Gavin Friday has delivered one of the finest albums of the year with Ecce Homo, a brilliant collection of electronic numbers that veers between danceable workouts and atmospheric ballads, at times recalling the sublime electro-pop of the Pet Shop Boys. And speaking of legendary synth-pop duos, the album – Gavin’s first since 2011’s Catholic – is co-produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball.

“It was a very spontaneous approach,” says Gavin during a stop-off at Hot Press HQ, holding his beloved dog Stan in his arms. “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s make an album together.’ Dave sent me over a backing track for a cover of Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’, back when Alan Vega was turning 70. We did it remotely, and it happened spontaneously and it was quite great. About six months later, he said, ‘Hey, do you want to mess around with one or two other ideas? Here’s something I have.’

“And then a few months later, he had something else. This went on for about a year or two. I would then go in and jam on it a bit, and I got all the ideas up with my engineer, Michael Heffernan, who’s also the co-producer.”

Unfortunately, Covid intervened to put a halt to proceedings. It was a particularly rough few years for the singer, who lost a number of close friends, including celebrated cult producer Hal Willner. Gavin also sadly lost his mum, who suffered from dementia in her final days.

Ecce Home

NEW WORLD ORDER

Now 65, Ecce Homo finds Friday in part reflecting on his remarkable youth, when he famously was part of the surrealist collective Lypton Village, whose members included Bono and Guggi, the latter eventually to join Gavin in goth-rock provocateurs The Virgin Prunes.

“It’s reflective, but in a sort of 50 percent way,” says Gavin. “Certain tracks are very Gavin Friday today, like the title track, ‘LoveSubZero’ and ‘The Church Of Love’. On the vinyl, that would be side one. The retrospective stuff happened quite spontaneously. You turn 60 and you go, ‘I’m fucking 60.’

“So you do reflect and think back on things. Just for the fuck of it, as well as so many musicians we know dying, some of them I was close friends with. And on top of that, my mother dying, and Hal Willner, who was one of my best friends. If you see the credits of the album, I think there were about eight people who died within the last six years. Including my dog!

“Grief as one thing is complex. There’s a line in ‘Lamento’, ‘The heart will crack, the heart will break, but broken live on.’ It doesn’t go away in certain things, so that would have been a subliminal push. But this melody came in from Dave Ball and it was just very simple. It was the basic chords of ‘When The World Was Young’ and I was very taken by it.”

As Friday notes, he was somewhat surprised by what unfolded next.

“I always improvise when I’m writing and I just started singing the title,” he says. “Then I started writing, and it came out and I went, ‘Jesus!’ I’m not looking back at the last 50 years of my friendship with the Lypton Village gang, and Bono, Guggi and Cedarwood Road. I’m looking at the 15, 16 and 17 year olds, and that innocence and beauty. That almost blind faith and fearlessness; all that madness, which is a beautiful thing you have when you’re a young fella. I do it in a very poetic way, but in an emotive way.

“Somebody compared ‘When The World Was Young’ to ‘Cedarwood Road’ from Songs Of Innocence. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I lived up the cul de sac, he lived up the other end!’ But the bottom line is, it’s a love song to that. And the U2 song is a love song too, to that striving. Also, there’s that whole thing of a play on words. I’m a 60-year-old wondering, and I say, ‘Remember your wonder’. But we wandered into our careers. And then we sold ourselves to rock and roll. I sold myself to rock and roll, to punk rock and roll.”

What do you mean by that?

“I gave it everything,” Gavin emphasises. “It was, ‘If I Die, I Die’, I’m going there. And so did U2. They went, ‘We are going to be.’ So I’m playing with all those images, and those phrases like, ‘If we come to be’. There are those allusions, and it was quite an interesting thing. I’m back living in the city centre, and I lived out in the hills of south county Dublin for about 15 or 16 years. I’ve been busy, working away or whatever. Then I come back into town, and I actually see the city and go, ‘Wow, this is fucking amazing.’

“I actually see two young men who looked like I did when I was 19, and they’re holding hands. And I see two girls kissing, and no one’s blinking. Now, it’s a certain side of the city. But I was there thinking how fucking hard it is now for young musicians. Like, with the stranglehold of streaming, there’s no fucking money in it for kids. They can’t even sell albums or CDs anymore, and then there’s how expensive it is to play a gig. The cost of living is killing live music, and not just for young bands.”

In terms of of other lyrical themes, you can also sense the tumultuous current state of the world on Ecce Homo.

“Well, we touched on ‘When The World Was Young’, and that was me contemplating all the fucking people dying around me, but also turning 60 and looking back,” says Gavin. “But also, looking forward. With the title track, it became very engrained in my head that this is what the fucking album’s called. I very rarely write lyrics before music. For that track, this very punk-y Moroder riff came in, almost Kraftwerk on speed. I said, ‘I fucking love this.’

