prolific.org

(Cleveland, 1996)

Twenty years ago today I met Gavin Friday for the first time. It was outside the Roxy club in Amsterdam. He was slightly overdressed considering the sveltering heat that afternoon, a little shorter than expected and completely charming. He let me in to watch him soundcheck for his show that night. I love watching musicians practice their craft and shape their show and no one’s more driven and meticulous than Gav.

I have lost count of how many times I’ve watched him soundcheck since then, how many drinks we’ve had and ciggies shared, how many afternoon chats over cups of cappuccino. There have been dozens of postcards, letters and faxes, a couple of hundred phone calls and e-mails, a thousand or more text messages. And art. The songs we love, the albums treasured, the films we’ve seen. It’s what we love to share. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, if you want to know Gavin, you listen to the songs he recommends. They tell you everything he doesn’t say.

I love being able to see the world through his eyes, to learn through someone who ’sees things differently’. The people he meets, the company he keeps, his ridiculously famous friends… he always has a story to tell. He is the most contrary, argumentative man you’ll ever meet and he’s taught this conflict-avoider to enjoy his verbal fireworks.

In return, I offer unwavering loyalty, a one-woman-PR-campaign, a familiar face in unfamiliar places, honest and informed feedback, my web-related skills, a 24/7 help desk, a personal Googlist and occasional snarky sideline commenter.

It is rare for artists and fans to connect and Gavin is a notoriously private man. Although I have been working with him since forever, and I ‘get’ where he’s coming from instinctively, it took fifteen years for me to think of him as a ‘friend’. But in the last five years I think we’ve finally got the measure of each other.

I can’t wait to see what the next twenty years will bring us.

Richard Harwood, Finghin Collins, Elizabeth Cooney, Carol McGonnell, Ian Wilson and Gavin Friday during rehearsals.

One more time before the new year I followed the music abroad, bringing me to a bitter cold Paris for a third time this year.

Though I found the second part of the concert, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a little hard going, I did enjoy Gavin Friday’s narration of Marquez’s ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’ as set to music by composer Ian Wilson better than I did the first time I saw it, in Brighton. It was the venue’s ‘recital’ setting, placing the musicians amidst the audience, that much improved the sound and intimacy. Gavin, hindered by the low lights and the yellow marker ‘popping’ on his print out, fluffed up a few times, but he also hit some sweet marks. Particularly the part of the text that goes ‘and the hidden strength of his heart popped the buttons on his shirt’.

Afterwards musicians, crew, friends – among which the lovely Fiachna O Braonain – and yours truly retired to a restaurant cellar where rustic food, sangria, wine, calvados and hearty laughter kept us warm, happy, handsome and quite, quite drowned.

Surrounded by Irishmen and women, I sometimes got a little lost – this Dutch fallen Prod doesn’t really ‘get’ the holy Host or Mise Éire, but it’s endlessly fascinating nonetheless and somehow I always feel more at home than I do amongst my own.

“While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and beauty of their drowned man.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez – The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, set to music by composer Ian Wilson. Performed at the at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris on October 9, 2008.

More pictures of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World

These are my links for September 30th through October 6th:

• Twitter Patterns –
• Kill your pet puppy – Great source of punk / wave singles downloads
• Drifting and Tilting – The Songs of Scott Walker – Gavin Friday – Official Site – "Gavin Friday will perform as guest vocalist at the world premiere of 'Drifting and Tilting – The Songs of Scott Walker', live performances of songs from Scott Walker's albums including Tilt and The Drift."
• Mealographer – record your meals, set goals, track your diet –
• gooseGrade – Let readers correct your spelling.
• Field Notes — “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” – Oh teh purty
• Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com – "The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community,"

I’ve finally redesigned my oldest website, gavinfriday.com. It’s kind of an in between thing, as the look of it will probably change somewhat once the next album is out, but I’m happy to have ditched the ten year old, dreamweaver-created and Blogger-powered mess that was there before I threw MT4 at it. There were moments I wish I hadn’t, I find MT4 almost impossible to get my head around, but I managed to sort of make it do what I want in the end. I don’t really build websites anymore. I’ve done content editing for the longest time and now tell real developers what to build, so you could say I was a little rusty.

