Gavin Friday at Cork Opera House

Gavin Friday’s career spans four decades, and he still puts the same energy and passion into his work that he did with the Virgin Prunes in 1977. The 1980s were dominated by other artistic endeavours – painting, (his 1988 exhibition I Didn’t Come up the Liffey in a Bubble), writing and MCing his own weekly cabaret. 1987 saw the start of a decade long collaboration with pianist Maurice Seezer, where they tackled Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf, Brecht and Kurt Weill with a punk ethos, layering it with influences from Bacharach to T-Rex.

Gavin’s solo album Shag Tobacco (which the singer called “a very sexual album’) was released in 1995. The decade was also the beginning of his career in film as both a vocalist and composer. With Bono, he wrote the soundtrack to Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, which including Sinéad O’Connor’s hit, ‘You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart’. In 1996 Friday and Seezer contributed the song ‘Angel’ to the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and wrote their first score for the Australian film Angel Baby. Subsequent film scores have included The Boxer (1998), Disco Pigs (2001) and In America (2002) and the 50 Cent biopic Get Rich or Die Trying.

His 2001 show Ich Liebe Dich, juxtaposed 1920s/30s Berlin and 1940s Broadway and had a sell-out run at the Dublin Theatre Festival. It was only a matter of time before Gavin made his film debut, in 2005. Director Neil Jordan cast him as sexually ambiguous rocker Billy Hatchet in Breakfast on Pluto, which won him much acclaim. He returned to the stage in Germanophile mode in Tomorrow Belongs To Me. Since 2007, he has been playing live with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, on performances such as This Shakespeare Sonnet Project and The Sinking of the Titanic.

More theatrical and collaborative work followed in 2007, including music for The Revenant, a play by Patrick McCabe’s and Ian Wilson's The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. In Summer 2008, Scott Walker invited Gavin to perform the song 'Jesse' in Drifting and Tilting – The Songs of Scott Walker and in 2009 Gavin turned 50 and celebrated with a gig at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Guests included Antony, Rufus Wainwright, Courtney Love, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and U2.

Last year he covered Suicide’s ‘Ghostrider’ with Dave Ball, read a Yeats’ poem at the National Library's ‘Summer’s Wreath’ alongside traditional musicians Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill and guested on Dublin band Preacher’s Son’s debut album Love, Life & Limb. catholic is his fourth studio album and was released on April 22nd, 2011.