Here's an article from '02 (I can't believe it's been that long!!) about the friendship of Bono, Gavin and Guggi...
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Sunday Times: Part 1 - Leader of the Joshua Trio (10-1-2002)
Leader of the Joshua Trio
Guggi grew up on the same road as Bono and Gavin Friday. As his friends made their
name in music he developed into a powerful painter
They didn't fit into Cedarwood Road, nor into the lower middle-class niche of their youth.
Neither of them liked football, the drinking culture that they saw the older teenagers
slipping into nor the grinding poverty of ambition among their peers. It helped that they
lived opposite each other: Derek Rowen in number five, Paul Hewson in number 10.
Neither was academically outstanding and both were unhappy, to a greater or lesser
extent, in their home lives. To escape the greyness of 1970s' Dublin they invented a
parallel world and one by one invited others to join it.
They had a fascination with finding the precise words that best described people. Rowen
gave Hewson the name Bonavox of O'Connell Street, the name of a hearing aid shop. "I
thought he looked like the place," he says. Shortened to Bonavox, the name mutated to
Bono Vox before being shortened once more.
Bono named Guggi because of what he describes as a hiccup in the shape of his face,
imagining a dribble of spit hanging of his lower lip going gug-gug-gug. "He hated the
name," says Bono. Guggi concurs. "I was embarrassed by it, particularly in front of girls.
But at the same time I knew that's what I looked like."
Guggi's appearance was dominated by a severe bowl haircut, the most unfashionable
hairstyle of all at the time, inflicted on him by his disciplinarian father. As a young man,
the father had converted from the Church of Ireland to the Christian fundamentalist
Plymouth Brethren. Guggi and his nine siblings had an unusually strict upbringing. "We
lived by his rules and there was no questioning that," says Guggi. "I wasn't allowed to
have long hair and it was the one thing I so badly wanted. The bowl haircut was my dad's
statement against long hair. Other children laughed at us."
At the far end of Cedarwood Road, in number 140, lived Fionan Hanvey. Handbag country,
the locals called his end of the road, because the big-boned Hanvey, though painfully shy,
clomped around in his Dr. Martens slathered in make-up and swinging a handbag.
The three of them formed Lypton Village, a notional place to which some, such as David
Evans, were admitted, while others, such as Adam Clayton, were granted only associate
membership. Guggi was the giver of names in Lypton Village. The angular Evans became
the Edge. Guggi's brother Trevor became Strongman, because of his sickly constitution.
David Watson became Dave Id because he pronounced words slowly; and Hanvey
became Gavin Friday.
U2's rise to global success was accompanied by a mythologising of Lypton Village but,
says Guggi, although there was a banal reality about it, there was also something special
about the small northside tribe.
"We were just teenagers with nothing to do -- most people thought we were eejits," he
says. "But there was a spark there: we knew we were on to something. We were a group
of artists and we didn't know it. It was based largely on a shared humour. But we took our
humour very seriously.
"The few of us there from the start -- Bono, Gav and myself -- developed our personalities
together, developed our sense of humour together and have remained close. People who
came in afterwards maybe didn't feel quite so secure about their place."
"We didn't go to university," says Bono. "We came from a place where you went to
school, then got a job or went on the dole. U2 and the Virgin Prunes became our
university."
Bono and Guggi had painted together from early childhood. Even at the age of seven or
eight, says Bono, Guggi was good. "He had a natural talent for drawing that was
extraordinary. I'd try to draw a horse and it would end up looking like a misshaped
elephant. Guggi would effortlessly draw a perfect horse. He could get outlines, he could do
the shading.
"When we were teenagers, my old man, who also painted, would come and have a look
when we were painting. 'You're good,' he'd say to Guggi. 'You've got a talent.' He never
said that to me, though," says Bono, laughing.
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Sunday Times: Part 2 - Leader of the Joshua Trio (10-1-2002)
Having crucially been nurtured by Jimmy Burns, his art teacher in secondary school in
Whitehall, Guggi developed a sideline in signwriting while still in the Virgin Prunes. "I
wasn't a musician, I couldn't sing and my contribution to the Virgin Prunes was a tangent
of me as a painter: costume, make-up and performance." He drifted away from them as he
got more signwriting work, and eventually was sacked.
"I was in the Virgin Prunes for eight years, so it was an important part of my life," he says.
"When they fired me I was really hurt, but it was a blessing in disguise because I realised
I had to paint."
He found himself stalled: still painting in a childish way, obsessed by technical perfection.
"He was a natural draughtsman and had to work hard to get beyond technique," says
Bono. "It was a struggle but he didn't lack confidence. He always had a healthy ego. He
didn't think much of other painters. There were a few he approved of. 'Picasso, yeah, he's
all right.' "
The breakthrough came when U2 were recording The Joshua Tree. The band rented
Danesmoate, a Georgian mansion in Rathfarnham that bass player Clayton subsequently
bought. While U2 recorded downstairs, Gavin and Guggi painted upstairs, Guggi moving
into oils in a determined way for the first time and painting on a larger scale.
Once a week or so during that period, usually on Wednesday evenings, Guggi, Gavin and
Bono travelled to a painting studio in the city centre to work with artist Charlie Whisker.
"Guggi quickly began to develop a dramatic style," says Gavin. "As he developed, Bono
and I could see just how far ahead of us he was."
Early in 1988, they showed the results in an exhibition called Many Wednesdays, though
Bono, as he puts it, "bottled out" of showing his paintings at the last minute and showed
photographs from his 1985 working trip to Ethiopia. With the show a success, Guggi
realised that painting full-time was viable.
"Once I got even a smell of it I went at it fill tilt," he says.
Guggi's work evolved in a series of leaps. The overtly Christian imagery of early work such
as the First Day and Last Day series, which took cues from the books of Genesis and
Revelations, was followed by a long series of abstract heads, his first mature paintings. A
brief minimalist series followed before Guggi began, in the early 1990s, exploring the form
that has become his signature: bowls.
"To a large extent, all three of us are reactions to our fathers," says Gavin. "Bono has
always spoken highly of his father, but he had the easiest time of the three of us when it
came to fathers. In Guggi's case, you don't have to be Freud to see that the man with
probably the longest hair in Dublin, who paints bowls, just might be a reaction to the father
who inflicted the bowl haircut on him as a child. His upbringing and his partner, Sibylle
(Ungers, also a painter) have been his biggest influences."
"The most important thing about his painting is its religious quality, which can be traced
back to his upbringing," says Bono. "There's a religious intensity to it, a monastic
quietness, even in the canvases that look the least religious: a bowl is never just a bowl
with Guggi -- it's the most intense bowl you'll ever see." Gavin regards Guggi's bowls as
the equivalent of pop singles and can see him moving into more abstract work. "The bowls
are immediate, they're easily digested. Guggi has done the pop thing: the concept album
awaits."
Guggi is not so sure. "Bowls are my language," he says. "They are no more important to
me than they are to anybody else. They're just shapes. But I've no plans to move out of
bowls. I'd change tomorrow if I felt I should. But I see endless possibilities for the bowl."
Recent work by Guggi opens at the Solomon gallery on Tuesday, October 8.
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,
Nicknames have the weirdest origins.
