One More Time With Feeling . . .

We misunderstood the script, says Christy Dignam with a rueful grin on his face. When people tell you about the music industry and what a cunt it is, you expect the ones who are gonna fuck you up to arrive in long, black coats and to actually look sinister. They don t. They come with smiles and hand shakes. The other thing they don t tell you is that the person who fucks you up the most is yourself.
The Aslan story is the stuff of classical tragedy. Five young men from the wrong end of town try to take on the world and beat it at its own game. For a while they do. They become working class heroes, in the truest sense of the term, but then it all goes wrong and they themselves become the central agents of their own downfall.
It s the story of Christy Dignam, Billy McGuinness, Tony McGuinness, Joe Jewell and Alan Downey from the Northside area of Finglas/Ballymun. But it s a story that also tells a great deal about the music industry, about Dublin and about the nature of fame, even on a local level. Most of all, it s a story of sex, drugs and rock n roll.
However, what makes it particularly special, indeed almost unique, is the fact that it could yet be a story with a happy ending. Against all the odds, Aslan have been given a second chance.

They d known each other for as long as they could remember. Christy, Joe and Tony had even attended the same primary school. Collectively and individually, rock n roll was the only thing they cared about, virtually the only thing they talked about. They rarely put it into words but they all secretly knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. Rock stars.
There were many false stops and starts, balls of shite , as Christy now calls them, but eventually, in the early eighties, they put together the first draft of their plan for world domination. It was called Meelah XVIII, a band whose music was every bit as awkward and cumbersome as its name. Still, for a while back then, the roman numerals did seem cool.
Christy was doing a lot of acid and smoking a lot of hash in those days, and it showed in his lyrics. Nobody has a fucking clue what they were about most of the time, least of all the guys in the band. By early 1983 the brief stylish sheen had faded from the XVIII and people started saying that it looked stupid so they decided to get themselves a new moniker. They opted for Aslan, after a character in the children s fable, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.
Later, when critics and reviewers would start writing stuff about the roar of the lion and making all sorts of fairytale analogies, the name would become a bit of an embarrassment. They d only picked it because it was nice and short and was impossible to abbreviate. They hated the fact that people referred to a band like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark as OMD. Initials were gank nobody was gonna be able to reduce Aslan to an A.
The first line-up featured Christy on vocals, Joe Jewell on guitar, Tony McGuinness on acoustic guitar as well as a bassist, a keyboardist, a drummer and a sax/flautist. Their music was still a little clumsy and graceless, their repertoire at that stage consisting of lengthy, swirling epics with Christy s near-operatic vocals bringing the overall effect remarkably close to that of someone like the legendary Pavlov s Dog. An average song would have anything up to five time-changes, making their material as difficult to listen to as it was to play.
Nobody, apart from a smattering of hard-core fans, was dancing at their gigs so they had to find a way of sharpening and adding more sinew to their schtick. Out went their keyboards, bass and sax/flute players. Tony took over on bass and Billy McGuinness joined as the second guitarist (by now, drummer Alan Downey was also onboard). Within a matter of weeks, the distinctive Aslan sound that would become so familiar had started to emerge. I know this might sound corny but when the five of us are together in a room, something else comes into play, says Christy. It s a vibe or something. It just feels right. It s always been that way.
In the summer of 1983, a man called Dick Fagan, who would become their first manager, saw Aslan play a Lark In The Park concert in Raheny and was blown away.
It was unbelievable, he would recall. The music that was coming off that stage was fucking amazing. What I saw that day was a great band, but they didn t seem to know where their next gig was coming from. They hadn t been in contact with record companies or anything. I offered to become their manager. I really believed in the product and felt that I could sell it.
Neither Fagan nor any members of the band had any real income at this time so they created a basic operating fund of #300 by each borrowing a total of #50 from friends of relatives. They then began sending out four-track demos to every record company address they could find and Dick Fagan and Christy took up permanent residence in the RTE canteen, hoping for even a brief encounter with Ian Wilson or Dave Fanning.