The redesign is based on a rejected ‘heart’ design for a poster promoting the ‘Ich Liebe Dich’ shows in Dublin a few years back. It’s a really cool graphic, but the cross of the heart sticks out quite a bit which makes it heart to design around. I’m still not happy with the design, it is a bit of a compromise, taking into account feedback from friends, the client and my coding limitations. I am not keen on the font used for the ‘gavin friday’ header, or of its placement on the page. I think it would look better with a less ostentatious one. I also think there’s too little connection between the homepage and the rest of the site.

And there’s still much to do. Mr client was happy and I thought we were ready enough to launch, but I still got years of archived stuff to add to the database (Blogger export wouldn’t work and it needs careful filtering and rewriting anyway.) and lots of other things to add and improve.

It was all about the jewelry.

LOU REED, GAVIN FRIDAY, LAURIE ANDERSON, BABY GRAMPS, JENNI MULDAUR and BETH ORTON will be performing pirate ballads, sea songs and chanteys at the world premiere of Hal Willner’s Rogue’s Gallery Live in New York on May 2.

The concert, based on the double CD born on the sets of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, will be in support of ‘Arts at St Ann’s’. All proceeds benefit programming at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.

Programme:
6:30 pm Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres
8:00 pm World Premiere of Rogue’s Gallery Live
9:15 pm Dinner and dessert

Tickets range from ‘Co-Chair’, at $10,000 a table (10 tickets), to ‘Friend’ at $250 (1 ticket). To buy tickets contact Inga at 718.834.8794×11 or inga@artsatstanns.org (before April 20)

More information

Puppetmaker and musician Erik Sanko (Lounge Lizzards, Tom Waits, Lou Reed.) has created a puppet show called The Fortune Teller. He made the puppets and wrote the music with Danny Elfman. Pre-recorded narration courtesy of the great Gavin Friday.

The show opens at the HERE Theatre in New York on October 19th and will play through the 31st.

‘The Fortune Teller reveals a world of curiosities as seven unusual characters are invited to the estate of a late millionaire industrialist and informed they’ve been included in his will,’

The Fortune Teller
Created and Directed by Erik Sanko
Original Music composed by Danny Elfman and Erik Sanko
October 19-31, 2006 | Tickets ($20.00)

Bono has recorded the song ‘The dying sailor to his shipmates’ for a Chantey and Sea Songs tribute album, produced by Hal Willner.

Other artists involved in the project which is being recorded in various cities around the world with an all star line up including Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Gavin Friday, Bryan Ferry, Antony and the Johnsons, Loudon Wainwright III and Richard and Linda Thompson.

The album will be released on Epitaph Records in July 2006.

Source: U2log.com, GavinFriday.com (um, yeah, I’m blogging my own scoop.)

• HeraldNet: A charming Irish fable
  ‘Kitten has a Yoko-like fling with a beery rock singer (wonderfully played by the debauched Gavin Friday), which is interrupted by a subplot involving Irish Republican Army gun-running.’
  (tags: cinema movies review gavinfriday)
• Nine Horses – Snow borne sorrow
  Great new ‘David Sylvian’ album. I hate to be conservative, but I do prefer his less experimental outings. This is one he’s done with Steve Jansen and Burnt Friedman.
  (tags: music albums)
• ‘West Wing’ star John Spencer dies at 58 (Dec 16)
  Fuck. How did I miss this?
  (tags: actors television)
• Veggie black pudding a world first
  ‘Chevalier du Gôute-Boudin’ invents veggie black pudding.
  (tags: food vegetarian)

If you caught the recent Much Music U2 special on Canadian TV (‘U2 Dismantled’)… that was one of my pictures they used, full screen, in the Gavin Friday tour of Dublin section. Taken in Dublin in 1990. They must have got it from the website, or from the book if it’s in there. No credit, of course. But still cool.