Listen to the lions

At the conclusion of this interview in the conservatory boardroom of EMI’s salubrious Ailesbury Road HQ, Christy Dignam and Billy McGuinness bid your Hot Press correspondent a fond farewell. Although we’d sailed through some choppy waters during the conversation, the Aslan singer and guitarist appear to have enjoyed the chat.

“Cheers, man!” says McGuinness. “You live in Galway, don’t you? Do you want me to put your name on the door for Monroe’s on Friday?”
“Thanks a fuckin’ million, Olaf,” Dignam enthuses in his undiluted Northside accent, shaking my hand so vigorously that our silver bracelets jangle in unison. “Lovely talking to you. I’ve been reading your stuff for years, man, so it’s great to finally meet you.”
To which I can only reply, “Er... but we have met before, Christy.”
“Eh?” The singer sighs and shrugs guiltily. You can tell he’s used to this one. “Have we?” He laughs. “Ah look, fuckin’ sorry, man, but you know...”
No need for apologies. For a start, it was almost 20 years ago. Besides, as a former full-blown heroin addict, Dignam can be excused the occasional memory gap. Now aged 52, he’s actually looking damned good for a man of his experience, but he’s undoubtedly scarred on the inside. He makes no bones of it either. Aslan made some brilliant music along the way, but in many respects he’s lived the rock ‘n’ roll nightmare, rather than the rock ‘n’ roll dream. He’s also painfully aware that sometimes they’re one and the same thing.
But let’s be clear about this: all things considered, in the Aslan Chronicles, the good so far has outweighed the bad.

Let’s rewind an hour or so. Or more to the point, let’s rewind 30 years to a time when five musically precocious young Northsiders came together, formed a band, and named themselves after the lion in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles. All things considered, even just to still be going three decades on is something of an achievement.
“It doesn’t feel like 30 years at all,” laughs McGuinness. “It’s a bit mad to think it’s been that long. Like, looking back at the 30 years that we’ve been together, the stories and the shit that we’ve been through... No matter if we break-up tomorrow, we’ll always have those. Some of them are so funny, some of them are so sad. We nearly had a plane crash in Sligo and we nearly shit ourselves! We’ve been through everything a band can be through. We’ve all stayed kids, even though we’ve no right to be kids. Like, I’m 52. I don’t know what I should be doing with my life, but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m glad I’m doing this!”
It’s certainly true to say that Aslan have been through some shit in their time. So much so that it’s surprising certain members are still breathing, let alone still recording, touring and throwing shapes. Dignam’s drug problems caused the band to fracture for five years from 1988 to 1993, but they’ve persevered through their share of music business disappointments as well. More so than many of their early contemporaries.
“When we started, there were all these great bands – In Tua Nua, Cactus World News, An Emotional Fish, Blue In Heaven,” recalls McGuinness. “What used to really blow me away was the way bands would lose their deal and then just (clicks fingers) disappear. To me, the whole concept of some fuckin’ accountant in Los Angeles or London deciding that you’re no longer commercially viable, so therefore you stop being a guitarist or a drummer or a singer... To me, it’s fucking outrageous.
“Like, how long are you writing, Olaf? That’s what you fuckin’ do. When we were dropped, that’s only one guy – the A&R guy moves to another company and someone else comes in. It doesn’t mean you’re a worse band than when you started. Whenever we got dropped, we always used to keep on going, keep on writing, and see what came out of it. And something always did.”
Dignam nods his agreement. “If we thought we were flogging a dead horse or embarrassing ourselves, we would have stopped,” he says. “Like, people think that because we’re not having Number Ones in fuckin’ England and all that shit, for that reason alone the thing hasn’t been successful. That concept is a bit alien to me. We’re doing a job. Aslan have been all over the world this year. We’ve been to Australia twice. We’ve played in the Middle East, we’ve played in Europe. And we’ve played all over this country, of course. That’s just this year alone!”
Busy as the band have been of late, things are about to get an awful lot busier. They’re marking this milestone year with a new album, Nudie Books And Frenchies, a feature-length documentary movie, Please Don’t Stop, and an ambitious attempt to fill Tallaght Stadium supported by the Kaiser Chiefs and Royseven on June 30th.