Meanwhile, the band s reputation as a live act was growing at Grand Prix speed. Though still unsigned, a sort of Aslan-mania had started to develop. They became local heart-throbs. At almost every gig, the front four rows would be made up of screaming females. There were even reports of panties being thrown on-stage during their shows.
When tangible record company interest did materialise, it came hard and fast. Muff Winwood of CBS, known in the industry as the God of A&R , declared an interest and in doing so unleashed a stampede. Chrysalis sent people over to Dublin to see Aslan, so too did Stiff, Atlantic, Virgin and a half dozen publishing companies. At one show in the TV Club, there was a total of 15 publishing executives and A&R men present. A mini-bus had to be hired to drive them around.
There were surreal moments. Dick Fagan remembers collecting his dole one Tuesday and then heading straight down to the Gresham Hotel for lunch with some record company bigwigs. Aslan were careful about vetting every deal that was offered to them but such prudence costs money. They had a solicitor in London, an accountant in Dublin yet, some days, there wasn t a member in the band who could afford the price of a cup of coffee.
Gradually, familiarity with A&R men began to breed contempt in the Aslan camp. None of these people could seem to get a proper handle on what they were doing. Some saw them as a short term proposition, others as strictly a singles act, one American A&R man declared his disappointment that they weren t taller and then, there were the scouts who came to Dublin, got pissed and coked to the eyeballs, and didn t even turn up for the showcase gigs.
Ultimately, the very fact that their For Sale sign had been up so long itself became a problem labels interested in Aslan began to wonder if there was something amiss which they hadn t spotted and which might explain why nobody else had signed them.
Aslan were one of the biggest draws in Ireland. Janice Long was repeating their session on BBC Radio every week and they were regularly topping Hot Press readers polls, but they still hadn t put pen to dotted line. This became something of a running joke in some Dublin circles but for those directly involved there was definitely nothing funny about it. Everybody s nerves were frayed. Hopes would be raised and dashed overnight. Patience was wearing thin, strains among band members erupted and, then, Dick Fagan completely cracked up.
Within two years of taking over as manager, Fagan had personally amassed huge debts, including a #2,000 phone bill. He also owed large sums of money to sound and lighting companies, rehearsal studios and solicitors. He had become an alcoholic, was addicted to a tranquilliser called Atavan and his marriage was on the rocks. Utterly demoralised, he felt he could do no more for the band so he resigned.
An acquaintance called Colin Boland took over in a caretaking capacity but was soon replaced by Danny Kenny and John Reid, two well known music biz heads who had previously been managing Cactus World News. Kenny and Reid helped give Aslan a renewed sense of confidence and direction. And, later, when Danny Kenny became the sole mentor, he seemed to get on so well with the rest of the guys that he was seen by some as an unofficial sixth member of Aslan. There would come a time, however, when Kenny would be reviled by the band and singled out as one of the chief sources of blame for the misfortunes that would befall them.
For now, however, only the sky seemed to impose a limit. The singles, Loving Me Lately and This Is , were released on solid records and became huge Irish hits. More triumphant tours and critical adulation followed. Then, at long last, in May 87, the news came: Aslan had signed a deal with EMI Records in London. Their debut album, Feel No Shame, produced by Mick Glossop, was released the following February to a predictably enthusiastic response.
Behind the fanfares though, there could be heard the low, threatening rumble of a not too distant avalanche. Aslan s world was about to cave in.

Christy Dignam cannot remember exactly when it was that he began doing heroin but he will never forget the beautiful buzz which, initially at least, he got from the drug. He had been smoking hash from a very young age, scoring his first few hits from a couple of hippies who lived on his estate. Gradually, however, as his appetite increased, he found himself venturing further and further into Dublin s drug underworld.
In order to buy the hash, I had to go to various haunts where there was also all sorts of harder stuff available, he says. Over the years, I dabbled around with various things and the heroin only really became a problem towards the end.
