Meet the Pig Children…

“Like a crazy singer in a band that’s lost the words.”

I’ll go out on a limb here and declare that I think the Virgin Prunes are THE #1 most underrated group of the post-punk era. Go ahead and do your worst. What about _____? Or ______?  Or _____?

Well, what about ‘em? Sorry, but I’m right. No other band with their theatrical power and musical genius has been so wrongly overlooked as the Virgin Prunes.

The main reason for this gross miscarriage of cultural justice is simply because their albums were extremely difficult to find until the mid aughts. Unless you bought the expensive limited edition import vinyl pressed in France and Italy when they actually came out in the early to mid-80s, you were pretty much shut out of enjoying the din glorious of the Virgin Prunes. You probably weren’t going to encounter much, if anything, of the Virgin Prunes’ output in a used record store, either. People who owned those albums, even those who slimmed their record collections down considerably over the years (like me) held onto them. They were not common on Limewire or Napster. Not only were they rare and coveted albums, they were glossy, darkly glamorous and obscenely weird objects d’art in their own right.

I think another reason for their obscurity has to do with the (mostly) misinformed notion that the Virgin Prunes were a goth band due to their “Pagan Lovesong” being such a big dancefloor mainstay at places like London’s Batcave discotheque (which is admittedly where I first heard them myself). Being lumped in with bands like The Specimen, Danse Society, Gene Loves Jezebel and Clan of Xymox hurt their credibility with rock snobs, but their scary, intimidating noise/art rock had far more in common with Faust, The Pop Group, The Birthday Party, Public Image Ltd. or Throbbing Gristle, certainly, than it did with Sex Gang Children. The goth label was, and is, an unfortunate one for the legacy of the Virgin Prunes to bear and is still a barrier to proper critical re-appraisal of the group’s work. The goth label didn’t exist when they started. They were Irish hooligans who came of age with Bowie and punk. They threw pigs heads around onstage and spoke “in tongues” in cheek out of disrespect to their Catholic elders. To lump them in with goth is just… lazy. The Virgin Prunes wanted to do things like this:
 

 
(Imagine the collective reaction the people of Ireland had to seeing THAT on their tee-vee sets. Then shed a tear for the current generation of boring, well-behaved young people.)
 

 
“We entertain people from another level…”

Another excuse that they’re still so unknown and underground after so many years have passed is that their work is simply not for everyone. Motherfuckers are evil sounding. If you don’t like an evil-sounding racket, get back to your Carpenter’s albums—quick—and just keep moving. These guys might damage you for life.

If Satan himself had a band, they would try to sound like the Virgin Prunes.
 

 
“Mirror, mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, I’ve seen it all…”

It’s been remarked often that the Virgin Prunes are the reverse image of U2. Dik Evans, original Virgin Prunes guitarist, is the brother of The Edge and the members of both groups grew up as friends in Dublin. Quoting from the Wikipedia entry:

The band consisted of childhood friends of U2’s Bono. Lypton Village was a “youthful gang” created by Bono, Guggi (Derek Rowan) and Gavin Friday (Fionan Hanvey) in the early 70s, where every member got a new identity and where they could escape from dreary and predictable Dublin life and be anything they wanted to be. It was both lead singers Friday and Guggi who first gave a teenaged Paul Hewson his alter-ego and world-famous moniker “Bono Vox of O’Connell Street,” later simply “Bono.”

 

 
U2 were the good boys, the Christians. The Virgins Prunes were feral and downright demonic.

“We’re just heroes. We’re better than ‘Art’”

And did I mention the whole smearing “chocolate” on their faces and that simulating sodomy onstage thing? The ritualistic, fetishy cross-dressing infantilism of the live act put a few people off, too.
 

 
The music heard on their albums Heresie, A New Form of Beauty and If I Die I Die (produced by Wire’s Colin Newman) can perhaps best be described as “insane” and “disturbing,” yet it’s always somehow still “beautiful” (in a very broad definition of the word, I grant you). The best comparison to the Virgin Prunes sound would have to be Bauhaus, although that’s just getting you into the ballpark, so don’t make too much of it. The Prunes exist in their very own, very singular continuum. Theirs is the sound of tightly controlled chaos. Rubbery, almost metronomic bass. Pounding primitive drums. Eerie tribal percussion effects and trippy tape loops. Bone-crunching guitar riffs. Dark, apocalyptic lyrical matter and three wailing weirdo singers including a mentally handicapped young man they met in a fish market. Their music was the stuff of nightmares. The perfect soundtrack to a bad trip.
 

 
Aside from their louder, more violent music, the band could make Eno-esque instrumentals like “Red Nettle” and “Mad Bird in the Wood” (a manipulated recording of pigeons that sound wild). As freaky as these dudes were, they were also great musicians with a lot of range and creativity. The world had never heard this music before.

The Virgin Prunes were also capable of recording profound and subtle tone poems like… “Suck Me Baby”:
 

 
“Give me money. Give me sex. Give me food and cigarettes.”

Throughout the 90s, the only common Virgin Prunes product, at least in America, was a cheap live CD that Cleopatra Records put our that was merely the audio portion of a concert video that was once sold as a VHS tape (both with the title Sons Find Devils). Finally, in 2004, Mute restored the damaged Virgin Prunes master tapes and released their catalog on CD with a nice sonic scrubbing. Although the profile of the group was raised for a while, it’s not like those reissues won a MOJO award or anything, as they should have. Sadly, the Virgin Prunes remain relatively obscure to this day.

Below, the studio recording of “Come to Daddy,” from A New Form of Beauty, one of their finest, darkest moments:
 

“Theme for Thought” on the Whatever You Want TV program. This was shot at the Brixton Ace when the group opened for the Birthday Party on November 25, 1982. During their career, they also toured with The Fall and Pere Ubu.
 

“Decline and Fall” on Whatever You Want.
 

“Walls of Jericho” on Whatever You Want.
 

“Caucasian Walk”
 

“Decline and Fall” on French television in 1982
 
Here’s the real treasure, the entire Sons Find Devils home video in excellent quality. Dave-iD Busaras Scot is more or less the opening act for the first two numbers before Gavin and Guggi take over. This has some amazing moments in it (the weird art films, “Come to Daddy” and the “Pig Children” segment that preceded it), but there’s nary a wasted frame. If this would be your first exposure to the Virgin Prunes, be prepared to be, well, any number of things, but I think it’s safe to say that pulverized might be one of them.
 

 
The final proper Virgin Prunes album (although the line-up by now was already lacking Dik, Guggi and Dave-iD) was 1985’s The Moon Looked Down and Laughed. Gone was the dark guitar onslaught, replaced by a positively evil, campy cabaret sound that foretold of Gavin Friday’s solo style. The Moon Looked Down and Laughed featured a distinctly new sonic polish (strings, wind chimes) courtesy of producer David Ball (Soft Cell) and is perhaps the point where they went “full goth.” The best song, for me, is the chilling “I Am God”: