by Peter Murphy
Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer give Peter Murphy a blow-by-blow guide to soundtracking The Boxer.
HUNCHED OVER their cappuccinos at the back of Tosca s restaurant, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer look for all the world like two mafiosi plotting the details ofa particularly tricky hit and not the chartbusting kind, either. But while this odd couple are not renowned for troubling the Top 40, they should be regarded as key players in any chronicle of Dublin s music culture. Between 1988 and 1996 the pair recorded a trilogy of albums for Island Records that, for anyone who was listening, created a new Irish musical identity, re-introducing humour and surrealism to an end-of-the-millennium party previously hogged by po-faced poltroons.
From the ruined pre-war splendour of Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, through the velveteen aestheticism of Adam And Eve, to the blue-lit exotica of Shag Tobacco, the two men took Joyce and Beckett as their oracle and went hunting for the real indigenous Irish spirit in Europe, soaking up elements of Brecht, Weill, Brel, Gainsbourg and Piaf. The result was a canon of work that had an obtuse but very real influence on everyone from U2 down to Jack L.
In fact, on their most recent album, Friday and Seezer seemed to re-imagine the capital as some Western-European Interzone populated by a madcap cast that included Genet, Cocteau, Pat McCabe, The Diceman, Oscar Wilde, Behan and Bono, all scrambling for last hors d oeuvres in Mr. Pussy s at four in the morning.
