Christy Almighty

Christy Dignam sits on the vaulted steps of EMI’s opulent Ailesbury Road building, smoking a fag in the autumn sun.

“Have ye got a crack pipe?” he jokes as I approach. I’d been thinking it might be tricky getting Dignam onto the subject of drugs – perhaps he’d finally grown tired of speaking openly about his addiction – but no, the heroin trap is still Dignam’s number one subject. That, and the connection between addiction and childhood sexual abuse.
“I think it’s huge,” says Dignam. “The reason is that heroin is the greatest known painkiller – and that includes emotional pain. I can see the abuse in people’s eyes when I meet them in the street.
“I went to the Rutland Centre when Aslan split up in the 1980s," he continues. "I was strung out on heroin at the time. On the fourth week nearly everybody in there had this blinding flash of fuckin’ light and they came out with some deep trauma that happened to them as a child. And the next day you could see them glowing where they’d got all this shit out. But that didn’t happen to me. As far as I was concerned I had the best childhood.
“When I came out of the Rutland I visited me parents. And I’m trying to apologise 'cos it’d been in the papers why Aslan had split up, and about me being a heroin addict. I was trying to come up with some reason, and I remember saying to me da, ‘Look, it coulda been something that happened to me as a kid.’ Later I walked out the hall door, and just as I did I looked across the street at a neighbouring house. And in that moment I remembered being raped when I was six by a man who lived there. The whole thing just replayed like a video. It was unfuckinbelievable.”
From the age of six to nine, Dignam was raped by the same man several more times, and also by another neighbour.
“I grew up thinking I had some hand in it,” he says. “I thought I was a prick-tease or something. When you grow up your sexuality is totally screwed up. Because of all the shit that went on when I was a kid, d’y’know when you’re hungry, you have an empty gnawing feeling inside? Well all my life I’ve had a feeling like that. Say if I wanted to be part of a gang and you had to clean a window to be part of that gang, I’d clean the whole fucking house full of windows. I was always trying to be accepted. But the day I took heroin, it was like this hole just disappeared. And all of a sudden I felt adequate.
“Next morning you wake up and you think, ‘Well, I can either go back to that fuckin’ jittery self-conscious person or I can be cool and in control of shit.’ That’s what dragged me into it.
“If you imagine your soul to be a burning flame, when you’re sexually abused, it goes down to the top of a candle, just that little burning ember on the top. It doesn’t kill it, but it brings it to within a hair’s breadth.
“Addiction has a catalysing effect. You take it for whatever reason you’re taking it, but then everybody finds out you’re an addict and a scumbag, so then you’re trying to hide it, trying to lead a secret life. You feel guilty about doing that, so then you take more to cover out that shame and guilt.
“Your creativity just stops. You wake up in the morning and your priority is to get gear. Initially you start off to get high, but eventually you just want to be normal. When you’re addicted you’re not taking it to get high any more, you’re taking it to stop yourself being sick and going into withdrawals. Say for example if we were doing this interview and I was strung out. My priority would be to go and get heroin. If I’ve to meet you at 3 o’clock, if there was some reason there wasn’t heroin around, you’d be fuckin’ sittin’ here until I got my heroin. Because in reality I wouldn’t be able to do the interview without it, because I’d be just sittin’ here shaking, me nose’d be running – I’d be in withdrawals, so I wouldn’t be any use to you. All I’d be thinkin’ would be, 'Let’s get this thing over so I can go out and get gear.'
“So your whole life is like that. There were times when we’d be rehearsing and I’d be off trying to get gear and there wouldn’t be any around and I’d have to keep going, so the band would be waiting for me in rehearsal rooms. That’s how we ended splittin’ up. And the same was goin’ on with me family.
“I remember singing ‘Crazy World’ one time, and we got to the chorus, ‘How can I protect you in this crazy world?’. Now I’d sang the song millions of times, but just as I sang that line, I looked down to the sound desk and me wife was standing there, and I thought, 'You fucking haven’t been protecting her, you prick, you’ve been letting her down, breaking all the promises you made to her when you married her.' And I just broke down on stage…”
As recently as two and a half years ago, Dignam found himself attending rehab again after his wife – who he’d been with since he was 14 years old – separated from him.
“She’d just had enough,” he says. “She got a barring order on me. She had to… I had our two cars destroyed, all the windows smashed up. I was living in Ballymun in a flat, fucking strung out. I was at rock bottom. I was thinking of killing meself but I just hadn’t got the balls to do it. So I went over to a Buddhist monastery in Northern Thailand in the middle of the jungle. I knew I had to get back in touch with me spirit, with me soul. And the Buddhists helped me to do that.
“There was one thing I learnt over there that was cool. I used to pray and say, 'God, please help me stay clean today.' I’d go out then and I’d use, and I’d say, 'Thanks God, nice one for letting me down.' So I was telling this to the monk one day, and the monk says, ‘You know what you’re doing, Christy? Imagine you’re on the ocean in a boat, and the boat’s after flipping over. And you’re waiting for the life guard – who’s God – to come and save you. I’m telling you now there’s no lifeguard coming. It’s up to you. If you don’t get yourself back in that boat, you’re gonna die. It’s as simple as that.’
“Now I know that sounds really obvious. But for some reason it spoke to me. I was always blaming. And thinking that people wouldn’t blame me, that it’d be like, ‘Ah, look what happened to him as a kid, doesn’t he deserve to be able to take this drug.’”
Since the Thailand experience, Dignam – father to a 21-year-old daughter and grandfather to a four-year-old boy – is now back with his wife.
“I’m with her longer than I’ve been on the earth without her,” he says.

Considering the craziness that heroin addiction has dumped on their doorstep, it’s testament to their loyalty and friendship that after 25 years, Aslan are still making a damn good living gigging and recording together. And they’re clearly thrilled with For Some Strange Reason, a brand new studio album of ten tracks that range from the darkly discordant to the happily melodious. Of particular note are ‘Jealous Little Thing’, ‘Sooner Or Later’, ‘Sold Out For Fame’ and ‘Bullets And Diamonds’, the latter featuring the inimitable voice of Damien Dempsey.
“It was a very hard album to make,” says guitarist Billy McGuiness. “We had to ask ourselves if Aslan were going to be relevant in 2007. Our last album was 2001. We’d started this album three times and said no, the songs aren’t good enough.
“The thing that finally sparked it was the band’s 25-year anniversary. The album went in at Number 8 this week, which we’re delighted with. Because if you look at this year, Andrea Corr, Dolores O’Riordan, even The Thrills – their albums bombed. You can be a name and be out there and release something, but it doesn’t mean it’s automatically gonna do the business. So we’re very, very happy that it’s doing so well.
“Ger McDonnell, the producer we got, he was fantastic. He had a way of coaxing a vocal performance out of Christy that’s up there with the vocal performances on our first album, Feel No Shame. It has the same type of vibe.”
The album’s subject matter, like its artwork, is complex, hard-edged and at times disconcerting.
Dignam concludes: “We hate writing songs that are just whinging for the sake of whinging. So if there’s a dark song, we try and offer hope at the end of it. I think when you get to our age, you couldn’t be arsed singing about how Mary met John and they went home together in a taxi.”
One of Christy’s favourite tracks on For Some Strange Reason is ‘Sold Out For Fame’. Which is the opposite of what this much-loved Dublin rock band have done in their quarter-of-a-century together.
Happy anniversary.

Aslan’s new album, For Some Strange Reason, is out now