Christy wasn t the only one with a problem. The rest of the guys in the band were also starting to veer dangerously off the rails. During their long, frustrating abeyance as unsigned local heroes they had allowed their small-time success to go to their heads. To outsiders, it seemed that they were counting, roasting and barbecuing chickens that hadn t even begun to hatch.
It all went wrong at least a year before everything became public, admits Tony McGuinness. It was down to us all being fucking wankers and losing the plot. You saw what we were like, wankers just partying constantly and forgetting the whole point of what we were supposed to be doing. It wasn t just Christy, the rest of us with our gargle and drugs added to the whole mess. We were on a tour of Europe with Stiff Little Fingers, playing a half hour set and every night without fail we d be out doing drugs and drinking.
Christy doesn t drink. He hates booze, regards it as the most insidious drug of all and despises what it does to people. So, while Billy, Tony, Joe and Alan became regular fixtures at the bar of The Pink Elephant, he was growing closer and closer to a gang of people for whom hard narcotics were the stimulants of choice. And without a shared social life, Aslan quickly became a group who got together only for (occasional) rehearsals and gigs. They were no longer mates, they were now merely work colleagues.
This rift was soon widened into a chasm by a variety of outside forces. Not since the dog days of Phil Lynott s final decline was an Irish rock act so surrounded by seedy hangers-on. Aslan became a magnet for all sorts of pushers, groupies, con-artists, leeches and other assorted low-life who helped distract attention from what should ve been the job in hand. Meanwhile, Danny Kenny, the man they thought was taking care of business, was himself succumbing to the delights of extra curricular activities.
Danny was great at business but business became a party, insists Tony. He was exactly the same as the rest of us. I don t know if he s chilled out a bit now but he was a party animal. We were too close to him in a way, y know. You d have a business meeting and then go for a few pints. There was no dividing line.
There were other pressures too. When we started off Aslan, we wanted to be a successful working class band because there d never been a working class band to come out of this country, says Christy. But that was turned on us. A lot of journalists in this town at the time were Southsiders and they turned what we were trying to do into something ugly. We were trying to celebrate the joys of being working class but instead we were being portrayed as the Vinny Jones of Irish rock in between lashing auld ones and robbing cars, we made records, kinda thing. We were supposed to be five hard men who flashed our tattoos and loved fighting. Complete bullshit!
People ask What split Aslan up? It was no single thing, and this bullshit played a part. It was totally grating with me. There were times when I was embarrassed getting up on stage. Everywhere we went, we were getting guys coming up to us saying youse are Aslan, youse are hard, stitch that!
We had a riot at a gig in Longford one night over this shit. The band became very uncomfortable with all this stuff because we still had to go home and meet our mates. You do something and it has no integrity but you still have to face your mates the following night.
And so, the steady implosion of Aslan continued apace. To the fans, however, it seemed that all systems were go for further future triumphs, and that facade could ve been maintained for a whole lot longer had the scale of Christy s heroin addiction not brought the whole situation to a frightening, final climax.

Being a junkie is a full-time job. At the depth of his addiction, Christy needed #40 every six hours to buy enough smack to feed his habit. A schedule like that takes a lot of hustling, a lot of skulduggery, a lot of lying. It certainly leaves little time for work.
What was really hard was trying to pretend to people that everything was alright in the camp when it wasn t, says Billy McGuinness. That really got to us when we tried to get together and write songs. We just couldn t sit down and work with him and it got to the stage where we hated each other.
We couldn t tolerate it. You d be set up for a day s rehearsal and then you d get a phonecall saying Christy had to tax his car or renew his marriage licence and couldn t make it!
If Christy did turn up, he d invariably fall asleep after about half an hour or start feeling sick and have to go home again. Regular rehearsals were a bit of an indulgence anyway by now, Aslan could rarely do more than one decent gig per week because Christy s throat was always in bits. Plans for British tours to promote Feel No Shame had to be scrapped.