The rather curiously titled Nudie Books And Frenchies is Aslan’s sixth studio album. While they’ve recorded some absolutely classic songs in their time, in truth they’ve always been a better live proposition than a studio act –it could be argued that their 1999 live album, Made In Dublin, is their most representative release. Either way, Nudie – a retrospective, melancholic and occasionally joyous outing – is easily on a par with their best recorded work, which again is some achievement. Although not written by Dignam, first cut ‘Too Late For Hallelujah’ (penned by Don Mescall) is already a massive radio hit. The closing track ‘Wake-Up Call’ ends with the repeated lyrical refrain, “Is this our last goodbye?” All told, it is a tour-de-force of big Irish stadium rock.
“This album was different,” says Dignam, matter of factly. “When you’re in a band, you do an album every couple of years and that’s what’s expected of you. And you almost go into autopilot. But this could easily be our last album. We’re 30 years together. Every fuckin’ day is potentially your last day.”
The title is a real throwback to the not-so-heady days of 1982. “The Nudie Books And Frenchies title came from when we started off and were heading over to the UK in a van. Our mates would give us a tenner and say, ‘Would you get us a few nudie books and frenchies when you’re over there?’ Just because of the way things were over here.”
More like the way things weren’t. When Aslan first formed, you couldn’t buy pornography in Holy Catholic Ireland. Let alone something as evil and immoral as a condom!
“When we started off, the Catholic Church was just starting to lose its grip on Ireland,” Dignam recalls. “It was a great thing for us to see. The Catholic Church has nothing but negative connotations for me personally. This is before all the abuse shit came out. Just psychologically what it was doing to the country. I remember years ago Dr. Noel Browne trying to bring an NHS style medical system into Ireland. And the fucking Fianna Fáilers were going mental saying ‘no’. And the doctors all came out against it, saying it was like communism and stuff. And the Church was right in there with them. So there was all that.”
He’s definitely not a fan of organised religion: “As far as I can see, all organised religion is doing nothing but fucking up the world. It belongs in the Middle Ages! The world we live in today has no relevance to what all of that shit’s about.
“Like, look at your man Rick Santorum, one of the Republican candidates in America. He’s totally against evolution, and he’s into Creationism. How can an educated man, who’s potentially going to lead one of the most powerful countries in the world, tell us that there were never any such thing as dinosaurs? What the fuck is that about?
“It’s funny because at gigs I often say, ‘God bless’. But I remember when I was coming off the gear, this bloke said to me, ‘Look, there’s two types of people. Religious people are people who want to go to heaven. Spiritual people are people who’ve been to hell’. And I kind of indentified with that. I don’t particularly want to go
to heaven.”
Dignam may not want to go to heaven, but he’s already been to – or at least through – hell. His autobiography, This is Christy Dignam written with journalist Neil Fetherstonhaugh, revealed that, between the ages of six and nine, he was repeatedly raped by a male neighbour in his native Finglas. When he eventually sought help from a friend’s older brother, he was raped again by him. Little wonder that he later turned to heroin.
“Addiction really is about feelings,” he explains. “I was sexually abused when I was a kid. So you have this fuckin’ thing inside you, it’s like a hole, a gnawing feeling. I used to have that all the time, until I took gear. The first time I took gear, I just said to myself, ‘man, you’re fuckin’ home’. Not with hash or coke or drink. No other thing ever gave me what heroin did. It was like, ‘Now I know how Olaf feels when he wakes up in the morning or how Billy feels’. I didn’t feel stoned, I just felt normal.”
Hard drug abuse was rampant across Dublin’s Northside in the 1980s anyway, but his burgeoning rock ‘n roll career offered chemical temptation wherever he went.
“We did our first tour of America, just before we split up,” he recalls. “We were with Capitol in America. I think New York was the first date and in each state you go to there’s a record company rep meeting you. So the rep meets us in New York and gives us a gram of coke and two bottles of champagne to welcome us. So we’re going, ‘Fucking excellent!’ So then we get to Boston and the next guy says, ‘Did Olaf look after yez in New York?’ We went, ‘Olaf’s a fucking gem, he bought us a gram of coke and two bottles of champagne’. Yer man buys us an eight-ball and three bottles of champagne! The next guy buys us two eight-balls and six bottles of champagne. By the time we got to Los Angeles... (laughs).
“We got back from America and the lads all went, ‘That was great – now let’s get down to work!’ But I was fuckin’ gone. I came back and the first thing I did was go straight from the airport to Ballymun to score. That’s the difference. Some people can use drugs recreationally. I couldn’t.”
Not that it was needed, but being a moderately successful rock star gave him another excuse to travel the road of excess. It didn’t always lead to the palace of wisdom though...