“Then I said, ‘Let’s go up to a higher BPM’ and we started improvising. Usually, when I’m grabbing ideas to improvise, because I’ve done a lot of work with Gavin Bryars on Shakespearean sonnets, I’ll grab Shakespeare lines or a line from the bible. Out of nowhere came, ‘Fight fire with fire’.

“I was going, ‘What is this? This is interesting.’ And that fucker in America, who in 2016 became president, and hopefully that’s the only time we have to talk about that person, and he goes away in the next month.”

Friday further considers Trump’s malign impact.

“He relit the flame that gave all these other fuckers, and so called far-righters – but also fundamentalism – a new fucking stick to beat everyone with,” he resumes. “And I went, ‘Fuck this’. So I was bringing in these lines, ‘We can die, we can live forever’, touching on this thing where fundamentalists believe they’re right. Even suicide bombers believe they’re right, that they’re gonna live forever. And then, Ecco Homo.

“I haven’t felt that compelled in my life, since in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when the politics were wrong in Ireland and Britain. There was the rise of Thatcherism and the injustice to the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six – all the Troubles things. Then you add in the Catholic Church stranglehold, and I hadn’t felt that rage until Trump came along with this ridiculous new world order.”

Gavin Friday. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

More than most people, Gavin has travelled extensively around the US. Did he sense at any point that the country might be vulnerable to a movement such as that headed by Trump?

“I sensed two things,” he reflects. “It was a beautiful moment when the first black president was elected, Obama. When he was elected again, it was like, ‘We’ve had four years of a black man telling us what to do, now we’ve another four years?’ And the roots of this movement were getting bigger. They were going, ‘We’re not having anymore of this shit.’ It was waiting. Also, with the crash and austerity, working class people – and middle class people – were sort of forgotten about and had to fucking pay the bill.

“Meanwhile, the rich were getting richer. But that was happening worldwide, and then Trump comes in. So all of this was seeding. Always one of the best ways of learning about things is taxi-drivers. Someone’s collecting you at the airport, you get talking to him and he’s going, ‘I’m voting Trump!’ Why? ‘He’s going to make America great again!’ I’m going, ‘Woah, that’s a title.’ People like lines.

“But also this (picks up phone). It was all coming at the same time, with the phones and fucking social media. Propaganda was the biggest tool of Goebbels and the Nazis. And with fake news, they’re going, ‘No, that didn’t happen!’ I mean, I looked at the Trump inauguration on telly, live, and there wasn’t that many people there. And then, I’ve seen pictures in his office and it’s all photoshopped. I go, ‘But that didn’t happen! I saw it live on TV.’ And they’re going, ‘No, it happened!’”

Meanwhile, the landscape of social media has continued to get more angry and fractured.

“Arguments are getting heavier, there’s no centre,” laments Gavin. “There should always be a left and a right, but it should be centre-left and centre-right. Not ‘far’. But the far-left is out there too. Then just before Covid, there was that avalanche of cancel culture. I got really worried then. And then, I was going, ‘There’s a pandemic that can kill us, and people aren’t taking the vaccine, because they think they’re going to track us?’ I said, ‘They are tracking us!’  (Picks up phone) ‘That’s how they’re tracking us, you fucking eejits!’

“So I went, ‘Ooh, we’re in trouble. The world is very angry and confused.’ And on top of that, the real issue is Mother Earth is not happy. She’s burning, she’s flooding, and she might just go, ‘Oh, you’re worried about the Ukraine and the Middle East? Well I’m just going to flood all of California!’ Anything can happen.

“And then you start seeing it happening – horrible crises like the Ukraine situation and what’s going on the Middle East. Even before that, with the Muslim wave of refugees and the tolerance going. I just go, ‘For fuck’s sake, we’re Irish.’ We’re everywhere, we were the biggest fucking refugees 100 years ago. All over America, England and Australia.”

Gavin Friday with Sinéad O'Connor

THE BEST MOMENT

To finish on a happier topic, I ask about Gavin’s 50th birthday bash at Carnegie Hall in 2009, where he collaborated on a number of incredible live performances, on an evening where attendees included the likes of Courtney Love, Lou Reed, Scarlett Johansson, Lady Gaga and more. What was it like hanging out with Courtney?

“She’s lovely,” says Gavin. “She had that firecracker in her, but she’s clean for years. She’s super-smart. There’s a myth about certain characters. A lot of people were afraid of Sinéad O’Connor, and are afraid of certain characters, because of their myth. I mean, you cross Courtney, yeah, you’d be afraid. You should be, and if you cross Sinéad, you should be. But she’s a lot gentler, deep down. She never freaked me out, we just got on like that.

“But really, it was about people I worked with. We had Flo & Eddie, who Hal got. I was obsessed with T-Rex, and Flo & Eddie and the Turtles did all the T-Rex backing vocals. Also, as a kid, I loved the film Cabaret with Liza Minnelli. Joel Grey must be in his nineties now, and he came out and did a 15-minute piece, and it was a sensation. For me, that was the best moment. Someone asked me if there was anything I’d like to relive – and I’d sort of like to relive that.”

• Ecce Homo is out now.