The Prince of Heaven's Eyes

A short introduction concerning Fruupp, Annie Austere, Mud Flanagan and his search for the end of the rainbow.

In the early 1970s I was working with Belfast band Fruupp and apart from numerous other tasks including, but not limited to, finding the weekly wages I wrote some of the lyrics for their songs and wrote the spoken word links that connected the songs on stage into a kind of show. It’s probably also important to note that swords, costumes, dry ice (loads of dry ice) and blood capsules were also involved.

For the third album I had the idea of reversing the process, that is to say writing the links first, in the form of a short story, and then the band’s song-writers, Vincent McCusker and Steve Houston, writing the songs to bring the story to (stage) life.

I often wondered how the legend grew about a pot of gold being buried at the end of the rainbow and so I created a legend of my own to explain it and named it The Prince Of Heaven’s Eyes. From childhood I’d always seen a rainbow as being the top eyelid of the almighty.

It has to be said that Vince and Mr Houston came up with the musical goods and in trumps. Fruupp as a band, Vince McCusker, Steve Houston, Peter Farrelly and Martin Foye, wrote their one and only song, The Prince of Heaven, about the show as opposed to being part of it, and so was released as a single and not on the album.

The album was released (with the first 5000 albums containing a free booklet of my short story) and we took the show on the tour and that as they say was that. The following year Fruupp could be heard to mutter, “Houston we have a problem.” They were of course referring to their keyboard player and a year and an album later it was all over.

The Prince of Heaven’s eyes album was re-mastered and re-released a couple of years ago as a CD. I thought it might be a good idea, once that dust settled, of revisiting, tidying up the story and e-publishing it on Kindle, so here we are…