“I bought into the whole sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll thing,” he admits. “Keith Richards, Lou Reed... I loved all that shit. I ate all that shit up. Both my grandfathers died of drink, literally keeled over in pubs, so alcohol was a real bogey thing to me. So to me drugs were cooler. I started off smoking hash. Now, I don’t believe in the gateway thing – if the gateway thing worked then anybody who starts off drinking wine is gonna end up
on meths.
“But when I started smoking hash first, it did give me a kind of insight for writing. From an artistic perspective, it gave me more of a creative kind of well to draw from. So I kind of thought, ‘Well, maybe if I take heroin...’ Believe it or not, I believe that heroin or coke can be recreational drugs, but for people like me it can’t be. I’ve got this disease of addiction.
“In terms of the band, though, what it did do is all the incentive, initiative and creativity that I put into writing songs went into scoring gear. And getting money to score gear. And hiding the fact that I was scoring gear. So there was no brain left to be
writing songs.”

It wasn’t just Christy’s songwriting that was affected. As his addiction worsened, his live performances started to become noticeably less passionate. “We’d be gigging and I’d be looking at the set-list going, ‘three songs left... two songs left.... I just wanted to get it over with and get up to the room and have a turn-on. My creative input to the band was nil at that time.”
Whenever Dignam was too out of it to meet the press, which was most of the time, it usually fell to McGuinness to make excuses for him. “I’d cover for him in interviews – ‘Christy has the flu’,” the guitarist explains. “I’m sure all the journalists knew. But you try and keep the whole band together and keep it moving forward. Someone said to me recently that I was the Sellotape of the band at that time. I just wanted to keep the band going. But eventually it got to a stage where it had to stop.”
In the first week of September, 1988, things finally came to a head. Summoned to a band meeting, Dignam was unceremoniously fired from Aslan. “How bad did it get?” laughs McGuinness. “Well, we broke up. I really thought it was the end.”
Although the band struggled on for a while with newly recruited Eamo Doyle on vocals, it wasn’t the same without their fiery former frontman. They eventually morphed for a time into an act called The Precious Stones. Dignam continued to make music (forming Dignam and Goff with guitarist Conor Goff), but also continued to use heroin.
As he tells it now, he’s lucky to still be alive. “I don’t want to be glamorising drugs, but I wouldn’t say that I had a terrible time on the gear. If it was all terrible, I wouldn’t have stayed fuckin’ using for so long. I had some fuckin’ great times and met some great people. But of all the people who started using when I started using, I’d say only one or two of them are still alive. And the only reason they’re alive is because they got locked up for bringing in a load of gear.”
Did you ever get locked up yourself?
“No, I was never convicted, but I was in millions of strip searches and busts and things like that. Fuckin’ bastards! I used to be picked up nearly every day. And they’d bring you into the police station and they’d strip search you, and you’d be standing there in Fitzgibbon St [Station] bollock naked and freezing. And they’d have you bending over and all this shit. And all the coppers would be coming in sniggering at you. You already feel like this (holds fingers together), you didn’t need these cunts to do it to you. I’ve been in loads of that.”
It wasn’t just the authorities who used to give him a hard time. His rock star status often worked against him on the mean streets of druggy Dublin. “I used to score off this fella in Ballyfermot,” he recalls. “I used to get an eighth off him every two days. One day a friend of mine told me what he was doing. He said, ‘Do you see that bastard you’re scoring off? Just before you arrive, he gets the gear and he wipes it all over his hole’. Of course I didn’t know that. So when I’d arrive I’d put the gear straight into me mouth, and they’d all piss themselves laughing when I was gone. Because of who I was.
“I’d go into Fatima Mansions and I’d hand your man the money. (Shouts) ‘Fuck off, Aslan! You’re getting no gear! I’ll punch the bleedin’ head off ya!’ I used to have to support a bloke’s habit just so he could go and score for me. Throughout the years, I had about four different people whose habits I had to support because of the shit I used to get off people.”
Although his use fluctuated over the years, and he made several unsuccessful trips to rehab, it wasn’t until 2004 that he made a really serious attempt to quit.
“I went to Thailand,” he explains. “It was a Buddhist monastery called Wat Tham Krabok. Basically it was a lockdown compound. They took all of your clothes, your passport and your money. They gave you monopoly money that you could use on the compound, but wasn’t worth a fuck off the compound. You were given these pink sarongs so if you escaped you were like a sore thumb in the local area so you couldn’t go off and score or nothing like that.
