Madness? There's Methodism in it

Music for a series of radio plays - well, it sounds pretty quaint, doesn't it? The sounds which issue forth from the speakers in the recording studio at the back of Maurice Seezer's house, however, are anything but quaint. A chainsaw erupts with disarming clarity. A happy, clowny tune takes a distinctly sinister turn. There's a bright, breezy theme and then a blast of Whiskey on a Sunday on a Casio keyboard and then a quieter track called Old Flames. Did I say quiet? Um, not exactly. Actually it will accompany a scene in which somebody burns to death in a barn while sheep scream in the background.

"It's this idea of the hip culchie," explains Gavin Friday helpfully. "The opening theme starts off with almost a blaxploitation sound, but it's funk mixed with fiddles, didgeridoos and spoons - sort of, like, Shaft Goes To The Mid- lands. In South of the Border the lads drop acid on the bus to Dundalk. Now Dundalk used to be called El Paso, because of the so-called outlaw element around there. So when they get out of the bus they're actually in Mexico and there's a whole Morricone thing happening in the music."

No prizes for guessing that the plays in question, Emerald Germs, are by Pat McCabe, the music is by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer and the humour is very, very black indeed. But how did they come to be collaborating with Pat McCabe? "We asked him to write some sleeve notes for the album Shag Tobacco - not sleeve notes that would say `aren't we great', but something that would create a landscape to fit the imagery of the songs," says Friday. "And now we have a working friendship where - well, we talk about lots of things, but one thing we always talk about is pretend projects. And this is the first one that actually came about."

"Pat used to play in a showband called The Oklahomas" - this from Seezer - "and he's very into music, anyway. He always works with a piece of music in mind, for whatever he writes. He's well capable of sitting down at a piano himself, too." "When he gets a few jars on him," adds Friday, "he's a great man for parlour songs. He's got a brilliant one called Bosco You're A Bollix." On the face of it Friday and Seezer make a great conversational double act: Seezer the thoughtful, serious one, Friday the playful one with the great one-liners. That's true, but it's not the whole truth. The serious Seezer has an obviously anarchic sense of humour. And it's Friday who, musing over the significance of Pat McCabe's writing, observes that "in a weird sort of way it's an elegy for ruralism, for a way of life that's gone. Behind the forced smiles and the psychotic knife there's something else . . . " But then, given their pedigree - hands up who doesn't know, to pluck a few random facts from the CV, that Friday was a founder member of the punk group The Virgin Prunes, that the pair toured a Jacques Brel-type cabaret show around Europe and featured in a Dublin nightclub called The Blue Jaysus and have written, among other soundtracks, the haunting, elegiac music for Jim Sheridan's gritty film, The Boxer - "eclectic" would be the only word which would even begin to sum them up.

When they talk about their musical paths, though, odd, interwoven strands emerge. Religion, for instance. Seezer, who comes from a staunchly Methodist family, planned to devote his life to the ministry and was accepted as a divinity student at the age of 20. "Because I couldn't begin until I was 25 they suggested I do a degree in a related subject, so I enrolled in the theology course at Trinity," he says. "I followed that road for two years and realised that it wasn't going to be for me. "My belief at that time was based on a more fundamentalist point of view - I remember at the age of 17 standing on the corner of Abbey Street `witnessing', as we called it, for the YMCA, trying to entice people to understand what we were about - and studying theology pulled the carpet out from under me, in many ways. That's what it's designed to do, as well. You're confronted with a lot of things, and if your faith survives, then you'll be the stronger for it. I guess my faith wasn't as strong as I thought it was." Friday, meanwhile, had his own close encounter with religion in the shape of The Virgin Prunes' two-year involvement with a spiritual group called Shalom. "When punk happened in 1977 and 78 there was a passionate belief that this was The Way," he says. "And when punk went up its own arse, we felt betrayed by that. We were very seriously into Shalom, but at the end I felt there was an element of being taken advantage of, by the spiritual leader of the group. The last straw was when they called me in and said, you have to change the name of the band. The Virgin Prunes - it's not right. You have to change it to The Deuteronomy Prunes."

"I'll tell you what was a real turning point for me, " says Seezer. "I went to see St Peter's in Rome with my Italian wife - and what annoyed me, even before we went in was, she wasn't allowed into the church because her shoulders were bare. She insisted that I went in by myself, just to see it. Now I grew up in a Methodist church with completely bare walls and no statues of any sort - a beautiful church, but very spartan. So to walk into St Peter's and see the ostentatious accumulation of wealth, of gold leaf and wood carvings and stone work and magnificence . . . I walked out completely appalled. "It took me about two years to go back and appreciate it from an artistic perspective, to see how the Church has really been responsible for the creation of some of the greatest works of art by acting as a patron of artists over the centuries. I would have been of the view that money should be used to help mankind - but in fact these works of art did inspire people to believe in something greater than themselves. And there's something supremely moving about those expressions of belief. I'm not a Christian now, but if I were a Christian I wouldn't despair, because the discovery at the core of belief is something really beautiful." It's perhaps no coincidence that when asked about musical heroes, Seezer puts J.S. Bach at the top of the list: a Protestant composer, but one who dedicated every note he ever wrote to the greater glory of God. These days, of course, both Seezer and Friday are totally dedicated to the ministry of sound. But when I ask if the religious phase was a positive influence in their lives, I get a unanimous "yes". "It's not just an interest in spirituality or belief," says Seezer, "but a more general interest in what spawned us and where we come from - that remains something we're both very interested in. We argue about it all the time. And whether we like it or not I will always argue from a Methodist, Anglican, Protestant perspective because that's what I am." "And if I'm out with a bunch of his friends," says Friday, "they try to get up my nose with, `oh, we'd better get a seat for the Catholic'. It's engrained even in the humour. For my 35th birthday a friend of ours gave me an Orange Sash. Now that did get up my nose . . . "

Has there ever been a head-to-head clash, though? "No, we always stop before it gets to that," says Friday. "But the first time religious music played a major part in our work was when we wrote the Agnus Dei for the soundtrack of The Boxer. It was to run over a riot scene - Protestants singing while the Catholics burn, you know. Jim Sheridan liked it, but the Americans hated it. They wanted it out, but it stayed in the end. But they got their own back on the CD, look . . . "

He hands me a copy. The track is listed for all time as Angus Dei. A simple mistake? Maybe. Mistakes can be wicked, though. Seezer, for reasons best summarised as teenage dudespeak, used to be known as Maurice "The Man" Seezer. And they think - though they can't swear to it - that it was Larry Gogan who once introduced one of their singles, pricelessly, as "Gavin Friday and the Man-Seizers". "Seezer is a real name, though," says The Man, when the laughter subsides. It was his German grandmother's maiden name. "My grandparents ran a butcher's shop in Thomas Street where Manning's bakery is now - in fact, there's a litle laneway beside the bakery where you can see the tiles of an old butchers' shop still. Apparently Seezer's sausages were legendary in the Liberties." It could be a line from a Pat McCabe play.

Emerald Germs of Ireland begins on RTE Radio 1 on Saturday July 1st at 11.02 a.m.