The actual ditch used was not at Clongowes nor Kildare, but in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. Pushing Dedalus into it introduced Daniel Figgis to Marlay Park and Marlay House, to which the unlikely school bully, now a composer, returns next weekend with Tamper, his site-specific work.
When he worked as a teenager on Portrait, Figgis was already at the end of one career, having worked as a child actor for 10 years. “I was a very brattish child who needed something to do,” he says. “My parents farmed me out to acting class to use up some of my excess energy. I imagine I was impossible. I was beyond precocious.”
Since giving up acting he has had at least two more careers: first as the transvestite incubus of Irish rock in the 1980s, then as an influential but scarcely visible instrumental artist going against the Britpop grain in the 1990s.
Collaborations seldom lasted long. Former colleagues speak of him as an indefatigable obsessive with whom it is impossible to work. Attempts over recent years to interview him faltered on his demands — he would communicate only by e-mail; he wouldn’t talk about his previous incarnations as Haa-Lacka Bintii in the Virgin Prunes and as Princess Tinymeat; on and implacably on.
“I got pissed off with being misquoted,” he says, “and some people just couldn’t get beyond the tranny thing.”
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The Marlay Park events, which combine live music with multimedia elements, mark the end of Figgis’s first phase as a composer. After that he will begin work on his first album since Skipper. “I’m very proud of that work but I have far better in me,” he says. “This time I want complete control over everything, from owning the studio to every aspect of the recording and release. My career has been a series of one-offs. I want to bring order and strategy to it.”
Born in 1961, Figgis’s career began six years later. Having attended acting classes in the Brendan Smith Academy, he got his break into show business in Tolka Row, RTE’s proto-soap. Two years later he got a part in Swift, a Eugene McCabe play, in which Micheal MacLiammoir played Jonathan Swift. “After that it was a roller coaster for 10 years,” he says. “It never stopped.”
He abandoned acting to study philosophy at Trinity College, a training he regards as one of the two main influences on his subsequent work. “I got involved with the murky world of rock’n’roll when I was at Trinity, but I continued with the philosophy, which gave me a conceptual underpinning.”
The other main influence was Roger Doyle, the experimental composer, who took Figgis under his wing in the late 1970s. “Roger is one of the best mentors of all time,” says Figgis. “It was exciting to come across somebody completely committed to doing things the way he wanted.”
While at Trinity, Figgis befriended Dik Evans, guitarist with the Virgin Prunes. When the Prunes’ drummer, Pod, left the group, Dik invited Figgis to join.
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“I was looking for a musical consultancy. I didn’t want to join a band. I had been in a band with some schoolmates. For our first event we called ourselves Normal Service Will Be Resumed: One. For our second event: Normal Service Will Be Resumed: Two. We were staggeringly, hideously up-our-arses pretentious.
“So I was never quite a member of the Prunes. I was brought in to help kick-start our careers, as a kind of associate drag artist. It was an unsustainable teenage moment.”
Figgis cranked up his image of ambiguous pixie sexuality even more for his next project, Princess Tinymeat — a reference to Montgomery Clift’s backstage nickname — and continued wearing dresses on stage and off.
“There must absolutely not be any delineation between the stage persona and the off-stage one,” he says. “The tranny thing was as much about getting laid all the time as it was about making a political statement. When I wasn’t in hospital recovering from a gay bashing I was always very lucky with women. Pretty much every party I went to I got lucky. And the nights I didn’t, I got hunted down like the monster at the end of Frankenstein and got beaten up.”
Princess Tinymeat made three singles and an album for Rough Trade before fizzling out in the late 1980s, Figgis’s gender politics looking a bit dated and forced in the wake of Boy George, Pete Burns and other mainstream gender benders of 1980s pop.
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“I was very caught up in the politics of what I was doing, to the detriment of the work,” he says. “It became a huge distraction from what I was doing. The work was interpreted in sociological terms rather than aesthetic ones. The politics are still part of what I am, but they don’t inform the work any more, though inevitably they still inform how I’m seen.”
The years immediately after Princess Tinymeat became Figgis’s lost weekend. He hadn’t begun smoking or drinking until he was 22 but by the end of the 1980s the situation had got out of control.
“I took absolutely every single thing you could think of,” he says, “and enjoyed it. I have a slight problem with people who blame peer pressure. The reason people take drugs is because it feels very nice. It’s just that dealing with the fallout is not so nice. And dealing with the drug subculture is really not nice. So I was skilled at not dealing with the subculture. I had operatives in the field who kept me supplied.
“I had a wonderful time — as always, my feelings were central to me — but I became a complete shit. I was extraordinarily violent. A partner I loved very much left me and was right to do so. I don’t know how any relationship could last through what I was doing.
“By 1990 I was tripping all the time and drinking like a fish. When we split up, I realised how bad it was. So I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m not going to drink for five years. Starting tomorrow’. I still circled around drugs, but nothing heavy. Other than that it was cold turkey. No therapy: I found the idea demeaning. No 12 steps: that complete dissociation from one’s old life I found appalling.”
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Geoff Travis, the boss of Rough Trade, continued to support Figgis and funded what became two years of studio work on Skipper. “It was full of unfathomable references that nobody else could be expected to get,” says Figgis. “For example, I cut up a recording of Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech and used only the static between the words. I spent month after month erasing and overdubbing until by the end it was a palimpsest from beginning to end.”
After Skipper he made an album for a label that went bust before the work could be released, which Figgis has come to see as a lucky escape. “I had an epiphany where I saw that every part of it worked, but taken together they didn’t work. So I decided to withdraw. This is the fruit of the rethink.
“I was tired of the infantilisation of the music business. As an artist you are presumed to be an idiot. Audiences are presumed to be incapable of processing anything remotely challenging. I refuse to believe that. In the past it was frustrating to deal with that, but now I have a Zen detachment. Or at least I’m working on it.”
Daniel Figgis’s Tamper (not suitable for children), Marlay Park, Rathfarnham, September 25 & 26