Rock Regeneration

Out 25th October

Today, Irish renaissance man Gavin Friday returns with details of his highly anticipated new solo album Ecce Homo. Out 25th October via BMG, the new album – which was produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball and Michael Heffernan – marks his first since 2011’s “Catholic” and is announced alongside it’s title track and an eponymous digital EP featuring two remixes and an instrumental version of the track.

An artist who needs little in the way of an introduction, Friday is perhaps best known as the founding frontman of cult Irish post-punk outfit Virgin Prunes, his career as a genre-hopping, award-winning songwriter, composer, actor, visual artist, and creative director has spanned four decades and has seen him collaborate with everyone from his childhood friends in U2 through to Colin Newman, Laurie Anderson, Sinead O’Connor, Scott Walker, The Fall, Quincy Jones, and many, many more. He has scored music for Academy Award nominated films such as In The Name of The Father and In America (earning Ivor Novello and Golden Globe nominations for his work on the latter), and his artistic contributions extend to visual arts, with several exhibitions showcasing his work, as well as collaborating and performing on-stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The last year also saw the release of the animated film Peter And The Wolf, which featured scoring and narration by Friday, as well as the recent reissuing of classic Virgin Prunes albums and EPs on vinyl.

Driven alternately by thundering electronics that recall the power of the Prunes and exquisite acoustics that reflect the beauty of his most recent solo work and soundtracks, Ecce Homo is an ecstatic and unbound expression of anger and independence, of severing oneself from stereotypes of what you’re supposed to be while also acknowledging that our hardest battles are often our collective ones. There are love songs and fight songs, reflections on loss and reveries of nostalgia, anthems for solidarity and excoriations of the powerful. Friday thinks it’s the most honest album he’s ever made; it is also his most riveting.

Having teased details of the track / single in the months leading up to the release with mysterious posts written in Ogham – an ancient runic language that was used in Ireland and parts of the UK between the 5th and 9th centuries – the first taste of the album comes in the form of it’s title track “Ecce Homo”. The track is a pulsing, pulverizing menace, its streaks of florid noise and walls of hard-edged rhythms squaring up against enemies of inclusion and liberty as Friday throws the words of Pontius Pilate back at our persecutors, promising to “Fight fire with fire / We can walk on water” over warped gospel harmonies.

Ecce Homo began more than a decade ago with a surprise email from Dave Ball, the Soft Cell co-founder who produced Virgin Prunes 40 years ago. They hadn’t seen each other during that long span, but Ball asked if Friday wanted to conspire on a cover of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” for Alan Vega’s 70th birthday. For several years, they bounced ideas for other songs back and forth via email until Friday finally visited him in London for a series of studio sessions. They wrote the bulk of Ecce Homo’s music together, their interpersonal dynamic resulting in tracks that moved freely between disparate emotional ends.

Friday, though, wanted to make it all bigger, to drape the songs in the finery and grandeur he’d indulged with his soundtrack work. He did that back in Dublin with a cast of familiar collaborators including producer Michael Heffernan as he also cared for his ailing mother, then suffering the final stages of Alzheimer’s. Enraged by the rise of international strongmen but inspired by a long, loving, and stable relationship with another man after a prolonged divorce, Friday built Ecce Homo as a monument of and to his own emotions. In early 2020, he was ready to mix it when Covid-19 arrived. He put it down for two years, vowing to revisit it only when he could make a little more sense of the world. His mother died, as did Hal Willner, one of his closest collaborators, and one of his two beloved dogs, Ralf. Hard seasons, all around.

That difficult gap seemed to supercharge Ecce Homo, enhancing not only its sense of deserved indignation but also amplifying the tenderness and love that undergird so many of these songs. Hurt comes from every side here, in every possible shape, but the real core of the album is a reaction rooted in hope, in seeing the struggles of the past and the possibilities of the future through the same unified gaze. It is a stirring testament to finding comfort and strength wherever we can, to enduring in whatever way we must.

When Friday was a teenager, alienated from the Catholic church and looking for meaning, music became his godsend, his lifeline, his revelation. Or, as he calls it, “the release where I could bleed publicly.” He surmises it saved his life. Though it is rooted in so much loss, Ecce Homo advances that story of survival, of how we are always looking for what can ferry us into the next phase of our life. It is neither a happy album nor a tragic one; it is, instead, a bracingly honest thing, staring at both sides of a life and testifying to how it has been and how it may yet be.

Ecce Homo will be released on 25th October via BMG on ltd. edition transparent blue vinyl as well as a deluxe CD package featuring an exclusive 28-page booklet and bonus material. The album will be available everywhere digitally including two exclusive remixes.

Tracklisting
1. Lovesubzero
2. Ecce Homo
3. The Church Of Love
4. Stations Of The Cross
5. Lady Esquire
6. When The World Was Young
7. The Best Boys In Dublin
8. Lamento

Bonus (Deluxe CD only)
9. When the World Was Young (Reprise)
10. Cabarotica
11. Amaranthus (Love Lies Bleeding)
12. Daze
13. Behold the Man

Digital Only
14. Ecce Homo (Apparition Remix)
15. Ecce Homo (Smallboy Remix)

Gavin Friday Picture by Barry McCall

Links
https://www.gavinfriday.com/
https://www.facebook.com/gavinfridaynews