Cedarwood Road (A Gavin Friday Narration)

Vocal by Gavin Friday (Bono in bold)

Cedarwood Road.

This is the road I grew up on.
Along with my two old friends;
Guggi who lived in number five,
Bono in number ten,
and my good self, Gavin Friday,
the Catholic in the cul-de-sac.
I lived in number 1-4-0.

Back in those days,
North side Dublin in the early ’70s,
It felt like it rained,
and it rained, and it rained, and it rained…
365 days of the year.

No way out of there.
No way out of there.

The only way was through the friendship,
the imagination,
the dreams of three teenage boys.
The phone box and the cherry blossom tree.
Right outside Guggi’s house.

In the ’70s nobody had phones,
so the phone box became
almost like a meeting place for us all.
It was outside that phone box
I first met Guggi and Bono.

Northside
Southside

I don’t know what it was
that pulled us together.
Our sense of humour?
The way we looked at the world? All of the gold
The love of music?
The fear of our fathers? The joy that you know
We didn’t fit in, After the storm
so we made up our own world.
We gave each other names. Cedarwood
Names that made sense only to us. Cedarwood Road

No longer Catholic.
No longer Protestant.
No Longer Plymouth Brethren.
No longer our father’s sons.

Just Gavin Friday, Guggi, and Bono.
In a world called Lypton Village.
Then came Bowie, the one and only Starman.
We first saw him on Top of the Pops, early ’72.
He was for me, very much the guiding light.
And he showed us all the way.

The dull and grey world of Ballymun
suddenly turned Technicolour,
as we saw the world through his crazy eyes.
The Leper Messiah gave motivation
to the confused young fellows
that turned out to be the Virgin Prunes and U2.

In those days violence was a daily occurrence.
Every day getting your head kicked in
because of what you thought,
and how you looked,
and the music you liked,

Bowie and punk rock gave us the keys,
keys to open the door to get out of there,
we were making it up as we went along,
writing songs and finding out who we really were.

The Three Amigos, the Prodigal Sons, more like.
It wasn’t easy growing up on Cedarwood Road,
but as the song says, ‘The heart that is broken is the heart that is open’…

The heart that is broken, is the heart that is open.

Open. Open