Christy Dignam: Read a previously unpublished interview with the Aslan icon

In June 2019, Aslan played a special pop-up show at Bruxelles Bar in Dublin – in the run-up to a major gig at the Iveagh Gardens. Ahead of the Bruxelles performance, Christy Dignam sat down with Lucy O’Toole, and spoke with his trademark warmth, wit and openness about Dublin, politics, RTÉ, immigration, homelessness, and more. Here’s what he had to say, in his own words – taken from the previously unpublished interview. So, over to Christy...

When you get to our age, a year is about three months long. It goes like that. When you’re young, it’s so endless, but at our age you’re like, ‘Fuck – was that it?’ It really is that quick. Now, any day you can get your feet on the floor is a good day.

When I came out of hospital first, I’d forgotten parts of every song. We’d be singing ‘Crazy World’, and I’d forget the words. It’s just chemo brain – you get wipe-outs. It’s taken me three years to get over that, and get back to normal again.

When I got diagnosed five or six years ago, I did chemotherapy and held it at bay for three years. Then I had to do chemo again, and the second time it only held it at bay for a year. What happens then is that your cells start recognising the drug you’re using, so you have to try a new one. So I did that, and I’ve just finished five months of chemo. So my head is only clear enough now for us to actually sit down and write.

Slane & The Noggin Inn

If you get music at its purest form, it’s in a really intimate setting. The further you get from that, the more insincere and contrived it becomes. It’s about commerciality then.

The best gigs I’ve ever done are in places like the Noggin Inn. I remember, for example, we played with Bowie in Slane a good few years ago. It was going to be the biggest gig of our lives. We were all huge Bowie fans, thinking, 'This is going to be fucking amazing!' We used to start with a song called ‘The Gallery’. They’d be playing for a minute, and then I’d walk out onstage.

I remember walking out – and the nearest audience member was as close as McDonald’s down the end of fucking Grafton Street. I was kind of like, ‘Oh fuck.’ I didn’t really enjoy the gig because of that.

Playing the bigger gigs becomes a necessity, because otherwise you’d have to do a thousand fucking pubs to get that same audience, and you don’t have the time. But I love those smaller gigs.

And I love Vicar St. No matter where you’re sitting you’ve a great view of the band. When they were building Vicar Street, they brought us in to play for a week while they set the sound system up. I love the staff in Vicar Street too.

The Olympia has its vibe because we’ve been playing it so long. There used to be this big thing years ago – Midnight at the Olympia. It used to be on at midnight on a Friday and Saturday. It was for bands only starting out, and we used to play it a hundred-fucking-years ago. That place will always have those memories for us.

Christy Dignam by Michael Quinn

The Current Scene

Look at Fontaines D.C., IDLES and [Gilla] Band now. I’m mad into the punk thing. It’s coming back again, and so it should. Rock ‘n’ roll needs that kick up the hole every once in a while. It gets too complacent and too safe.

But it’s fucking hard out there. For 90,000 streams of ‘Crazy World’ on Spotify, how much do you think we were getting? Around €16.

We go in and we sweat blood trying to get a song out, and you hope radio stations will play it, so that people will then come to your gigs. But they’re doing a fucking Gerry Ryan show from 40-fucking-years ago!

RTÉ are still stuck in this bullshit thing, where they’re saying ‘Oh look they have a dancing show – let’s have a dancing show!’ Dating shows. Gogglebox. Copying fucking everything. Get a fucking brain, man. We have so much talent in this country. My heart goes out to young people.

RTÉ never really played our music, so to have the success we’ve had without RTÉ backing us is kind of amazing. In countries like France and Canada, the radio has to play a certain percentage of the national music. RTÉ say they’re playing national, but it’s all U2 and Westlife…

35 years later, and we’re still whinging! Like the little aul fellas on The Muppets!

But our diehard fans will still buy the records. That’s who we do it for now, and for the joy of doing it. When you make a record, it’s like a baby – you kind of fuck it out there, and it’s no longer yours. So that’s all we can do.

Poverty And Homelessness In Ireland

I remember going to a soup kitchen when we were kids. You paid a penny and got a bowl of stew or a bit of batch loaf.

When I was a very young kid – I’m talking five years of age – this neighbour of mine went to America. She had family living in New York. At that time nobody went to America, or even England, on holidays. If you went, you went to stay. But the family over there paid for her to go on a two-week holiday.

She came back, and I remember all the aul ones standing around in the hall talking to her about it, and she was regaling them with tales of her fucking travels. She said, ‘You’d never believe it: over there were people with no homes, lying in the streets. I’d want to go over to them, but I was told to ignore them and walk past.’

Here we are over 50 years later, and instead of getting better, its gone a fucking thousand times worse – even though we’re a richer country now than we were back then. It’s out-fucking-rageous, that Leo Varadkar can pay himself a quarter of a million a year or something, while there’s people starving in the streets. How can he sleep at night?

Immigration, The Church And Politics

I was walking from the Ilac Centre to the Liffey the other day, and it didn’t feel like my hometown anymore. You could be in fucking Tralee, or Cork, or Belfast.

I like the fact that there’s loads of different people and nationalities in the country. It’s great now that it’s become a melting pot, with the big Polish community, and the Nigerian community. I think it’s fucking amazing, and it is the way forward as a country. They obviously bring different talents into the country, and there’s different music now because of it. It’s a much more cosmopolitan place now than it was back in the day.

When we started off, the Catholic Church still had a stranglehold on this country. Contraception was illegal. The reason we called our last album Nudie Books and Frenchies, was because when we were going to England first years ago, our mates would all be going, ‘Can you get us some nudie books and frenchies when you’re over there?’ Because you couldn’t get condoms here. It’s changed so much, for the better.

There are obviously aspects that aren’t good, and our governments have a lot to answer for.

For a nation the size of ours, and the resources we have in this country, we punch above our weight in music and literature. Even in rugby!

But then I look at the politicians, the state of the health services, and homelessness. It’s a fucking scandal. Patrick Pearse must be spinning in his fucking grave looking at the politicians. I don’t know what it is. You vote Fianna Fáil and they fuck up the country. You go with Fine Gael, and they say they’ll stop all the big pensions and big wages – and then give themselves a fucking raise!

So who the fuck am I going to vote for? I’m running out of options. Because they’ve all shafted us.

When you look at the cervical cancer scandal here, it’s just outrageous. Crisis after crisis – we limp from one crisis to the next, honestly. To think, in this country, they’d give a hotel €3 million to put people up for a few weeks – when they could be building houses? I just don’t understand it.

Christy Dignam and Billy McGuinness in 2019 by Miguel Ruiz

The Songwriting Process – And Looking Forward

We write on acoustic guitar. We’re just sitting in my gaff, and Joe will play a chord sequence. It should evoke some kind of emotion in you, so then you try and write a lyric to fit whatever that emotion is.

When you’re a young fella, getting your hole is what’s important, to be honest. But when you get to our age, it’s no longer a priority in your life, and you’re more reflective. So our new material is probably a little bit more reflective lyrically than past stuff.

I haven’t been this excited about new stuff in a long time. To be 143-years-old and still be getting a buzz off music is very good. With our first record, ‘This Is’, we were walking down O’Connell Street about a week after the 1916 Rising, and everyone was on a downer.

So we said, ‘Come on and we’ll write a song, to cheer them up!’

Read the full Christy Dignam tribute in the current issue of Hot Press: