In 1995, Gavin Friday released Shag Tobacco—one of the most startling and inspired albums of the decade. Created with Maurice Seezer and producer Tim Simenon, it’s a 21st-century noir cabaret where the spirits of Leonard Cohen, Marc Bolan, Jacques Brel, and Scott Walker collide. Think Weimar Berlin decadence filtered through a futuristic Las Vegas.
Island Records/Polygram
August 7, 1995
55:18
Tim Simenon
"I believe in songs having a meaning. In the power of words. I believe that making a record is like entering into a new world which lasts for as long as the music does."
— Gavin Friday
Gavin Friday is one of the most charismatic, original, and maverick talents to emerge from Dublin’s lair of wit and wisdom. Since co-founding the Virgin Prunes in 1978, he has challenged norms with confrontational live performances that caused riots in his hometown. The band’s seven notorious years were spent pushing the imagination of their audience. Increasingly audacious shows and a unique blend of humour made Virgin Prunes albums like Heresy and ...If I Die, I Die exceptional and ground-breaking.
After the band dissolved in 1985, Gavin began a series of collaborations with artists such as The Fall, Coil, David Bell, and Maria McKee, before stepping back from the microphone to pursue his visual art. His first exhibition, I Didn’t Come Up the Liffey in a Bubble, debuted in 1987.
By 1988, he had launched the Blue Jaysus cabaret/vaudeville club in Dublin. Meeting Maurice Seezer reignited his musical drive. Together they created the critically acclaimed albums Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves and Adam and Eve, toured Europe and America, and composed scores for Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father.
In 1995, Gavin Friday released Shag Tobacco—one of the most startling and inspired albums of the decade. Created with Maurice Seezer and producer Tim Simenon, it’s a 21st-century noir cabaret where the spirits of Leonard Cohen, Marc Bolan, Jacques Brel, and Scott Walker collide. Think Weimar Berlin decadence filtered through a futuristic Las Vegas.
The album's cast of characters includes Mr. Pussy, a glamorous drag queen hostess; the “Dolls” of New York nightlife; and the glittering, androgynous “The Slider,” resurrected from the T. Rex catalogue. They mingle with suburban housewives from hell and the doomed lovers of the title track.
"As we come to the end of the century, everything’s going ballistic," says Friday. "A lot of stuff is being dragged out from under the carpet. When I worked on this album, I became obsessed with the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties—the between-the-wars era when decadence was always laced with darkness. I tried to transport that into the Nineties. It was one of those 3 a.m., out-of-your-head moments in a café, drinking coffee and thinking, 'I'm not really in Dublin at all — I’m in Berlin in the Thirties.'"
"It’s a very sexual album," he adds. "From the monogamy of Shag Tobacco, to the transsexuality of Dolls, to the camp of Mr. Pussy. If there’s a place for this album, it’s where love is most definitely the drug, and everyone’s a junkie."
