of God, would beat him and his classmates. This was just before he witnessed the rise of glam and punk, before he saw Joy Division for the first time or snuck across the Irish Sea to catch David Bowie in London. This, too, was just before he started Virgin Prunes, his canonically transgressive post-punk band that scrambled perceptions of genre and gender. And this was just before the acts of rebellion and interrogation that have crafted his singular career as a singer, composer, visual artist, and actor merged into an astonishingly creative life. But there are some symbols and some histories you can’t outrun—or really don’t want to. “Maybe I haven’t grown up,” he quips beneath the sacred heart, winking. “Or maybe I am growing up.”
That toggle and tension animate Ecce Homo, Friday’s first album in 13 years and an engrossing culmination of the life he has lived and the life he is now determined to make for himself. Driven alternately by thundering electronics that recall the power of the Prunes and exquisite acoustics that reflect the beauty of his most recent solo work and soundtracks, Ecce Homo is an ecstatic and unbound expression of anger and independence, of severing oneself from stereotypes of what you’re supposed to be while also acknowledging that our hardest battles are often our collective ones. There are love songs and fight songs, reflections on loss and reveries of nostalgia, anthems for solidarity and excoriations of the powerful. Friday thinks it’s the most honest album he’s ever made; it is also his most riveting.
Ecce Homo began more than a decade ago with a surprise email from Dave Ball, the Soft Cell cofounder who produced Virgin Prunes 40 years ago.
They hadn’t seen each other during that long span, but Ball asked if Friday wanted to conspire on a cover of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” for Alan Vega’s 70th birthday. For several years, they bounced ideas for other songs back and forth via email until Friday finally visited him in London for a series of studio sessions. They wrote the bulk of Ecce Homo’s music together, their interpersonal dynamic resulting in tracks that moved freely between disparate emotional ends.
Friday, though, wanted to make it all bigger, to drape the songs in the finery and grandeur he’d indulged with his soundtrack work. He did that back in Dublin with a cast of familiar collaborators including Michael Heffernan, as he also cared for his ailing mother, then suffering the final stages of Alzheimer’s. Enraged by the rise of international strongmen but inspired by a long, loving, and stable relationship with another man after a prolonged divorce, Friday built Ecce Homo as a monument of and to his own emotions. In early 2020, he was ready to mix it when Covid-19 arrived. He put it down for two years, vowing to revisit it only when he could make a little more sense of the world. His mother died, as did Hal Willner, one of his closest collaborators, and one of his two beloved dogs, Ralf. Hard seasons, all around.
That difficult gap seemed to supercharge Ecce Homo, enhancing not only its sense of deserved indignation but also amplifying the tenderness and love that undergird so many of these songs. In the former category, the title track is a pulsing, pulverising menace, its streaks of florid noise and walls of hard-edged rhythms squaring up against enemies of inclusion and liberty. He throws the words of Pontius Pilate back at our persecutors, promising to “Fight fire with fire/We can walk on water”
over warped gospel harmonies. “Lamento” summons similar betrayal from the personal rather than political vantage, Friday’s yearning voice rising to meet the little symphony that slowly circles beneath the track’s distant sequencers and acoustic guitars. He sings his late mother’s name here, Anne Storey, and samples her voice during “Amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding),” a hardcore electro browbeater that aims to dance the hardship away. Hurt comes from every side here, in every possible shape.
But the real core of Ecce Homo is a reaction rooted in hope and love, in seeing the struggles of the past and the possibilities of the future through the same unified gaze. Dedicated to longtime friends Bono and Guggi, and their youthful posse Lypton Village, the gorgeous and wistful “When the World Was Young” feels both like a sad goodbye to the past and a cheery hello for the kids who can remake the world right now. “Lady Esquire” celebrates teenage indiscretion, to watching buildings dance after getting high on shoe polish. “The Church of Love” shimmies away from the conservative and Catholic mores of old Ireland, relishing in rejection of hierarchies and sexual strictures. “Happiness is heaven,”
Friday sings, his own personal Bacchus. “And heaven is at our feet.”
The two most affecting songs might be about the loves of his current life. Opener “Lovesubzero” slowly rises from coruscant symphonic splendour to an unapologetic electronic ode to the partner who has helped set him free and find himself. It is an anthem of love, a dark disco tribute to the brilliance of romance and partnership. And then there is “The Best Boys in Dublin,” an unguarded paean to his pups, Ralfie and Stan the Man, who escorted him to many of these sessions. It is a short little tune, acoustic guitar and piano ensconced inside lush strings. Still, it is a stirring testament to finding comfort and strength wherever we can, to enduring in whatever way we must.
When Friday was a teenager, alienated from the Catholic church and looking for meaning, music became his godsend, his lifeline, his revelation. Or, as he calls it, “the release where I could bleed publicly.” He surmises it saved his life. Though it is rooted in so much loss, Ecce Homo advances that story of survival, of how we are always looking for what can ferry us into the next phase of our life. It is neither a happy album nor a tragic one; it is, instead, a bracingly honest thing, staring at both sides of a life and testifying to how it has been and how it may yet be.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Georges Quay, Dundalk, Ireland
Tickets
