20 years ago today: Damien Dempsey released Shots

Originally published in Hot Press in March 2005:

Your writer is just as fond of the throwaway, the frivolous and the ephemeral as the next person, but it takes someone as integral as Damien Dempsey – back here, with his third studio album – to remind you how empty, or, alternatively, full of shit most music is.

That's not a negative statement, just a true one. It’s not only that Damo is a political writer at a time when anyone in Ireland who opens their mouth about how modern life, for all its lovely earn-and-consume opportunities, is occasionally rubbish is considered to be a fun-free party-spoiler. It’s not just that he’s pushing indigenous Irish music forward, inventing new ways to bring the legacy of Sinéad and Christy and singers, pipers and fiddlers going all the way back into a relevant, thoroughly modern present.

It’s that he is an unashamedly spiritual person. ‘Spiritual’ that's not ‘religious’; rather, Damo has, as JD Salinger put it, an understanding, a taste for, the main current of poetry that flows through all things. As such, he's one of the few people alive for whom, when he sings a chorus of ‘And we sing/Sing all our cares away’, it’s not a throwaway cliché or an advocation of mindlessness; with Damien Dempsey, transcendence through music is actually a reality.

Here, as usual, whip-smart lyrical tours de force – like the updated ‘Colony’ (from his debut album), ‘Choctaw Nation’ and ‘Patience’ – are full of the kinds of truths most of the media stopped bothering to highlight long ago, all delivered with a warrior’s fierceness and a good son’s humility.

The number of images and ideas per square inch in these songs is remarkable: they stack up unstoppably one beneath the next, and their cumulative effect is as shocking and undismissable as war reportage. But with Damo, the truth never comes at the expense of a genius melody or a lightness of touch. In anyone else's hands, this kind of fiercely political songwriting/repeated exhortation to live well would be worthy, flaky, eat-your-greens-ish. In Damo’s, it’s smart, grounded and full of fun: he’s wisecracking as well as wise, the kind of older brother you’d idolise when you're growing up.

As ever, his songwriter’s eye for detail astounds: in ‘Spraypaint Backalley’ we met a 15-year-old Damo, who sports a horrible teenage moustache (“If I shave it, I'm a boy again”) and who is fascinated by the oil-blackened roughness of his brother’s and father's hands.

But if anything, Shots is the DD album that finally sees the full-band sound match the powerhouse impact of the songwriting itself. There’s ‘Cursed With a Brain,’ whose gently turning melodies and wistful MBV thrum (nice one, producers John Reynolds and Brian Eno) echo the track's sense of unsettled contemplation. And there's old favourite ‘Party On,’ here given a cinematically new lease on life, which drags you in one fluid motion from hangover house to bass-thumping party to taxi-hailing pedestrian-jammed post-rave street like the famous one-shot scene in Goodfellas.

There's something overwhelmingly physical about Damien Dempsey’s music; I think that's why the huge no-matter-what positivity that has always radiated from his work has the emotional impact it does. His positivity does not come from a rarefied or peaceful place but is the earthbound, experience-fired lifeforce of a man at once spiritual yet utterly of the earth and of his corporal body, walking strong, open and observant through a fucked-up world. That physicality ensures that every punch he throws is a sure hit, but it also makes the tender bits tenderer, as with the curlicueing Planxty melody of ‘Not On Your Own Tonight’, or the love letter ‘Hold Me’: you get the sense of immense power being gently held back.

But, as is always the case with Damien Dempsey, the quality that resonates with you long after this record ends is his characteristic positivity, his emphasis on self-esteem, self reliance, patience and being truly present in your own life. He sees the good everywhere, even as he documents the bad. On ‘Not On Your Own Tonight’, he walks alone through shadowy, unsafe streets, but instead of being too-wary or cynical, he comments, “I can see the evil, but I can feel the good/Shining out to greet me from within bone and blood”, and the sheer goodness of the sentiment stuns you.

“Singers should be wise, spiritual human beings,” Damien once told an interviewer. He’s on his way, to say the least.

9/10

Damien Dempsey plays a special Windmill Live show on Thursday, March 27. Apply for complimentary tickets here.