Gavin Friday

Gavin Friday served as lead vocalist and chief creative force behind the Virgin Prunes, widely regarded as one of Ireland’s most ambitious, challenging, and frequently uncompromising post-punk outfits. Departing the group in 1986, he stepped away from music entirely to focus on painting for eighteen months before reemerging alongside pianist Maurice Roycroft, whom he rechristened the Man Seezer. Their first joint effort, the 1989 album Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves, steered Friday toward a contemporary cabaret aesthetic while retaining the pronounced Bowie inflections in his singing. The follow-up, 1992’s Adam ’N’ Eve, proved considerably less compelling, applying a conventional modern-rock framework to his characteristically dark themes. Friday joined forces with Bono to pen three songs—two of them performed as vocal duets—for the 1993 motion picture In the Name of the Father. He shifted back toward cabaret textures on the 1995 release Shag Tobacco. In 1996 he and Seezer placed the track “Angel” on the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack and undertook additional film-related projects; that body of work reached its peak with the complete score Friday composed for The Boxer in 1997, issued early the following year.