Christy Dignam was characteristically open, thoughtful and funny when I interviewed him in 2019. The singer and songwriter, who has died aged 63, a decade after being diagnosed with amyloidosis, a rare blood disorder associated with cancer, told me how he was inspired to start a band by Slade, the English rock group.
“One day somebody said to me, ‘You know, Slade are from a place in Birmingham that’s like Finglas,’ and up until that moment I thought doctors were born doctors and rock stars were born rock stars. I thought they were given this divine right.”
Dignam’s band Aslan, named after CS Lewis’s God-like lion in the Narnia books, was formed in 1982. Its members came from Finglas and Ballymun, in north Dublin. In the 1980s the city was swarming with A&R men on the search for the next U2, but few other bands on the scene had Aslan’s working-class background. It sometimes led to them being stigmatised, dismissed and not taken seriously. “There’s this idea that between battering auld ones and robbing cars we’d write the odd song,” Dignam told me, a little wearily.
Ultimately, Aslan inspired a loyalty that eluded most of their peers. After being signed and dropped by EMI, after releasing finely crafted hits such as This Is and Crazy World, and after internal politics led to Dignam leaving and, eventually, rejoining the band, they went on to become something very rare: a local act with a genuinely huge and passionate fanbase.
[ Christy Dignam, frontman of Aslan, dies aged 63Opens in new window ]
[ Christy Dignam: ‘Nearly all the people I started with are dead’Opens in new window ]
They worked hard at it. When this writer was in a band in the early part of this century, every time we played a small Irish town it seemed like Aslan had just played or were about to play there. Their attraction had a lot to do with the emotional honesty inherent in Dignam’s intense stage presence and clear, richly textured singing voice.
Singing was at least partly in his genes. His father, a CIÉ employee, would sing along to John McCormack and Enrico Caruso when he was growing up. Dignam always credited his singing teacher Frank Merriman with helping him strip away all artifice to find a voice that was authentic to his own life.
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And it was some life. He had seen huge ups and downs as a musician, from big record deals to near penury. He was a heroin addict who fell in and out of addiction before getting clean once and for all in the mid noughties. He was always honest about his darker life experiences and documented the upsetting details in his autobiography, My Crazy World (written with Damian Corless).
‘Aslan wasn’t really important. The house I lived in wasn’t important. The car I drove wasn’t important’
Dignam, who released his first solo record, the aptly titled The Man Who Stayed Alive, in 2021, believed his issues with addiction were rooted in the sexual abuse he experienced from two neighbours when he was a young child. He had huge empathy for addicts and marginalised people, and disliked the classist way they were often stigmatised and mocked. He believed most addicts were trying to address some loss or trauma. “I’ve found that the addicts I’ve known in my life, 99 per cent of them were very sensitive people and that was the reason they were addicts in the first place.”
After he was first diagnosed with amyloidosis he found himself focusing more on the things that truly mattered to him: his wife, Kathryn, his daughter, Kiera, his son-in-law, Darren, and his grandchildren. “For years I was running around like a headless chicken,” he told me in 2019. “I didn’t know what I wanted from life.”
After being told, after his amyloidosis diagnosis in 2013, that he had “only six months left, I remember just wanting to see my family. That’s all I wanted to do. One of my grandchildren was coming up to his communion, and I wanted to be there. The point is, that’s all that was important. Aslan wasn’t really important. The house I lived in wasn’t important. The car I drove wasn’t important. It allowed me to focus on what was important in life.”
But he never stopped singing and never lost his connection to his audience. Aslan’s 40th-anniversary concert at 3Arena in Dublin last September would have been their largest ever. It was cancelled because of concerns around Dignam’s health – he had remained a stalwart of Ireland’s music scene despite his extensive medical treatment. In 2019 he told me that he felt most alive when he was singing. “All the things you can’t have in every day life, you can be when you sing. You have that freedom.”
