Virgin Prunes Talk: Episode Four - The Moon Looked Down and Laughed
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- Опубликовано: 30 авг 2022
- Virgin Prunes Talk: Episode Four - Gavin Friday in conversation with Eoin Devereux. They discuss The Virgin Prunes' album 'The Moon Looked Down and Laughed'
‘Heaven, such a nice place…’ begins Gavin Friday in the Virgin Prunes’ brilliant fifth album - and the band’s swansong - The Moon Looked Down and Laughed (1986). It contains ten tracks and was produced by Soft Cells’ Dave Ball and recorded by Flood. It witnesses a turn from the Virgin Prunes’ earlier experimentation and improvisation, to more rhythmical, stylized and textured polyphonies and more narrativized lyrics.
The Virgin Prunes had toured widely across Europe in the mid-1980s and Friday had been exposed to all types of music, including the chansons of Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour, as well as cabaret and Bertolt Brecht. This album gave him the opportunity to explore these interests, as he sings and snarls his way through tales of romance, love lost, betrayal, broken relationships, melancholy and guilt - with a sequence of extraordinary, black jewel encrusted lyrics. The album includes magical tracks such as ‘Love Lasts Forever’, ‘I Am God’, ‘Sons Find Devils’, ‘Alone’, ‘The Moon Looked Down and Laughed’ and ‘Betrayal’. The angry lament ‘Don’t Look Back’ (which might also bring to mind the horror film ‘Don’t Look Now’) ends with the powerfully simple line: ‘With you I could change the world, but you don’t see the world with eyes that see the world like me.’
The Moon Looked Down and Laughed has a different self-consciousness to their previous albums, a new musical choreography and theatricality. It also contains a sense of humour that only came out to play occasionally on previous albums. Tragedy, however, is never far away from comedy with the Virgin Prunes. ‘Uncle Arthur’s Lonely World’, a beautifully plodding melody with accompanying story-line by Dave-Id (who always had a magpie-like ability to work with pre-existing lyrics), is the Virgin Prunes’ ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ For all the sadness it contains, we might also see a tongue in its cheek. Uncle Arthur ‘Never had a television. Never had a radio. Never saw Dracula. Never saw Frankenstein…I don’t know what the world is coming to.’ The moon looked down and laughed, after all. The art work for this last Virgin Prunes album was created by Steve Averill who had designed a number of their previous albums.
Recorded by Gavin Friday & Eoin Devereux, 2022
Produced & Edited by Jack Howson
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Overlooked album. Some beautiful songs in it.
My favorite album of the bunch
Informative, fascinating and…oh, Gavin’s voice 😍
I am absolutely in love with this series, and will make sure to hear every chapter you post!
These are great talks! Also, fab that Mick was good at archiving you guys on to film, on this tour.
I love these, and I love all the recent posts and such... lots of fun to hear Gav's recollections and stories! I would
This series is a very good idea, I love it !! and Gavin' voice... 😍
I bought this album as a teenager after "If I die, I die" and I didn't quite get it at first. Of course, that was only the first two or three listens.
This is strange. In an inteview Gavin said that "he should have left the band instead of dragging it along as a corps, wanting to keep going" (don't remember the exact words. He wanted the VP to keep going). Now he is saying that he didn't want to do that, weird. That he just did it for the money. Anyway without Dik and Guggi it just doesn't work. The guitarplay from Dik is so essential, Mary doesn't even come close.