Tradical Chic

A burly, socio-politically savvy troubadour informed by Woody Guthrie, Luke Kelly, agit-prop hip-hop and reggae, singing in his native Donaghmede-ese? When Damien Dempsey released his debut album They Don’t Teach This Shit In School back in 2000, he seemed like just the antidote to the culturally amnesiac wasteland of metropolitanised, moneymad 21st Century Ireland. His peers seemed to think so too, with Christy Moore, Morrissey, Shane MacGowan, Sinéad O’Connor and Robert Plant lining up to sing his praises. Jah Wobble, Sinéad and Eno collaborator John D Reynolds loved Dempsey’s songs so much he elected to record them for cost on studio downtime.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that this listener respected rather than loved albums like Seize The Day and Shots. I saw Dempsey play live once at the Lisdoonvarna-in-the-RDS extravaganza a few years ago, and thought him a powerful performer, but never could quite make my peace with the recorded work.
However, the new album The Rocky Road – a selection of robustly recorded trad standards featuring cameos from John Sheahan and Barney McKenna from The Dubliners, and also Sharon Shannon – is a different story. To put it bluntly, Damien Dempsey makes a far better traditional balladeer than pop mongrel. Steeped in the nuances and ornamentation of narrative ballad rendition, and obviously relishing getting his teeth into the juicy, bawdy, arcane, language of songs like ‘Hot Asphalt’, ‘Sullivan John’, ‘The Hackler From Grouse Hall’, a pump organ-driven ‘The Foggy Dew’ and a quite beautiful version of The Pogues’ ‘Rainy Night In Soho’, the big guy’s unfettered enthusiasm for the material is infectious.
Consider the de facto title-track, the clattery, rambunctious ‘Rocky Road To Dublin’. This listener first heard it on Makem & Clancy’s 1977 live album, but no matter who takes a run at the tune, it never seems to lose its vitality.
“It’s just incredible,” Dempsey affirms. “It’s a slip jig rhythm. Whatever timing it’s in, they don’t do that anywhere else in the world. I’m singing it 15 years now, but the lyrics paint some vivid pictures. These songs wouldn’t be around if they hadn’t been as strong as they are, they’d never have stood the test of time.
“I’m a great advocator of the sing-song, y’know?” he continues, warming to the theme. “I sorta travel around the world, and anywhere I go, if there’s a party, I always start up a sing-song and I tell ’em: ‘I’ll do a song and now you.’ And the poor fucker sitting next to me goes, ‘Me?’ And I go, ‘Just tell a joke or a little story or anything. Your favourite song, just sing the first verse, the first few words, and we’ll all help ya. But you’re not getting out of this!’ So it would be great to carry it on, because I feel like it’s dying out a bit.
“Like, with all these heads who sang them songs, they passed it onto me, so I’m hoping to pass it onto the younger generation. A lot of kids look upon traditional music as backward, dust on it, but a lot of the lyrics are hardcore. You think gangsta rap is hardcore? A lot of the Irish lyrics are raunchy as fuck, gargling and fighting and whoring and adultery and all sorts of stuff. ‘The Twang Man’ is about a pimp. So there’s a lot to be tapped into. A lot more than bitches and ho’s and my mickey’s this big and I’m going to fuck you up and all that. Early rap wasn’t like that. It was edgy and it had a message. NWA’s first few albums had great stories about what life was like in Compton. There was a guy I saw there a while ago, Jinx Lennon. The best lyricist in this country, without a doubt. Fuckin’ genius lyrics.”
Amen to that. What was Damien’s mainline into the wellspring of trad?
“I sort of grew up with it. I was born in ’75, so the ballad thing would’ve still been going strong with Christy and The Dubliners and The Fureys, and then Planxty were back together for a while. De Dannan and all these bands were going strong, if you look at the Lisdoonvarna bill, loads of acts would’ve had Irish stuff in their music, like Moving Hearts. And Philo incorporated some of the stuff in ‘Black Rose’. But kids now don’t have that. I watch fuckin’ MTV, I don’t know what the fuck it is. Cribs and Pimp My Ride and Sweet Sixteen and all this stuff. What the fuck is this shit? I can’t believe the kids are watching that.”
And again, amen. But harbouring a songwriter’s appreciation of traditional ballads is one thing. Committing to a whole album of them on a major label is quite another. Excuse the thespian phraseology, but what was his motivation?
“Getting it across to the kids. And I suppose it was self-indulgent of me as well. I’d been working hard the last four years, so instead of breaking me bollocks to get me own songs up to scratch, rewriting them and recording them and fuckin’ pullin’ your hair out for a year, I said, ‘Right, I’m gonna just relax and do a ballad album, all my favourite songs, just lash them out in the studio, playing and singing at the same time.’ Which engineers fuckin’ hate! But that’s the way we done it, the old way.
“I always had a dream of doing ‘Rainy Night In Soho’, but instead of the clarinet that The Pogues have, have John Sheahan on the fiddle. What a fuckin’ player. Him and Barney only came in for one day. We’d asked them in a month before that, were trying to get through to them and heard nothing, and one day we arrived in at 12 and they’d been there for two hours, sitting there drinkin’ tay, y’know: ‘What the fuck? The lads are here! Bollocks! Sorry lads!’ Shittin’ meself I was.”
And what about Sharon Shannon?
“She lives and breathes the music as well, just like they do, y’know? You can see it, she eats, sleeps and talks music all the time.”
I remember seeing her play with The Waterboys in 1989, and she and Steve Wickham seemed to be listening harder than any two players I’d ever seen.
“They’re plugged into a deeper world there, definitely. It goes much deeper than performance or how good you look or working the crowd. It’s definitely another plane they’re on. Maybe it’s just Irish music – you can hit them depths. I think maybe for those guys, playing tunes is like a form of meditation, praying or something. When you’re in the middle of a tune, having a session, you can just slip off out of your immediate world. These tunes were written when it was very harsh back in the times, it wouldn’t have been too nice outside the cabin door for them, the shit that was going on, so maybe you could just slip off into another world for a few hours when you were playing.”
There is that saying: sing while you pray and you pray twice.
“That’s a lovely one. That’s why I encourage people to sing at gigs. When you get a whole room singing together, people forget themselves and become part of the fucking room, a unison. You want them to walk out the door on cloud nine. After you get them to sing, it’s like they do a gig themselves. You’re sort of high, cos your adrenaline’s going, it’s like you’ve worked out or something. You’re pumping. I walk off the stage buzzing, and I want the crowd to feel the same.”

The Rocky Road gets a live airing at The Stables, Mullingar (July 4); Dolan's, Limerick (5); DeBarra's, Clonakilty (6); The Thatch, Tullamore (10); and Leisure Lounge, Galway (18 as part of the Sharon Shannon Big Band).