Dave Fanning wasn’t holding back when he went on Claire Byrne’s radio show to assess the legacy of the late Christy Dignam and his band Aslan. “He blew it, royally” said the RTÉ DJ, widely regarded as the voice of alternative music in Ireland since the late 1970s. “The problem was ... they never made it outside Ireland. Nothing. They didn’t mean a thing elsewhere.”
At one level, you have to credit Fanning for speaking his mind about Dignam, who died last week at age 63 after a long illness. Such frankness is all too rare in the Irish music media – an Orwellian never-never land where every Irish band is the best band ever, and there is an unspoken agreement that certain artists (though certainly not Aslan) are bulletproof from criticism.
At the same time, it’s striking that Fanning should be dismissive of Aslan’s real charm – precisely that they didn’t break through internationally and become a second U2. If U2, whom Fanning has championed throughout his career, are the kingpins of Irish music, Aslan were the eternal underachievers. They had a similar gift for big-hearted anthems, without U2′s preachiness, and they gigged internationally. But where Bono ended up brunching with Tony Blair, Aslan were condemned to headline mainly Irish venues.
And that’s why people loved them. Theirs wasn’t a rags-to-riches story. It was grittier and more compelling. In the mid-1980s, when UK and American record labels were desperate to find the “next U2″, Dignam and his bandmates were regarded as the potential successors to Bono – or, to quote a 1986 edition of music magazine Melody Maker “lucky the label that signs this band”.
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Dignam’s well-documented addiction issues got in the way, and it all unravelled after the release of their 1988 debut, Feel No Shame. The singer was no hedonist: in his autobiography, My Crazy World, he explains drugs were his way of coping with the trauma of abuse he had suffered as a child.
That’s a powerfully human story, and it is hard not to empathise with Dignam. Or to admire him and the rest of Aslan for persevering and returning in 1994 with their comeback LP, Goodbye Charlie Moonhead and the inescapable single, Crazy World.
There can’t be an Irish person alive who has not heard Crazy World, hundreds of times in many cases. But the context of the tune is crucial: here was a band who had overcome terrible setbacks putting their faith in each other and picking themselves off the floor. It may be a bit broad and syrupy for some but threaded through the music are sentiments that will speak to anyone who has gone through their own struggles.
Aslan’s working-class background appealed to some and arguably alienated others. Dave Fanning certainly wasn’t guilty of this, but there was often a hint of snobbery toward the group elsewhere. You can see it in a toe-curling sequence in the Dublin-set musical, Once, in which a drug user in a tracksuit slurs at the lead character to “play us Aslan, will ya” – a scene which all involved may have come to regret.
A strange part of Fanning’s criticism was that Aslan had “blown it” because “they didn’t mean a thing elsewhere”. Again, that was part of their appeal. When Irish artist breaks through internationally, there is sometimes a sense they are cashing in on international cliches about Ireland: such as when Bono claims Irish people are uniquely begrudging (look at how Chris Martin and Ed Sheeran are received in the UK) or when Fontaines DC went full Angela’s Ashes and described Dublin as “a pregnant city with a Catholic mind” – a line that prompted sage nods in London and New York.
Aslan never had to sell an ersatz version of their Irishness to the global market. They were underdogs – but more importantly, they were our underdogs. That’s why they mattered – and that’s the piece of the puzzle Dave Fanning didn’t mention.