Virgin Prunes - Pagan Rituals from Ireland

Virgin Prunes, led by Gavin Friday (real name: Fionan Harvey, born in Dublin in 1959), were one of the most original acts to emerge from the new wave melting pot, as well as one of the most genuine expressions of rebellion against conformism and "normality" born in the punk era. In truth, their artistic vision only partially involved music, at least at first.
Virgin Prunes were, above all else, theatre: a hallucinated, aggressive cabaret aimed at exposing urban squalor by setting it against a visionary, blasphemous return to the pure "naturalness" of instinct.
Since music was only one aspect of their adventure - and perhaps not even the most important - their discography may at first glance appear sparse and confused, and on first listen like a jumble of ideas barely connected to one another, sometimes locked into obscure avant-gardism, sometimes open to folk, pop and the most demodé of singer-songwriter fare.

Virgin Prunes became internationally known with their first LP, ...If I Die I Die, from 1982, one of the cult records of post-punk and gothic rock. In reality their adventure had begun much earlier, back in 1977, through intense live activity that had made them famous for years, although their fame remained confined to their island, as a scandalous eccentricity. Their grotesque theatre, their pagan rituals, their orgiastic nightmares were far more than mere artistic expression: they were also a way of life.

The context in which the embryo of the future Virgin Prunes formed in the mid-Seventies was the Lypton Village, a collective of Dublin teenagers trying to escape the greyness of the Ballymun suburb, from a daily life split between school, religion (Ireland, the country where, to quote director Neil Jordan, "even the dogs cross themselves") and suburban squalor, taking refuge in music, art, and the eccentricity of "glam" manners and looks. Two childhood friends were the "leaders" of the group: Fionan Harvey and Paul Hewson, who, in keeping with the collective's "policy" of adopting odd pseudonyms, renamed themselves Gavin Friday and Bono Vox respectively. The "circle" also included the Evans brothers, Richard and David. While the latter, under the nickname The Edge, would go on to found, together with Bono, the most famous pop-rock band of the last twenty years, U2, the former - renamed Dik Prune - joined Gavin Friday, thus giving birth to Virgin Prunes, a name that in their slang meant the "freaks", the "different ones", the outcasts that "normal" people shunned or ignored. But the strange characters making up Gavin Friday's "gang" don't end there: there were two more brothers, Derek and Trevor Rowen, known in the group as Guggi and Strongman; and also Anthony "Pod" Murphy, Reggie "The Dog" Manuel (future manager of the band), and "Dave-id", namely David Watson, Danny Figgis who chose the pseudonym "Haa Lacka Bintii", and finally Mary D'Nellon, who would later join the bizarre crew.

All of them were Virgin Prunes, and at the start (1977), while England was burning under the screams of Johnny Johnny Rotten (and Ireland answered punk's call to arms in its own way with Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats and above all with the legendary Stiff Little Fingers), and further down in the most sordid underground Throbbing Gristle were spreading the gospel of industrial, they instead wandered half-naked through the streets of Dublin, with the two lovebirds Gavin and Guggi showing off their look halfway between dandy and caveman, stopping as if nothing were amiss in front of churches and votive shrines. And they also began performing and shocking audiences with their shows, strewn with blood, screams, sex, tribal dances, animist rituals and assorted paganism. Gavin and Guggi (with sporadic contributions from Dave-id) were the stars, the "singers", performers/actors/screamers. In the shadows, Dik and Strongman (officially guitarist and bassist) provided the soundtrack, made of noise, tortured and deformed sounds, or wild gallops driven at frantic tempos (Pod and Bintii alternated on drums), vaguely related to the contemporary dark-punk of Siouxsie. And, as was bound to happen when faced with "Virgin Prunes" like them, in three years of life and performances, Ireland's reactions ranged between disdain, rejection and sheer ignorance; not so their fellow artists, though: in 1978 Virgin Prunes opened the Dublin concert for the Clash, while the guru of industrial music Genesis P-Orridge supported and backed them. And then there were U2, who despite the success of their first concerts and first singles (1979) had certainly not forgotten their old friends. And so Virgin Prunes shared the stage with U2 at the Acklam Hall in Dublin in 1980, right as Bono and company were about to release their first album, "Boy".

A few months later, for the first time, Virgin Prunes set foot in a recording studio to record the EP Twenty Tens. Putting their music in order was certainly no easy task: yet the four tracks on this EP already stand out for their uniqueness within the post-punk landscape of the time, to which Virgin Prunes can certainly be linked (in particular to Pil and the early Einsturzende Neubauten), but within which their music already carves out a niche entirely its own: "Twenty Tens (I've Been Smoking All Night Long)", built on a fractured, stormy rhythm, turns Devo and Pere Ubu into music for demonic sabbaths; "Revenge" isn't a song, it's a séance. And it sends shivers down your spine; "The Children Are Crying" takes the theme of U2's first (legendary) hit, "11 O'Clock Tick Tock", slows it down and stretches it out to absurd lengths, entrusting it to Dave-id's deranged vocals. And finally there's the delirium halfway between tribalism and ambient music of "Greylight".

