Rosella Bottone of Italy’s Jam Magazine talks to Gavin Friday in Dublin and wonders: “While preparing for my interview with Gavin Friday, I’m not sure what kind of person to expect: The austere dark Germanophile who for some reason is on the cover posing as a corpse wrapped in the Irish flag, or the sensitive interpreter who sings these songs, or a more recent version of the desecration that was Friday in the late 70’s when he made his Virgin Prunes the most radical expression of the British new wave, or the bon vivant who two years ago celebrated his fiftieth birthday by renting the Carnegie Hall in New York and rallying U2, Lou Reed, Courtney Love, Laurie Anderson, Scarlett Johansson and other celebrities. It takes just a few words to realise that my interviewee embodies all these attributes, but in a much more elegant and generous way than I expected. “
Gavin: “So through music I was introduced to literature, expressionist cinema, and the avant-garde. When I publish an album I want to create a universe, but at the same time I want to put together imagery of suggestions. And you can ignore them, but they’re still there. I like the idea that someone has ‘catholic’ in his hands and reads Requiem for the Fallen and thinks ‘what the hell is that?’ and then goes to buy a book or it brings them to something else.”
“Music allows you to communicate things that you can not express in other ways. That’s one thing I’ve always done. If I had not had the Virgin Prunes when I was 18 I would have died. I had so much anger to express, I couldn’t have managed without a way out.”
Gavin Friday Blog 