During the spring of 88 while their debut album was nestling at number one in the Irish charts, there were almost daily crises. After one show in Waterford, for instance, the band came very close to splitting up. A load of dodgy geezers arrived down for Christy, and Joe and myself just felt that we d had enough, recalls Tony. We felt it was just getting to the end of it so we just left, but only for about ten hours. We went on the piss but we still dragged ourselves to a gig in Carlow the following night.
Later, a short American tour, which they did manage to do, was also overshadowed by Christy s addiction and his reluctance to even admit that there was a problem. I remember myself and Tony sitting down with Christy in New York and saying, Look, we ve got to be open about everything otherwise this isn t going to work , says Joe Jewell. I was like a bleedin detective. I used to go off and catch him and we clashed pretty badly over it. He d say, Oh, I want to check out a pair of leopard skin shoes and five minutes later I d be out the door after him and find him somewhere he shouldn t be. I was feeling, Hang on, why am I breaking my bollocks for this . It wasn t a good time.
I was brought up with that type of thing all around me, continues Jewell. I have mates who are dead from heroin, and I thought that because I d done loads of types of drugs and was clever enough to say bollocks to that, I felt that anyone who went near it was a wanker. I didn t understand the illness and the reasons people take it. And because I d always looked up to Christy and thought he was a really intelligent bloke, that made his taking heroin all the more annoying.
On May 27th, 1988, EMI took up their option for a second Aslan album and, having been alerted to Christy s predicament, the label offered to send him to a clinic where he could get clean and straight. The singer wouldn t hear of it. He d sort himself out, he insisted, but then refused to take any steps towards doing so. Pretty soon after that, the rest of the band came to a painful conclusion. Christy would have to go.
At first, Danny Kenny was vociferously opposed to this course of action. Without Christy, he argued, they d more than likely lose everything. If it would make life easier, Christy could travel on separate buses, separate flights and stay in separate hotels. But the guys were adamant. They could no longer work with Christy Dignam. They wanted him out.
The most frustrating thing for me was the amount of people who thought we just sacked him on the spot, without stopping to think of the grief we put up with for well over a year, says Tony. How people could be so naive as to think we just fucked him out without trying everything possible to sort things out is beyond me.
The actual shock of getting the bullet is what got him into the Rutland to sort himself out, adds Billy.
Today, Christy agrees, but at the time, he felt bitter, betrayed and vengeful. His mates had stabbed him in the back. He was officially sacked on Thursday, August 18th, 1988, and, initially, his descent into narcotic oblivion appeared to accelerate. He was, he says, close to death and even closer to wishing for it. His relationship with his wife, Catherine, and daughter, Kiera, was at an all-time low and now he was no longer a member of Aslan.
Nevertheless, Christy s survival instinct was still strong and he eventually managed to summon up enough spirit for a fight back. In October of that year, he checked himself into the Rutland Addiction Treatment Centre in Knocklyon for a programme of rehabilitation. Apart from everything else, he was determined to clear his name which he felt had been grossly sullied by music industry rumour and tabloid speculation.
On Wednesday, September 7th, under the front page headline ASLAN IT S THE END, The Star had begun a series of misleading and often inaccurate stories which culminated in the allegation that Christy Dignam had been a heroin pusher. It took a while but Christy s libel action against the paper was ultimately successful and he was awarded considerable damages.

For months, even years, the bad blood between Christy and the other members of Aslan continued to boil. Billy, Tony, Joe and Alan were determined to keep the band doing and, if possible, to hold onto their deal with EMI. Eamo Doyle, a former bass player with The Lookalikes and one-time male model, was drafted in as frontman.
We didn t let anything sink in after Christy went, says Tony. No disrespect to Eamo Doyle, but we didn t even realise how bad that set-up was. We didn t listen to anybody because all we wanted to do was to get back over to America to do more partying. That was all that really mattered at the time.
They all knew that the chemistry was gone but they felt that there was still some life left in the old Aslan myth . Even when EMI availed of the member leaving clause in the contract and dropped them, they still plodded on, playing as many gigs as possible and telling interviewers that any day now they were going to launch a major offensive on the US market. Inevitably though, and not with a bang but with a whimper, Aslan Mark II realised that the game was up and decided to call it a day.
