NEWS
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Great ship goes down a storm
Read more: Great ship goes down a stormOn July 2, Gavin and Maurice performed two songs at Hal Willner’s Harry Smith Project (Meltdown Festival). ‘Fatal Flower Garden’ was orginally performed by Nelstone’s Hawaiians in 1929. The second track was ‘When that great ship went down/Nearer to thee’, by William and Versey Smith, 1927. Mary Margaret O’Hara and jazz great Jimmy Scott guested on the second song.
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Harry Smith’s Project Meltdown; Royal Festival Hall, London: Star collective pays homage to folk collector
Read more: Harry Smith’s Project Meltdown; Royal Festival Hall, London: Star collective pays homage to folk collectorWHO IS Harry Smith, and why would Bryan Ferry, Beth Orton, Nick Cave and others want to pay tribute to him? The films shown at the start of the evening show an old man in New York. But pictures from the Fifties, when he completed his epic Anthology of American Folk Music, show a sharply dressed young man with shades and a goatee, cooler then than many of the rock names who last night played some of the old songs he salvaged from 78rpm obscurity. Beth Orton provided a personal interpretation of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Frankie” and Eric Mingus delivered…
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Harry Smith night in London
Read more: Harry Smith night in LondonMaurice and Gavin are doing a one off, 3 song performance of songs from the Harry Smith archive of American folk ballads as part of the Nick Cave organised Meltdown Festival in the Royal Festival Hall London on Fri. 2nd July ’99. The night in question is the brainchild of Hal Willner. (Producer of Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves) “Artists for Kosovo”, a slide-show co-ordinated by Mr. Friday himself, will open in Temple Bar, Meeting Place Square, Dublin. There are a number of fine artists involved who have contributed works for conversion into slides, such as Guggi, Perry…
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Concern for Kosovo
Read more: Concern for KosovoGavin is currently involved in getting a large charity project underway for Concern (a large charity organisation in Ireland) to raise money for the refugees in Kosovo.
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AIDS Candlelight Memorial Service ’99
Read more: AIDS Candlelight Memorial Service ’99Gavin and Maurice will perform Freddie Mercury’s ‘These are the days of our lives’ at the AIDS Candlelight Memorial Service in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday 23rd May. Gavin will be the first celebrity for RTE radio’s new classic FM station ‘Lyric FM’. Each week a celebrity rings and answering machine (pretending it’s a friend) and tells them about 3 cultural things that they should go see or do. On Thursday 22nd April, Gavin and Maurice will be interviewed in Galway by Pat McCabe for the Galway Arts Centre (Cuirt International Festival of Literature)
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Agnes Bernelle (76) dies in Dublin
Read more: Agnes Bernelle (76) dies in DublinOn Tuesday, February 16th, the actress and singer Agnes Bernelle died in Dublin, aged 76. She was born in Berlin in 1923, daughter of a renowned Jewish-Hungarian theatre impressario who gave Marlene Dietrich her first job. The family fled to London in 1933, and Agnes started her career in wartime refugee cabaret in the West End in London. In 1963 she moved to Ireland. In later years she performed with Phil Chevron and Marc Almond, and continued to stage one-woman shows in Dublin. Agnes was familiar with the Virgin Prunes through her daughter. She appeared in Gavin’s Blue Jaysus cabaret…
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Emerald Germs radio plays
Read more: Emerald Germs radio playsGavin, Maurice and writer Pat McCabe are collaborating on a collection of surreal Irish tales: a series of McCabe’s stories set to music. McCabe in a recent Hot Press interview: “It’s called Emerald Germs. The boys are doing the music for it, and we’re hopefully gonna do it with RTE radio, and maybe a CD after that. It’s a collection of 15 stories named after songs, some of them Irish ballads, others ones I’ve made up. There’s a James Bond spoof in it called ‘Don’t Say Whenever, Whenever’; a kind of blaxploitation thing called ‘Wakka Wakka’; and ‘Voodoo One’, which…
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An evening at the Clarence
Read more: An evening at the ClarenceHot Press’s Peter Murphy meets Pat McCabe and Gavin Friday In the black and white corner, in a dark suit and white shirt, Gavin Friday, a dapper hybrid of Dub Rat Pack poise and course Behan-esque wit. In the other black and white corner, an equally dark-suited Pat McCabe, the Clones Cyclone, a dauntingly erudite literary madman who occasionally morphs into a toad-licking Travis Bickle. Both men have lost a lot of weight recently, probably from a combination of overwork and each other’s company. They’re obviously thick as thieves, and to witness the two brainstorming is enough to intrigue any…
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The maverick life of Billy MacKenzie
Read more: The maverick life of Billy MacKenzieGavin is briefly mentioned in In Tom Doyle’s recently published biography of Billy MacKenzie, “The Glamour Chase – the maverick life of Billy MacKenzie” to which Bono contributed the foreword: “The best aesthetes are working-class. Courage by contrast. Oscar Wilde on the buses, Versace down the chip shop, a falsetto voice on the terraces. Disco ball of nerves that he was, Billy MacKenzie was an aesthete. The Associates were a great group: we ripped them off. Billy was a great singer: I couldn’t rip him off. He was Caruso on a balloon of oxygen. He was over the top of…
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Man Friday, Northside Dublin
Read more: Man Friday, Northside DublinAugust 1998 It’s not every young man that has the balls to walk around Ballymun rigged out in a dress and a pair of Doc Martins but then again Gavin Friday was never one for adhering to conformities. Gavin was one of a group of pioneering artists from Finglas East who had a massive impact on the Dublin music scene during the punk explosion that hit the city during the mid to late 70s. This select band of Bohemians included U2’s Bono and spawned The Virgin Prunes, a band that musically swung from complete and utter incomprehensible self-indulgence to sheer…