Virgin Prunes formed in Dublin in 1977, part of the fertile Lypton Village artpunk scene that also spawned U2. Instead of Bono and The Edge, Virgin Prunes had the equally absurdly named Gavin Friday, Guggi, Dave-id, Dik and Pod (later adding Haa Lacka Binttii and D'Nellon). From a very early point, it became clear that while U2 were aiming for global chart domination, Virgin Prunes were more interested in remaining aggressively idiosyncratic, developing their own unique brand of transgressive, avant-garde performance art and a wildly anarchic take on post-punk rock.Depending on who's being consulted, the band name either refers to an Irish slang for masturbation or a term for a person with a particular kind of sexual hang-up. A cult fixture from the early singles until their 1986 swansong The Moon Looked Down and Laughed, the Prunes are barely remembered today. Much of their work was outstandingly original, and yet it has remained criminally ignored and rarely heard, largely due to the near-total unavailability of their back catalog. Initially available only in small vinyl and cassette editions, the catalog has suffered over the years from poorly mastered bootleg CD reissues that immediately went out of print. Mute Records, working alongside principal visionary Gavin Friday, attempt to rectify this situation with the release of five definitively remastered and repackaged reissues of the Virgin Prunes back catalog, with bonus tracks, lyrics and rare band photos included with each album. Since the Prunes disbanded, Gavin Friday has maintained a tenuous connection with the mainstream, recording a series of contemporary pop albums and doing soundtrack work for the popular Irish films In The Name of the Father and The Boxer. He scored a minor hit with the track "Angel," which appeared on the soundtrack for Baz Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet, and he can be seen performing in a scene from Lurmann's garish musical Moulin Rouge. In addition to occasional collaborations with his friend Bono, Friday has also worked with a number of other artists, contributing vocals to Coil's Scatology, Dave Ball's In Strict Tempo and The Fall's Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall.
The chronological beginning of the reissue series is A New Form of Beauty, in many ways the most ambitious of the Virgin Prunes' various projects. A New Form of Beauty was intended as seven-part artistic cycle exploring the band's inversion of the standard concept of beauty, reflected in their eccentric costumes and bizarre neo-primitive face paint. The Prunes were tuned in to an Artaudian current of perverse beauty and outlandishly confrontational performance, and this manifests quite well in the music itself. In many ways, their freakish attire and dark sense of melodrama served as a blueprint for the emerging goth scene, but the Prunes had talent and creativity that their followers often lacked. A New Form of Beauty Parts I through IV are collected here for the first time, originally released separately on 7", 10" and 12" EPs and a cassette. (Part V was an exhibition held in 1981, Part VI is an unpublished book and Part VII is an unreleased film.) The music is mercurial and often difficult; dark and overwrought; jagged and dissonant. Gavin Friday's vocals are twisted and menacing on the 10-minute "Come To Daddy," a lopsided avant-punk epic propelled by a brutally distorted, metronomic beat. The song tumbles over itself by the seven-minute mark, turning into a clattering free-improv with Friday screaming desperately: "No one cares about Mammy! No one cares about Mammy!" Their style seems equally informed by glam rock, Krautrock and their punk contemporaries, somewhat comparable to Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box but existing an aesthetic sphere of its own invention. "Sweethome Under White Clouds" is another deconstructed punk song, this time with a sinister mantra and undercurrents of atmospheric drone. And "Sad World" is something else entirely: a gloomy paean to misery that slowly fades into drug-damaged oblivion. The overlapping vocals of Gavin and Guggi, which often form a tense call-and-response conversation, is one of the Prunes' unique trademarks. "Beast (Seven Bastard Suck)" is a dark, chaotic slab of malevolence punctuated by the crack of a bullwhip. Even when I sense the Prunes are just fucking around with delay peddles, as on "Abbagal," the effect is positively eerie. Disc two consists of Part IV, a 37-minute live performance entitled "Din Glorious," which moves freely between energetic performances of their songs to blasts of terrifying noise, grotesquely distorted vocals and deeply unsettling tape manipulations. A New Form of Beauty is practically begging for rediscovery and reappraisal as one of the most wildly imaginative and unorthodox documents produced in the post-punk era. Stay tuned over the next four issues for reviews of the rest of this critical series of reissues.
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