After another single, "Moments And Mine", Virgin Prunes signed to Rough Trade and embarked on an ambitious multimedia project, A New Form Of Beauty, comprising three singles (released respectively on 7", 10" and 12" formats), a live recording (on cassette), a book, and a video that would never actually be made. The three singles together contain a jumble of ideas from which genuinely brilliant moments often emerge, such as the three-part noise suite "The Slow Children", the absurd, dazed chant of "Sandpaper Lullaby" (complete with a "la la la" chorus), and one of the most evocative pieces of their Dadaist theatre, "Sleep/ Fantasy Dreams". And what about the spectacular "Come To Daddy", 10 minutes driven by a feverish, catatonic rhythm, pierced by every kind of guitar dissonance worthy of Sonic Youth's envy, while Friday and Guggi scream, rasp and "converse" with one another more deliriously than ever... The live album Din Glorious/A New Form Of Beauty 4 (1982) instead documents one of their concerts held at Trinity College in Dublin in November 1981, in which their tracks are mixed and distorted via tape according to the practice of avant-gardists like Nurse With Wound.

1982, however, is first and foremost the year of the release of their debut album, …If I Die, I Die. The fundamental contribution of Colin Newman's genius as producer helps the group find the right way to express their theatrical vocation in a dimension that from now on becomes wholly musical, a dimension in which the input of the more reluctant members, especially Guggi and Dave-Id, is inevitably sacrificed. And so Gavin Friday emerges as the now-undisputed leader, drawing all the spotlight onto himself, steering the album through occult ceremonies like the extraordinary, possessed recital that is "Decline And Fall", dark melodramas like "Bau-Dachong" and unrestrained dances like "Pagan Lovesong" (also a single) and "Baby Turns Blue", two authentic gothic-rock classics. His visionary lyrics, delivered in his raspy voice, and the nocturnal, diseased atmospheres woven in the shadows by Dik and Strongman lend every track an aura of genuine "magical" fascination: whether it's an irresistible, nonsensical, over-sentimental pop song like "Ballad Of The Man" (sung by Dave-id), or a violent invective like "Walls Of Jericho", which, alongside the frenzied "Caucasian Walk" and a chilling black mass like "Theme From Thought", closes the record on the raw, cruel and uncontrolled tones of their earliest work.

The band's golden period is fuelled by two side releases that dig deeper into the album's most arcane atmospheres. These are the EP The Faculties Of A Broken Heart and the mini-LP Heresy, split between a live side and a studio side: among the gems it contains, worth mentioning are at least one more deafening snapshot from their theatre of cruelty, the infernal "Rhetoric", and the brief ambient-folk interlude "Nisam-Lo".

A European tour follows, as do television appearances, and in short, a hint of (relative) fame follows too. And then? And then nothing — a sudden dissolution. It's 1984 when first Guggi and then guitarist Dik leave the group, which is increasingly becoming a creature made in Friday's own image alone. It's a shame, though, that the recording sessions for the second album, Sons Find Devils, overseen by Dave Ball of Soft Cell, come to a resounding nothing, and amid various problems with record labels the album will never see the light of day. 1985 brings only compilations: the mini-album Over The Rainbow, an anthology of rarities and unreleased tracks dating back to previous years, as ever split between decidedly experimental episodes — the most successful of which is "Red Nettle" — and pop follies like "King Of Junk": the video, named after the "ghost" album Sons Find Devils, shows live and backstage footage (the video for "Rhetoric" was directed by Coil, with whom Friday had collaborated the previous year).

Meanwhile, Gavin Friday has founded his own label, Baby Records, and has by now turned toward nostalgic, romantic singer-songwriter fare. And the new Virgin Prunes album, The Moon Looked Down And Laughed (1986), follows this direction. But the album is by now essentially a solo record of his; the official breakup of Virgin Prunes can no longer be postponed and is indeed announced at the start of 1987, ten years after their formation, following their final release, the live album Hidden Lie.

Dik, Strongman, Dave-id and Mary D'Nellon carry on for a while under the name Prunes, producing a commendable brand of dark-pop, while Guggi has turned to painting and Gavin Friday has embarked on an up-and-down solo career, championed above all by Bono, still his close friend to this day, despite the radically different paths taken by their respective bands. Friday also collaborates with musicians Tim Simenon and Maurice Seezer, together with whom he successfully scores the soundtracks for the films "In The Name Of The Father" and "The Boxer", both directed by Jim Sheridan.

The adventure of his Virgin Prunes was one of the most original and inimitable in the history of rock: a legacy that's hard to pick up, too bound to that era (1977-1982) and to their native land for anyone to really hope a band might emerge to carry their torch. All the more reason why their cult following survives intact to this day, bolstered by the invaluable work carried out by Mute, which around the end of 2004 reissued their entire catalogue on CD, having been out of print for years.

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