Meanwhile, Christy was in the Rutland, trying to get his life back together. The treatment certainly rid him of any delusions of grandeur. Three months earlier, he d been performing in the Roxy in New York, now he was mopping floors in a drug centre. Forbidden walkmen, radios and all other distractions from concentration on his therapy course, he often became depressed and longed to be out of the place.
Attendance at the Rutland is voluntary and he could ve walked out the door at any time, but he didn t. He disciplined himself, gritted his teeth, stayed for the required two months, and then embarked on a Narcotics Anonymous programme for a couple of years.
During therapy, he had discovered that his propensity to addiction had a psychological basis. For years, he d been blocking out certain emotions, certain memories about dark incidents in his childhood. His drug abuse had its roots in sexual abuse, as he would explain to Bill Graham in a Hot Press interview in May 89.
When I was a child, I was abused on two different occasions by people, he revealed. I was raped when I was six and it happened again when I was ten. I thought I had something to do with that and I blocked it out. And what it did was that it threw my sexuality into question. In myself, it happened with two men, so my whole idea of male acceptance was totally fucked around . . . so I took drugs to block out that emotional turmoil.
Today, Christy insists that he is totally drug-free. It s still a daily struggle, however. I ve grown up with certain personality defects and heroin relieved all the headshit that I had going on, he says. So every morning I realise that I have to find a way of getting through the day without it. It s like saying to someone that, having done it a few times, they could never ride another man or another woman or whatever you want to ride.
It s very hard. You only remember the buzz it gave you. You don t remember the blood gushing out of your arm or the days you sat around dying for another hit. But I ve seen more people die from it than make a success of using it so I know what it is. I know what it could do to me, what it nearly did to me. It nearly killed me.
Back in the spring of 89, Christy had worked hard to keep his musical career alive. He released a double A-sided solo single, One Man s Dream / Chasing Shadows on Solid which gained considerable radio exposure. He also got one lucky assist through Terence Trent D Arby who was living in Dublin at the time. D Arby had a lot of studio time booked when word came through that his pregnant girlfriend had gone into labour earlier than expected and he headed over to London to be with her. Before he left, he organised for Dignam to be given his remaining recording hours.
D Arby wasn t the only established name to show interest in the singer with the newly-acquired solo status. When Fish left Marillion, Christy was invited to audition as his replacement. He got the job too, but as he rehearsed their songs at home in Dublin he realised that they just weren t him. He offered to do the vocals for their next album as a once-off project but Marillion wanted a singer who d tour and so declined this suggestion. Some months later, however, Christy did team up with well-known guitarist about town, Conor Goff, to form a duo that would become his bread and butter for over two years, Dignam and Goff.
By now, Billy, Tony, Joe and Alan had assembled their own new band, The Precious Stones, with Jewell as their lead singer. Their material was competent and efficiently played but nothing special. Still, they did manage to incite some record company interest. On hearing one of their demos, EMI even offered them the original deal back provided Christy Dignam was brought back to the fold. That, however, was a non-starter. We still hated each other at the time the EMI offer came in, says Tony. We weren t talking to Christy and he wasn t talking to us.
The Precious Stones worked hard and built up a relatively decent following. Signed to Solid, they issued a series of singles and even succeeded in having one of their songs ( Red Sky ) included on The A To Z Of Irish Rock. Nevertheless, the band were always surrounded by an air of anti-climax.
The Precious Stones were never taken seriously, insists Joe. It was still just four blokes from Aslan with a new set of songs. We were on a hiding to nothing and there was no way we could get away from it.
We still didn t believe that we needed a frontman as good as Christy, we couldn t see it, adds Tony. It took us ages to cop on that Joe wasn t a frontman and it wasn t just about trying to write good songs, the X-factor was missing.
