40 years of Aslan: People see you on The Late Late Show and think you’re minted
Aslan, Billy McGuinness, Alan Downey,Christy Dignam and Joe Jewell at rehearsals in Jealoustown Studios, Co Meath. Photograph Moya Nolan
A few years ago, Christy Dignam’s granddaughter informed him he was a millionaire.
“She says, ‘Granda, you’re loaded.’ I said, ‘Where did you get that?’ She said, ‘Google yourself.’ So I googled myself. It said ‘Christy Dignam, musician… worth $18 million, died 24 January 2010’.”
Seated beside bandmate Billy McGuinness in Aslan’s rehearsal space at Jealoustown Studios, near Dunshaughlin, Co Meath, Dignam, 61, isn’t dead. Nor, he says, is he a millionaire. Quite the opposite.
The pandemic has been tough on Aslan, who up until the lockdown and for most of the past four decades paid the bills by playing around 150 gigs a year. However, the bad times are hopefully behind them as they prepare for an anniversary tour that includes dates at Cork Opera House in early April.
“People see you on The Late Late Show and think you’re minted,” says Dignam. “I’m not saying we don’t have a comfortable living when we’re gigging. But if you get anyone and stop their income for two years… we all still have mortgages and stuff like that. I had savings at the beginning of the pandemic. They were totally depleted. I remember going to pay my mortgage and I had about €300 in my account. This time two years ago, I had €40,000 in it.”
The lockdown was tough in other ways. Dignam’s father died from Covid in May 2020, having contracted the virus in a nursing home. Later, Dignam poured his pain and his anxiety into a solo record, The Man Who Stayed Alive, recorded in an improvised studio in his kitchen.
As Dignam crooned amidst his cabinets, guitarist McGuinness kept busy in a very different way. He signed up for RTÉ’s Dancing With The Stars (DWTS), making it through to week eight. It was a deeply moving two months for the musician, who dedicated a ballroom dance to Aslan’s ‘Crazy World’ to Dignam.
“It was so emotional, dancing for Christy,” he told the DWTS judges, blinking away tears. “I put everything into the dance.
“I rang the lads. I said, ‘listen I’ve been asked to do Dancing With The Stars’. They said, ‘Do it, we don’t know how long this lockdown is going to go on for’,” says McGuinness. “I went in thinking it was going to last one or two weeks. It was a win-win for the band and for me.”
Dignam says: “It was great that it showed more of his personality. It’s like everything we’ve done over the years — Living With Lucy [where Lucy Kennedy spent a week with Dignam in 2018], Dancing With The Stars — all these things add to the smorgasbord of stuff around the band.”
“If it does bring a few people, that’s great,” adds McGuinness. “Every interview I’ve done regarding that show, I’ve mentioned Aslan, mentioned the tour.”
Aslan are a uniquely Irish institution. With anthems such as ‘This Is’ and ‘Crazy World’, they strain for a U2-level of grandeur. Dignam, in the group’s early years especially, cut a messianic figure. Whether headlining an arena or a pub, they always perform as if playing to thousands.
“We never wanted to be a Dublin band. We wanted to be the best band in Dublin and then the best band in Ireland,” says Dignam. “We were always very ambitious. Otherwise we wouldn’t have kept it going so long. Back in 1979, I went to Australia for a couple of months with my then-girlfriend who is now my wife. Our plan was to come back to Ireland, give Aslan a year and then we’d go back to Australia. That year has turned into 40.”
Now they are marking those four decades with an expansive tour of 40 dates — one for each year of their existence. They’ll travel the length of the country, playing venues ranging from the 3Arena in Dublin to the 120-capacity Sea Church in Ballycotton.
There have been ups and downs. The singer and guitarist bristle slightly at mention of Dignam’s history of substance abuse, which he discussed at length in his 2019 autobiography and which briefly led to his departure from the band in the 1980s (during which time Aslan played as the Precious Stones).
Dignam is also slightly fed up, it would appear, talking about his ongoing battle with Amyloidosis, a rare condition that leads to the build up of abnormal proteins in the tissue.
“Christie was very open and honest about it [his addictions] in the book he brought out,” adds McGuinness. “That should be it. Whenever the question comes up we say, read about it in the book.”
My Crazy World is indeed a bracing read. Dignam recounts being the first heroin addict to seek treatment at the Rutland Centre in 1988. His drug use, he writes, was his way of numbing the trauma of the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child growing up in Finglas. However, there is a happy ending and he eventually got clean at a monastery in Thailand.
“The first time I got stoned on heroin, I didn’t feel, wow, I’m on a different plane,” he writes. “I’d taken hash, it was nice. I’d had drink, it was nice. I took, coke, it was nice. But when I took heroin for the first time I just felt I was home.”
Dignam says: “We spent 40 years doing it [Aslan] and out of that 40 years I spent a small period with drugs. And it’s all people want to talk about. It’s disrespectful and disheartening because the rest of the lads didn’t get involved in it.”
Drugs were one of the reasons Aslan fell apart in the late 1980s. They were also too young to appreciate being in a band is all about compromise.
“We realised that everyone has their own little idiosyncrasies and we have to tolerate those things,” says Dignam. “When you’re sitting in a bus for six hours and someone is sucking their teeth and you want to strangle them… You have to learn to tolerate those things. And that’s what kept us going. The hardest thing in a band is not writing the music or gigging. It’s getting people that can tolerate each other.”
The atmosphere lightens considerably as conversation turns to their new tour and those gigs in Cork, which has always been a welcoming place for the group
“When we released [1988 hit] ‘This Is’ initially back in the day, it picked up radio play on 2FM and stuff. We as people didn’t realise the band’s profile was starting to [grow]. Our first gig outside Dublin was Lark by the Lee in Cork,” says Dignam.
“We were one of the opening bands and as soon as we started playing ‘This Is’ we had 15,000 people singing it back to us. It blew us away and because of that Cork has always been very special. Even aside from that, they love their music in Cork. There are certain parts of Ireland where music wouldn’t be a big deal. In Cork, it is a big deal. That’s another reason we love playing.”
“When the band were up, we were doing Live at the Marquee,” says McGuinness. “And then when the band was kind of anonymous, we’d go down and do the Old Oak, Riordan’s, Sir Henry’s. The audience has followed us. So we’ve always loved playing Cork.”
- Aslan play Cork Opera House on April 8 and 9, and Sea Church, Ballycotton, July 22
