Gavin Friday, born Fionán Martin Hanvey, Irish singer and songwriter, composer, actor and painter, is born in Dublin on October 8, 1959.

Friday grows up in Ballygall, a neighbourhood located on Dublin’s Northside between Finglas and Glasnevin where he went to school. When he is fourteen years old and living on Cedarwood Road, he meets Bono and Guggi at a party to which he has not been invited. Bono says, “We caught him trying to steal something of the house. Classic teenage stuff… but we became friends.”

Friday is a founding member of the post-punk group Virgin Prunes and has recorded several solo albums and soundtracks. In 1986, after the demise of The Virgin Prunes, he devotes himself to painting for a while, sharing a studio with Bono, Guggi and Charlie Whisker. This results in the exhibition Four Artists – Many Wednesdays (1988) at Dublin’s Hendricks Gallery. Friday, Guggi and Whisker show paintings, while Bono opts to exhibit photos taken in Ethiopia. Friday’s part of the show is entitled I didn’t come up the Liffey in a bubble, an expression often used by his father.

His main collaborator between 1987 and 2005 is multi-instrumentalist, Maurice Seezer. They sign to Island Records in 1988 and release three albums together, before parting with the company in 1996. After that Friday and Seezer compose the score for the Jim Sheridan films The Boxer and In America which is nominated for Best Original Film Score in the 2004 Ivor Novello Awards.

Friday has maintained a close friendship with U2‘s Bono since childhood, and they collaborate on the soundtrack for the Jim Sheridan’s film In the Name of the Father, including the title track, “Billy Boola” and “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart”, which is sung by Sinéad O’Connor and nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. In 2003 they write “Time Enough for Tears,” the original theme tune for Sheridan’s film In America, as sung by Andrea Corr. The song is nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.

In 2005 Friday and Seezer collaborate with Quincy Jones on incidental music for the 50 Cent biopic Get Rich or Die Tryin’. In 2001 they score the film Disco Pigs by Kirsten Sheridan and two years later they also collaborated with Bono on Peter & the Wolf in aid of the Irish Hospice Foundation.

Taking time out from work on his fourth solo album with Herb Macken, Friday teams up with English composer Gavin Bryars, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Opera North for a new interpretation of William Shakespeare‘s Sonnets touring as part of the 2007 Complete Works Festival. Friday and Macken compose the music for the Patrick McCabe play, The Revenant, which opens as part of the 2007 Galway International Arts Festival.

In 2009 Friday and Macken work on Bryars’ fourth studio album. On April 6, 2010, Rubyworks Records announces the signing of Gavin Friday and that a new album is on its way. The new CD is titled catholic and is released in Ireland on Good Friday, April 22, 2011.