Goodbye Christy Dignam: Ireland to bid final farewell to much-loved Aslan frontman
Christy Was Pelling A Person On Engaging Powerful, Frontman Dignam Equally Stage, In
Some things never change.
Christy Dignam loved performing. He loved to sing.
In an interview with the , prior to a headline gig in the Cork Opera House in 1998, he spoke of the joy and the buzz he gets from music.
“Songwriting is a pleasure and so is performing,” he said. “It’s something that I absolutely worship doing, I couldn’t imagine not doing it. So, in that sense, I don’t think of it as work.
“If you’re going around doing promotional appearances for the record company and photo sessions, that’s work all right. But when you’re on the stage gigging, that’s not work, that’s pure pleasure.”
He said more or less the same thing when I interviewed him in 2017.
Both of these interviews happened after his infamous fall from grace, when Aslan were briefly heading to the top of the world and he was then sacked from the band over his drug use.
But this second one in 2017, however, came after Christy had been diagnosed with the rare condition amyloidosis. Even with his failing health, music helped to sustain him.
He described playing Aslan’s first outdoor gig in Dublin for nearly 30 years in the Iveagh Gardens a week prior as “the best night of my career”.
“We’ve gigged so much over the years... I still love doing it,” he said. “The same joy is still there, and probably more so with me now.
“Before we hit it big, we were this northside band that nobody gave a fuck about. We’ve surprised a few people along the way.
And, as long as Christy loved to sing, people loved to listen to him.
Born in 1960 to Christopher Snr and Teresa, Christy Dignam was one of eight children who grew up in the north Dublin suburb of Finglas. Feasting on a musical diet that includes The Beatles and Bowie, he would begin trying to break into the music business at a young age.
Aslan was formed in 1982 when he and his Finglas pal Joe Jewell recruited two other up-and-coming musicians in Billy McGuinness and Alan Downey.
After U2 hit it big in the early 1980s, the music industry was scouring for the new Dublin band that could hit similar heights.
Their timing was good. But the talent was there to match.
Songs released such as 'This Is' and 'Pretty Thing' helped to establish Aslan as bona fide stars prior to the release of the seminal 1988 album .
In Aslan, the industry found something special in a working-class group of lads who put in the graft (such as rehearsing in a literal pigsty out by Dublin Airport) and had a frontman that looked and sounded every inch a rock-star.
And it cannot be over-emphasised how good Christy Dignam sounded when he sang.
One video doing the rounds this week from a Christmas edition of RTÉ’s in 1988 of a piano-accompanied 'This Is' is enough to invoke chills. He sounded that good. But this was a Christy already on the slide.
had put them into a stratosphere where thoughts of breaking it big in America were looming on the horizon.
But Christy would be sacked by the band that year, as his drug use and life choices seemed to scupper that American dream before it began.
He would later say the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a neighbour from the age of six had a massive effect on his life, and played a role in the paths he took.
Suffering from heroin addiction, and later an addiction to crack cocaine, for many years, he would nevertheless reunite with his bandmates in 1993.
A resurgence followed, with perhaps the band’s most well-known song 'Crazy World' released that same year. The 1994 album hit the top of the Irish charts.
But his drug use would still play a major factor in his life and career until the late 2000s, when Aslan embarked on a number of tours that firmly reestablished Dignam and the band in the public consciousness as beloved and admired.
Christy Dignam has been interviewed countless times over the years and, reading through them, a particular kind of brutal honesty and passion frequently stands out.
It was the same when I was lucky enough to get the chance to speak to him.
An RTÉ documentary about him was due to air that evening when I interviewed Christy in July 2017.
Given his reputation, I thought I knew what to expect. Just another interview. But I was wrong, he floored me.
Erudite, honest and often hilarious, he had me in the palm of his hand for an hour.
Nothing was off limits. The RTÉ documentary would feature him talking about the abuse he had suffered as a child, and he said it was something he had to dig deep to talk about publicly for the first time.
Christy said he wanted to be as honest as he possibly could, and that was an approach he adopted no matter the theme. He would talk about his drug use, how he felt he may have left his family down over the years and his own health.
When he revealed his diagnosis in 2013, a benefit concert was held for him in the Olympia Theatre with a who’s who of major Irish acts at the time coming out to show their support. It also included an appearance from U2, via a live stream from their recording studio in New York.
He said in 2017: “That was an amazing night. On so many different levels. I’d always wanted to see Aslan live — see what other people see — and this is the closest I’ll ever get.
A powerful, engaging frontman on stage, Christy Dignam was equally compelling in person. His decades of experience in the music industry would mean you would have listened to him speak about just that topic for hours on end.
There was also that spark, that wit, that eye for detail that also shone through in the music when he spoke. His connection with the fans was incredibly strong. When Aslan were doing a few nights in a venue, fans wouldn’t just go to one gig. They’d go to them all.
In later years, his elevation to status of national treasure was cemented, with two appearances on — also clips shared widely this week — two of his standout moments.
One featured Dignam singing a beautiful, haunting rendition of the 'Green Fields of France' with Finbar Furey, with the other a powerful 'Waltzing Matilda'.
His voice always had the power to stop you in your tracks. To make the hairs stand up. To stir the emotions. That most rare and special of talents.
The scholars say James Joyce wanted to be about the ordinary people of Dublin, and for the ordinary people of Dublin.
Joyce's most famous book features its protagonist travelling to the northside for the funeral of a man called Dignam.
It is striking then that a day after Bloomsday, Dublin will bid a fond farewell to one of its favourite sons.
Christy Dignam is survived by his wife Kathryn, daughter Kiera, and grandchildren Cian, Ava and Jake.