Dignam and Goff were finding it similarly difficult to make a major public impression. Okay, it was what it was but it wasn t as bad as the media in this country thought it was, says Christy. Journalists never came to any of the gigs so nobody knew what we were doing. But when we went over to the States, it was completely different. We were getting respect off people over there, something we never got here.

About two years ago, a slow thaw in relations began between Christy and The Precious Stones, as his four former mates now called themselves. Time heals and life goes on but nobody was quite ready to forgive and forget just yet.
Whenever they d meet now, they d nod at each other or they might even stop and shoot the breeze for a while. Both camps stopped bad mouthing the other in public, there was nothing to be gained by that anyway. One night at a Dignam and Goff gig, Tony and Billy even got up onstage to join in an impromptu version of This Is .
That was a real ice-breaker, says Tony. From them on, the feelers were gradually put out about getting back together.
The South Band Show had been held every June in Finglas for some time now. Every year since 1990, its organiser, Robbie Foy, had made enquiries about the possibility of Aslan getting together for even a one-off reunion to headline the event in what was, after all, their first stomping ground. The answer was always an emphatic no, but not so this time round. For the first time it seemed to make sense and we couldn t really think of any reasons not to do that, explains Billy.
Arrangements were made for two weeks or rehearsal and, for the first time in five years, Christy, Billy, Tony, Joe and Alan found themselves working together again.
I expected this Aslan gig to be a retrospective bullshit thing but I said, fuck it, I ll do it, says Christy. In the first week, we rehearsed the set that we were gonna do at the gig and then that was done. We had another week so, just for the hell of it, we started writing and there was a real vibe about it. All of a sudden, it was back to the five of us again, back to the way it used to be. I know this might sound shite, but it felt right. The five people who d had the initial goal were writing together again without any of the other bullshit. In three days, we wrote three songs including Crazy World .
The South Band Show gig was a massive success. Afterwards, the four others told Christy that if he was up for it, they wanted to give it another go. Christy was keen but first he had to fly to America to fulfil touring commitments with Conor Goff. Bud Prager, a heavy-hitting US manager with a stable of acts that includes Foreigner, Bad Company and Damn Yankees, had expressed interest in Dignam and Goff and there was even talk of a possible deal with Epic records. Performing live with Conor now, however, after the South Band Show, Christy knew that his heart wasn t in it. He made up his mind. As soon as this tour was over, he was going home to Dublin and home to Aslan.
Naturally, Conor Goff was none too happy about this situation, especially since Bud Prager also seemed to develop an interest in the idea of a reformed Aslan (Prager has since signed a management deal with the band). Nevertheless, Christy has no regrets.
It basically came down to a musical decision, he insists. When I started out, I wanted to make a certain type of music and I know I can do that better with Aslan than with Conor. I know he might be pissed off but feeling the way I felt when I saw the possibility of us getting back together again it wouldn t have been fair to him for me to continue with Dignam and Goff.
Now, says Christy, and the others agree, it s just like starting over. We had the hatred, then the healing process and now we re friends again, says Joe Jewell.

Aslan have signed a deal with BMG Ireland. The single, Crazy World , literally sold out (3,000 copies were originally pressed) and reached number four in the Irish charts, the band s highest ever placing with a single. As they have already proven, Aslan are not interested in reliving past glories. They are fast and furiously working on new material, in between a pretty heavy touring schedule. Another single is planned for next February and, all going according to plan, an album should emerge shortly afterwards. Most importantly, however, the band are adamant that, to quote Christy, there will be no more fuck-ups.
No matter what happens, we will be united, he states. Not being united is what fucked us up the first time. Nobody will have the power to split Aslan up again. That s not to exonerate ourselves from responsibility for what happened; 80% of it was our own fault but without that other 20%, we d have survived and beaten our problems. Anyway, this is all we ve got. All those years we should ve been studying to become brain surgeons, we were doing this. We re experts now. We know a hell of a lot about the music business, both the business side and the spiritual side. Aslan are back to stay.
The story continues.