“The spiritual part of me was totally fucking down to this (holds thumb and finger closely together) so I wanted to see if that was what was lacking. You know the whole NA thing about a higher power? Basically the vibe is that you can’t do it on your own, but with the help of a higher power you can. One day one of the Buddhist monks came up to me and said, ‘The way it is, Christy, is you’re out at sea in a boat and you’re drowning, and you’re waiting on this higher power – a lifeguard – to come in and rescue you. Christy, I’m telling you now – there’s no lifeguards coming. If you don’t start swimming now you’re going to drown’. I know that sounds very obvious, but to me it was a watershed thing. It really blew me head.”
Although he continued using for a short period when he came back to Dublin, he got clean soon afterwards. “It was more of a behavioural thing. But what he said kind of stuck with me. I don’t even drink now.”
And it shows. With a busy 2012 starting to take shape, Christy Dignam looks fighting fit...

Of course, there’s more to the story of Aslan than Christy Dignam’s drug problems. They haven’t even seen it themselves yet, but the forthcoming documentary movie Please Don’t Stop concentrates mostly on their music. They financed and produced the film themselves after RTÉ refused to help fund it. Dignam cannot contain his sheer disgust at the national broadcaster. “We’ve got archive footage going back to ’79, even before Aslan, when we still in a band called Meelah XVIII,” he says. “So we’ve archive footage from then going up to now. We’ve a lot of stuff from the [live album/DVD] Made In Dublin thing that we never used, and we’ve had cameras following us around for the last year or so. We wanted to make a movie about the history of the band because there’s a bit of a story there.
“We went to [filmmaker] Billy McGrath and he went out to RTÉ and said, ‘Listen, we have most of this, we just need another forty grand to pull the whole thing together’. And RTÉ says, ‘No, we haven’t got the money’. About three weeks later I’m in my gaff and a thing comes on the telly – an hour-long documentary about Tommy Fleming. They went to his farm in fuckin’ Donegal or wherever the fuck it is. It was just the biggest load of Irish shite... you know that Irishy kind of thing? I just thought it epitomised this fucking place.
“It’s supposed to be public service television,” he spits. “We’re an Irish band that’s been going 30 years. Even if you think we’re the shittiest band ever, we’ve a fuckin’ story that’s worth telling. Them fuckin’ idiots that go out and spend bleedin’ hundreds of thousands on the fucking Voice wouldn’t put forty poxy grand into us.”
The rest of the band feel similarly irate.
“We had to get three of our mates – Paul, Daz and Ronan - to take it on,” adds McGuinness. “They’ve been following us around with cameras for a year. It won’t be slick. It won’t be
Pulp Fiction.”
Obviously you’re not a fan of shows like The Voice, Christy?
“All those shows are a load of garbage,” he seethes. “It’s the wrong mentality. There’s a guy called Chris Doran from Waterford. It’s a classic example. Here’s a guy who’s like me at 18 or 16 or whatever, who had a dream to be a singer. He entered that programme You’re A Star because now kids think that’s what they have to fuckin’ do. So he’s obscure, he’s nobody. Within six months, he’s a household name because he won that show.
“Then we sent him over to represent us at the Eurovision, and he was a fuckin’ disaster. Because the chap hasn’t learnt his craft yet. He’s only six months old, he’s only a baby. But we sent him over to compete with world class fuckin’ musicians and because he didn’t fuckin’ fare up against them, he came back and we crucified him
in the press. Like, to do that to a human being.”
Warming to his theme, he pounds the EMI boardroom table in anger.
“And all these fuckers that are out there! All these Bressies and all these people. If fuckin’ Bressie and The Coronas are the best that Irish music can offer, we’re in a sad fuckin’ state of affairs in this country, that’s all I can say. It’s all about branding now. If we released our album and it did nothing, right, and then I appeared as a judge on The Voice and it went into the charts, I’d be disgusted. It would mean absolutely nothing to me. Because it would be nothing to do
with the music, it would be all about the branding.
“If you look at who’s becoming famous out of shows like The Voice, it’s none of the kids. It’s all the fuckin’ judges that are becoming famous. Like, Bressie’s album died last year. He played in The Academy – 80 people, I was at the fuckin’ gig. This is only about six months ago. And now he’s on the radio every fuckin’ time you turn it on!
“I was listening to Brian Kennedy on the radio the other day. And me wife was sitting beside me and she said, ‘If he was one of the contestants you wouldn’t even vote for the fucker!’ And he’s the fuckin’ judge! Actually did you hear the name of his album?” He shakes his head contemptuously. “It’s called The Voice.”
