Culture That Made Me: Gavin Friday on Bowie, Brel, and Ginsberg
Gavin Friday has published a new version of Peter & The Wolf.
Gavin Friday, 64, grew up between Finglas and Ballymun in Dublin. In 1977, he co-founded the Virgin Prunes, and has released several acclaimed solo albums. He has created scores for Jim Sheridan films, as well as the In the Name of the Father soundtrack. In 2005, he starred in Neil Jordan’s film, Breakfast on Pluto.
His new edition of Peter & The Wolf, based on original illustrations by his friend Bono, is published by DK Penguin Random House. An animated version is available on the RTÉ Player.
Things radically took a turn in 1972 when I saw David Bowie for the first time on Top of the Pops. I went out and bought his album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a huge thing – spending £3.50 on a vinyl. Five Years is one of the great openings of any album ever. It's neo-apocalyptic, cockney jazz poetry coming at you. Bowie quickly became the meaning of life, almost god-like when you’re young and naïve. Bowie wasn’t just great and new music; it was very anti-hippie. He was the first pop star of the Seventies.
In May 1976, I saw Bowie live in London at Wembley. I was 16 years of age. I went on my own. I didn't tell me ma or dad. I got the boat and train over. I slept in the train station. It was the Isolar Tour. It opened with a Luis Buñuel movie, the famous one he made with Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. So I'm walking in, and I see this black-and-white movie where an eyeball is cut in half by a razor, and there was piped music by Kraftwerk. I’d never heard electronic music before. Then Bowie came out, wearing a waistcoat, and white shirt and holding a cigarette. Years later, I realised it was his cocaine era, but I didn't know then. I was expecting glam, and I saw this minimal, European, futuristic thing and it changed my whole perception. Every other band I saw visually then was crap.
RTÉ radio in the early 1980s did this phenomenal recording of Ulysses. There's a page early on where a character walks along Sandymount strand and the words on the page start mimicking the sounds and rhythms of the sea. As a 14-year-old trying to read it, I’m going, “What the hell is that?” But then as a 23-year-old, I hear the same passage on the radio and immediately know it's the sea coming in on the rocks. He was writing in 3D, writing smell, sound, vision, imagination. Hearing it helped to crack what the book was. Listen to James Joyce is my advice, and then read him.
Even though The Clash are cooler and better, I single out the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols invented punk. They didn't invent it the way the Ramones, Patti Smith and the punks in CBGB's in New York did, but it was that angst of a band and the look and the anger. Just look at 'Pretty Vacant' on Top of the Pops in early 1977. The fact they burnt out and broke up within 18 months of their first hit. It was the most organic punk, even though it’s showbiz.
I hated Bob Dylan when I was a kid. He was a dirty hippie. When you're a punk, anyone that smoked grass was evil. I never listened to him because I was a Seventies kid. Everything had to start in 1970. I was bigoted to the Sixties and the Fifties. In the Eighties, when I started learning that Jacques Brel and Kurt Weill are as punk as Johnny Lydon, and possibly even better songwriters than Bowie, I started listening to Dylan, and he blew my mind. I couldn't understand how a man in his early twenties could write with such knowledge and vision and about the games people play. He's phenomenal.
My granddad got me The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. I still have the copy. The Picture of Dorian Gray was the first novel I read properly. This sounds childish, but why it resonated as a 14-year-old is the Faustian thing of selling your soul to the devil. In a weird way, Bowie was that too – Ziggy Stardust, making a Faustian pact. That really got me.
Leonard Cohen might be better. Dylan is a bard, a travelling minstrel; he picks up on the smell in the air and writes about it, and love. Cohen has almost got an otherness. It feels spiritual. It’s got to do with his meditative way of life. When you're listening to Cohen, it has a religiousness about it, a higher being. You're hearing the words of a great Buddha, a great teacher.
Jacques Brel as a performer and an expressionist is a big influence. In early ’82, I was shown a VHS recording of his last concert in Paris in ’66. I was transfixed. It was in black and white. He spoke and sang in French. I didn't know what he was saying, but I understood everything. His recordings are so versatile. He would write the most vicious, political slurring thing against the government followed by a poem to the old people of the world or a children's song. It was ridiculous the amount of areas he jumped to, musically and thematically, with this incredible expressiveness, but not in an arty way. If you were in the front row, he would be spitting at you. It was raw and emotive.
Allen Ginsberg came to perform in Dublin’s Liberty Hall in 1993. He said: “Gavin, meet me on Saturday at 10 in the morning and bring me around parts of Dublin. I want to get the 19 bus to see the Ballymun Flats.” I didn't say a word to him about where I lived. He said, “On the way, I want to stop off and go to Russell St.” I knew Brendan Behan was born in Russell St. “Then I want to go to Davy Byrne’s pub where Patrick Kavanagh and Joyce used to drink. We can talk.”
It was a beautiful day. We were walking along the quays to see Kilmainham Gaol. All these new buildings were being built. I said, “Apologies, this is disgusting. Old Dublin is destroyed.” He said, “Don't be so silly. I live in New York. That in 200 years’ time will be a work of art.” Suddenly I was at school. He was constantly questioning me: “Why is it ugly, Gavin?” He was such an interesting man.
With Ginsberg’s poem Howl, it's like he imagined what was to come in America. It feels almost like a premonition of 9/11, and the way that America is going in on itself since then. In New York now, the amount of crazy people on the streets – it's almost like he was prophesying the fall of America.
