Virgin Prunes

Punks were the bastard children of Ziggy Stardust, as were the Virgin Prunes. Without the Sex Pistols and David Bowie I wouldn’t be in music.
(Gavin Friday – “Happy Birthday Mr. Jones”, The Irish Times, 4/1/1998)

Virgin Prunes, the pagan face of Ireland. Farewell to the Emerald Isle, land of fairies and sprites, of a sky that moves with you and a stern, oppressive God. That, if anything, is just the surface. The liturgies of Gavin Friday and co. belong to the underground: a hell teeming with outcasts, ready to rise up from the bowels of the earth and unleash their ancestral charge of savagery. And yet, precisely because they're "prunes" (Dublin slang for "derelicts"), they're also "virgin", pure, because uncontaminated. Virgin Prunes, the clear flame of madness.
But let's start from the beginning: 1977. Not just any year for rock on the other side of the Channel. Punk fever was setting Albion's basements alight. But if London was burning, Dublin wasn't laughing. At least not the Dublin of the Virgin Prunes... Not exactly a rock band, but rather a multimedia artistic commune, active in one of the city's most creative social circles, the Lypton Village. Among the members of this coterie were also two young men named Paul Hewson and David Evans, later better known as Bono Vox and The Edge of U2. But from then on, the careers of Virgin Prunes and U2 would run parallel and almost complementary to one another: one underground, the other under the spotlight.

Following in the footsteps of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, the Prunes staged a chilling Dadaist cabaret, full of screams and blood, black masses and frenzied dances. Gavin Friday (real name: Fionan Harvey), singer, performer and composer, is the soul of the group, which also includes the other two vocalists Guggi (Derek Rowan, brother of Peter, the child pictured on the covers of U2's "Boy" and "War") and Dave-id "Busaras" Scott (a childlike character, left marked by a bout of meningitis contracted as a boy), bassist Strongman (Trevor Rowan, another of Derek's brothers), drummer Pod and guitarist Dik (Richard Evans, brother of The Edge). The early singles and EPs of 1980-'81 already contain, in embryonic form, the philosophy of their project: harmonising age-old folklore with avant-garde sounds drawn from the most cerebral branch of progressive rock (King Crimson, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator), from the glam pantomime of David Bowie and from the gothic tradition. A jumble of disjointed ideas and sounds, which would be distilled into their full-length debut, released in 1982.

Produced by Colin Newman of Wire, who was able to steer the band's experimental fervour towards more "musical" territory, "...If I Die, I Die" is a collection of mini-pieces immersed in an atmosphere of surreal chill. They'll call it glam-dark, and not without reason, since it manages to capture the essence of both genres. The band, now featuring Mary D'Nellon behind the drums, plays with an agitated fervour worthy of the best Banshees. Traditional instruments, such as the whistle and the bodhran, fuse with dissonant electric guitars, noise effects and sounds captured live and laid over electronic backing tracks. The theatrical impact of the whole operation is guaranteed above all by Friday, an otherworldly crooner, with his sinister, hallucinated litanies.
"...If I Die, I Die" is a nightmare. An overused term, one might say, but not in this case. The poetics of Virgin Prunes, in fact, draw explicitly on the Dadaist attempt to "rob the bourgeoisie of its sleep". Art is the instrument for outraging official respectability, provoking, shocking, disgusting. But it's also the key to unveiling truth and beauty ("A New Form Of Beauty" would be the title of another of their projects), buried under centuries of social convention and endangered by a dehumanising notion of progress (that fear of the future which, from Pere Ubu to Ultravox, has always haunted new wave). Hence the meaning of a renewed paganism, of an animalistic primitivism, reawakened, in a kind of redemptive ritual, to set humanity free. "...If I Die, I Die" is almost a concept album on this theme, developed across multiple registers: grotesque, solemn, deranged, apocalyptic.

The instrumental "Ulakanakulot" opens the doors of this heretical temple to the notes of a menacing medieval dirge. Recovering the device of "ceremony", already dear to forebears such as the Stooges, Doors and Amon Duul, and playing on sudden shifts in tempo, the Prunes trap the listener in an endless spiral of anxiety. There follows a series of glacial sketches, bordering on Brechtian cabaret ("Decline And Fall", with Friday's alienating declamation and a funereal choir in the background, or the raucous chant of "Sweethome Under White Clouds", scarred by the wails of a clarinet) and devilish sarabandes like the stunning "Caucasian Walk": a mocking Slavic dance whipped up into a frenzy, with a rhythmic call-and-response played off the beat, between the singer's neurotic screams and the raging percussion. It's the peak of the record's "tribal" violence and the most explicit nod to the ethno-psychodramas of PiL.
At other times, instead, Friday slips into the role of a hammy dandy, somewhere between the flimsiest Peter Murphy and a Brian Ferry on acid (the synth-pop of "Baby Turns Blue", with a Bowie-esque vocal underpinned by biting keyboard and guitar phrasing, or the almost conventional ballad "Ballad Of The Man", rendered sinister nonetheless by its overblown arrangement and surreal backing vocals). But it's just smoke and mirrors. The illusion of a calm that can never be fulfilled. Not least because the razor-sharp guitars of "Walls Of Jericho" are lying in wait, and Friday is ready to stage yet another metamorphosis: from the damned to the preacher (the lyrics reveal that the Prunes, at the very least, believe in the human experience of Christ — Friday and Guggi even spent a period with the group "Shalom"). In the nearly six minutes of "Bau-Dachong", meanwhile, it's like listening to an even more spectral version of Bauhaus, amid metallic guitar shudders, echoes, reverb and an ever more obsessive rhythm section, as befits the dogmas of dark-punk.
"Theme For Thought", meanwhile, offers up a passage from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad Of Reading Gaol", whose decadent aesthetic and fierce anti-conformism the Prunes share. It's the final act, once again entrusted to Friday's melodramatic baritone, over which his bandmates' demented wailing is layered, as if to underline that streak of hysterical infantilism which is another leitmotif of the record.

The 1990 CD reissue added to the tracklist the manifesto of the group's "naturalist" creed, namely the Arabic-tinged goth-dance of "Pagan Lovesong", in which — in the most classic of role reversals — the pagan/blasphemer becomes a privileged creature, able to see colours invisible to other men and to live in a perpetual dream state. The track had originally been released as a 7-inch single in 1982.

The Virgin Prunes' cabaret kept its doors open until 1986, growing ever more surreal, ever less profitable. Then the band would scatter, and Friday would follow other, more lucrative paths. But the sonic shock of "...If I Die, I Die" would continue to reverberate in the years that followed. And who knows — perhaps even the protagonists of the 2000s new wave revival owe something to these old Irish fauns.

Special thanks to Monica Melissano ("Irish Rock History" — Auditorium, 1996) for some valuable information.

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14/11/2006