You might disagree with some of the sentiments, but it is easy to understand Aslan’s frustration. After three decades in the business, the band still don’t have a pot to piss in. In certain respects they underachieved but they should still have a bit more to show for all the graft and grind. “We’ve done OK over the years, but we don’t have big gaffs or anything like that,” he says.
“I’m two payments behind on me car,” laughs McGuinness. “But fuck it, this is what we do!”
For the most part, they do it all themselves. Although Aslan have a booking agent, they haven’t had a manager to handle their affairs in a number of years. “We’ve never had decent management,” he shrugs. “But there was times when we didn’t deserve decent management. There were times when we would have been the hardest band in the world to manage.”
However they’ve done financially, at least they can boast that they always did things their own way. “We’ve always trusted our own instincts,” says Dignam proudly. “When we made Made In Dublin, we had to get a string quartet in for a month of rehearsals, and then we did five nights in Vicar St. and had all the cameras in and stuff. So all that cost a lot of money. We had put up about 50 or 60 grand ourselves and we were short about 30 or 40 grand. So we went to EMI and said, ‘Listen, we want to put out this live album and DVD and stuff, and we’re short 40 grand’. They took out this sheet and said, ‘Look, the biggest selling live album this year is Oasis and it sold 7,000 albums. You guys might sell five or six thousand albums. We couldn’t invest 40 grand to sell that many albums. Sorry –
bad idea’.
“So we went off and gigged a bit longer and got the money together ourselves. It became the biggest album we’ve ever done. It’s sold almost 200,000 copies to date.
“We released ‘This Is’ first on Reekus Records in 1986,” he continues. “Before that, I met Bono in the Waterfront when they had Mother Records. We thought that we epitomised everything Mother Records stood for. Bono listened to it and said, ‘Fuck off, it’s a pile of shite’ kind of thing. We took the exact same recording to Reekus and it became the most played single in Ireland that year. So from fuckin’ day one, we’ve been told not to do this, not to do that. We’ve always fuckin’ done it anyway.”

Aslan is a democracy. All profits, royalties and riders are split evenly, and all major decisions are voted on collectively by Dignam, McGuinness, Joe Jewell, Alan Downey and Rodney O’Brien. “It’s good that there’s five of us,” McGuinness observes wryly. “There’s never anything split down
the middle.”
Having said that, the members do still come to blows occasionally. “I think letting things fester is what fucks bands up,” says Dignam. “We don’t have the class to let things fester. We just batter each other. And it does get it out of your system. So it’s a healthy kind of thing.”
As an elder statesmen of Irish rock, what advice would you give to young bands starting out?
“Just believe in yourself,” he states firmly. “Every cunt has told me in my life, everybody, what I should and shouldn’t have done. If you had of done that then you’d be this now. The reason you’re not successful is because of A, B and C. And none of those fuckers have gone out and done it. But they all know what I should have done. So what I’d say to kids out there is that you’re gonna have all sorts of fuckers telling you what you should be doing. Perseverance is what’s really important. Just keep going, and believe in what you’re doing, and don’t mind any of that shit. The world is full of experts that don’t know fuck all.”
With a new album, movie and stadium gig on the horizon, he’s relatively sanguine about Aslan’s future prospects. “Look, the movie could be shit and the stadium could have 300 people in it,” he says, with an indifferent shrug. “Now, that will matter today because of money and shit. It was like when Imelda May played The Point the first time a couple of years ago. People were saying, ‘Oh, did you see the way they pulled the curtains over the empty seats, and they blocked off...blah, blah, blah’. Instead of saying there’s an Irish artist that took a fuckin’ risk and played the biggest theatre in the country, they took a negative slant on it.
“That will happen if these two Aslan projects don’t happen to the media’s satisfaction, let’s say. But in five years time, none of that shit will matter. What will matter is we made a movie and we played the fuckin’ stadium. That’s it. Nobody will be able to take that away from us.”
The ever-cheerful McGuinness is just looking forward to taking his granny to the Don’t Stop Now premiere in the Savoy later this month. They’ve booked the cinema without having seen the film. “We just fuckin’ wanna do it!” he laughs. “We wanna walk down the red carpet with our families. My grandmother’s coming in. She’s fuckin’ 90 and I’m gonna walk her down the red carpet into the Savoy Cinema – fuckin’ great buzz! Fuck
the begrudgers!”

Nudie Books And Frenchies is out now on EMI. Aslan, Kaiser Chiefs & Royseven play Tallaght Stadium on June 30.