The word "challenging" springs to mind. Mention Irish performance/rock/Dadaist group The Virgin Prunes to any number of music critics and you'll be assured of one of two responses: they were either a joke or the most committed rock band Ireland ever spawned. Love or hate them (and many did both, sometimes simultaneously), you couldn't really ignore them. Mates of U2 (then and now), the lead protagonists of the band were Gavin Friday and Guggi. Other members at the point of origin included Dik Prune (The Edge's brother), Dave-id Busarus and Haa Lacka Binttii (aka Daniel Figgis, famously described by then-Hot Press scribe Declan Lynch as looking like "a fussy spinster").
They first came out of the "art terrorist" gutter in 1978 when they supported The Clash at Dun Laoghaire's Top Hat. At the gig, Friday caused a sensation and made tabloid headlines when his trousers burst at the crotch. Every subsequent Virgin Prunes live show was, in many respects, a reaction to staidness and an attempt to throw surrealism into the pot.
While U2 went in a polar opposite direction, the Virgin Prunes dissected the lives of the supposedly normal population, utilising tactics that shocked many. In Gavin Friday's own words, he wasn't afraid to "wear my camp knickers over my trousers" and, in a series of performances in the early 1980s, the band laid claim to being the only Irish rock group to ask serious questions about topics such as Catholicism, social conditioning and the relationship between art, taste and perceptions of perfection.
At their "New Form Of Beauty" performance at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 1981, the band blended their performance with radical art installations such as excrement and a freshly-cut pig's head. The following year, they paraded probably the most potent mixture of theatrics and shock-value rock music ever witnessed in Ireland as Gavin and Guggi re-enacted an eerie Gothic setpiece in front of gobsmacked punters. Some people guffawed, of course, but it was completed with such a sense of conviction it was difficult even for cynics not to be half impressed.
It wasn't to last, however. Ideas and directions altered and eventually interest petered out. Friday, Guggi and Figgis have since gone to expand their initial concepts of what art actually constitutes, an essentially European view. Yet the memory of the band lingers on, echoed in work by Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and, er, Marilyn Manson, but most of all through their influence on U2's Zooropa tour. The Virgin Prunes playing in front of hundreds of thousands people - by proxy? Pass the primeval sick-bag!
