Gavin Friday: Thief of My Heart

Posted in Kiss Me I'm Irish, Music, Retrovirus |

It would prove to be very difficult to figure out who Gavin Friday really was for some time. The Internet was only limited to bulletin boards, so it wasn’t as easy as just Googling his name. Music magazines were also scarce in my area, and Alternative Press was probably the only way I would ever discover anything of interest (sadly, I never read about him there, either). So I had this exceptional record by what seemed like an anonymous artist, and it was truly eating away at me! Due to no further clues of a discography, I had to preoccupy my time with other obsessions, and come back to that one when hopefully more information would surface. It was truly a cold case for at least a year.

Then one night (I believe it was yet again in the winter, but in the beginning of 1993), Peter Gabriel was hosting 120 Minutes on MTV. Well, I always liked Peter, so of course I watched it (even though it was a Sunday night and I had to go to school the next day)! As I’m barely keeping my eyes open (and trying not to awaken any of my family), Peter introduces the last video of the night by the “. . . ex-singer of the Irish band, Virgin Prunes” . . . and it was Gavin Friday!

I had no idea he was a previous singer of any band, let alone Irish, too! They played the video for “King of Trash” from his new album Adam ‘n’ Eve. My jaw pretty much hit the floor! Not only was this a new song, I finally got to see what he looked like. . . and then I really fell in love!

He reminded me of a cross between Bono and Morrissey, but dressed better than both of them! He was very theatrical, too. There was so much charisma shooting through that TV screen, that I was truly beguiled! I had to have this new album! It proved to be very hard to find, but I finally did almost a year after that (and it was on cassette, which by then, was just starting to become extinct).

I listened to the tape until it melted in my cheap GPX brand Walkman. I couldn’t find it again until after I was out of high school and managing a shitty local record store, so I was able to special order it. This was around 1995, and in that shipment from Island Records, they included ads for upcoming releases, and Gavin Friday’s Shag Tobacco was coming up within the next six months. (Unfortunately, the place went out of business before then, so yet again, this was tough to find!)

At this point, I had bought some lame Goth book and compilation just because Virgin Prunes’ “Pagan Love Song” was on it. I was totally obsessed with that song, and obsessed with finding anything by them! Virgin Prunes proved to be harder to track down than Gavin’s solo work (I am still trying to track it all down, and have been marginally successful at finding stuff by a band that had no American distribution). I ended up ordering Shag Tobacco from a pretty awesome store that was in a really shitty neighboring town.

This particular store had a basement full of stuff that was disorganized and random, unlike the showroom on the main floor. You were allowed to go down there and shop, but it was a real word-of-mouth, speakeasy kind of experience. . . they didn’t let the public know about their dungeon of treasures! So when I went to pick up Shag Tobacco, I ventured into that no-man’s land underneath the store, and spent hours scouring the chaos for a golden nugget. It proved to be successful, as I found two Virgin Prunes records in that voyage, those being A New Form of Beauty 3 EP, and The Moon Looked Down and Laughed. When I got home, I was pretty much inseparable from my stereo. . . I listened to my treasures until friends came by and dragged me out of the house!

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