Gavin Friday

Biography

The exhibition that Dublin was writing about in 1988 was called “Four Artists – Many Wednesdays”. Three of the participants showed paintings; the fourth, Bono, hung photographs he had taken in Ethiopia. Gavin Friday’s section was titled “I Didn’t Come Up the Liffey in a Bubble”, an Irish saying about a person who knows how the world works, and a favourite expression of his father.

Fionán Martin Hanvey was born in Dublin on 8 October 1959 and attended schools run by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order, in the north of the city. Of his school years he remembered one thing: the only subject he liked was art, and the Brothers found that laughable and expected boys to become civil servants, carpenters or footballers.

At fourteen, living on the Northside of Dublin, he turned up at a party to which he had not been invited and met Bono and Derek Rowen, known as Guggi, a future painter and singer. Bono recalled that they caught the newcomer trying to steal something from the house: “Classic teenage stuff... but we became friends.” Hanvey is credited with coming up with the nickname Bono for Paul Hewson. The stage name Gavin Friday appeared at about the same time. At seventeen he founded The Virgin Prunes. He described the band as something between the Sex Pistols and David Bowie; critics saw it as the opposite of the political seriousness of their contemporaries on the scene, U2. The members often performed in women’s clothes, but Friday denied that it was a drag act: by his account he looked more like Rasputin on acid, and that was simply how they expressed themselves. In 1986 he left the band, and for a few more years, until 1991, it continued as The Prunes. By other accounts it broke up earlier, in 1985–1986. As early as 1983 he sang on the title track of In Strict Tempo, an album by Dave Ball, the keyboard player of Soft Cell. In 1984 he recorded three songs with The Fall, “Copped It”, “Stephen Song” and “Clear Off!”, singing on each alongside Mark E. Smith. That same year he took part in Scatology, an album by Coil.

After leaving The Virgin Prunes, Friday gave himself over entirely to painting for a time and shared a studio with Bono, Guggi and Charlie Whisker. The result was the 1988 exhibition. By his own account, he earned more from painting then than in six years with the label Rough Trade.

From 1987 his main collaborator for eighteen years was the multi-instrumentalist Maurice Roycroft, known as Maurice Seezer. In 1988 they signed with Island Records and released three albums, leaving the label in 1996. His first solo album, Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves (1989), was recorded with the producer Hal Willner: on it Friday turned to Édith Piaf, Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Jacques Brel, and sang Brel’s “Au Suivant” under the title “Next”. It was followed by Adam ’n’ Eve (1992) and Shag Tobacco (1995). The song “Angel” appeared on the soundtrack of “Romeo + Juliet” (1996). With the director Jim Sheridan they worked a great deal. For “In the Name of the Father” (1993) Friday, Bono and Seezer wrote the title song, “Billy Boola” and “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart”, sung by Sinéad O’Connor and nominated for a Golden Globe. For “In America” in 2003 they wrote “Time Enough for Tears”, sung by Andrea Corr; it too was nominated for a Golden Globe, and the film’s soundtrack for an Ivor Novello Award. There were also “The Boxer”, “Disco Pigs” and “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” (together with Quincy Jones).

In the summer of 1999, on behalf of the charity Concern Worldwide, he went to Kosovo to film a documentary about refugees; the result was “Three Wishes for Kosovo”, along with the exhibition Artists for Kosovo in Dublin’s Temple Bar. In 2003 Friday and Seezer recorded a version of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” in aid of charity, with drawings by Bono and his daughters; in 2022 an animated film was made from those drawings.

He made his screen debut with a small part in Kirsten Sheridan’s “Disco Pigs” (2001), and in 2005 played Billy Hatchett in Neil Jordan’s “Breakfast on Pluto”, singing in it with Cillian Murphy. In 2007 he narrated Gavin Bryars’s piece “Nothing Like the Sun”, a setting of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The album Catholic came out on 22 April 2011, Good Friday, and his sixth solo album, Ecce Homo, on 25 October 2024 on the label BMG; the producer was Dave Ball.