Magic of music in the blood
Live festivals bring out the best in ‘shaman’ Damien Dempsey
It sounds like a scene straight out of Clint Eastwood’s movie Hereafter with Matt Damon about bereaved characters searching for answers to the afterlife. In a weird and wonderful coincidence, Damien Dempsey was convinced his father Frank was smiling down from heaven the day after he passed away at aged 75 from a long illness last December.
It happened when the music icon went down to his local pub in North Dublin to write the eulogy for the funeral and, all of a sudden, a stranger burst out singing Andrea Bocelli’s Time to Say Goodbye.
“He died in the middle of that song. We were playing the music all the time and singing to him, which was nice,” Damien began, as he recounted the full story.
“It’s a nice way to go with people around you: loved ones singing to you and playing you music. He was lucky that way.
“It was traumatic now, I have to say, watching him in bed, because you remember him as a strong fella, always active.
“He had stayed strong; he didn’t sort of ‘go old’. But watching him in the bed was a f ***** g nightmare.”
He added: “We were doing shifts with him because of the COVID, we couldn’t all go in at the same time.
“I’d done my shift and I went down to Dingle to do the ‘Other Voices’ for a night. It was the twentieth anniversary, I was the main act.”
Every time Damien left the hospital he would “kiss him on the forehead, wipe my tears and try not to blub”. But the tears always came.
“I knew he would’ve wanted me to go (to Dingle), he was six weeks at the hospital, he was sort of meant to go, then he didn’t go,” Damien added.
“So I went down and did the gig. And I just heard (the bad news) before I went on stage.
“I said nothing to nobody. I didn’t tell the band because I thought, ‘If I tell these I’m probably going to break down’.
“So I said f**k all. I thought, ‘I’m going to sing him across the great divide. I’m going to sing him across’.
“I got back the next day and went to the funeral home and they said, ‘Who’s going to do the eulogy?’ I said I’ll do it.”
As Damien was sitting at the bar later that day he noticed something unusual out of the corner of his eye.
“It’s all old fellas in the bar. You know, big bellies and red noses and Guinness’ farts!” he said, laughing.
“But there was this woman sitting at the bar, dolled up: olive skin, black curly hair who looked Mediterranean.
“First of all I was going, ‘She must be lost. What’s she doing in this bar with all these old fellas and me?’
“At about nine o’clock she started singing in Italian. I was going, ‘Jaysus! What’s she doing? I know that song?’
“It’s f ***** g ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ she started singing!
“I’ve never heard that song sung in any pub, or any stage. I’ve only ever heard it sang by your man on the telly or The Sopranos, or something.
“And here it is ‘live’ in the bar the next day. For me, I’m a spiritual fella, that’s a nudge from the dad.
“They’re little signs. If you’re open they’re little signs, I think.”
Damien, who also has these premonitions, once had a vision in which he saved someone from drowning.
“I could see myself pulling somebody out of a body of water – and the next day it happened,” Damien said about the time he helped rescue two drowning men in the River Slaney in 2014.
Damien and his crew had just pulled up to the concert venue to get ready for a sound check when they noticed one of the two distressed men “bobbling up and down and trying to come up for air”.
Damien got a sheet and “waded into the river” and threw it to one of the lads to help pull them out.
“These little things have been happening to me,” he said about that spookily accurate premonition.
“I think in the modern world with all the electricity and all around us – the different sorts of distractions – it’s hard to tap into this if you have it.
“There’s only certain people in the tribe that have it. And my mother has it and my grandmother had it – a sixth sense or whatever it is. They call themselves white witches.
“I think I have it myself. We all have our own role in the tribe, we’re all good at something. We all have our own skills.
“My other granny used to read the tea leaves actually. So maybe she was a white witch as well.”
Damien once got much more than he bargained for when a spiritual ritual resulted in a ghost entering his home.
“I had done an ‘Ayahuasca’ ceremony – that’s what brought the woman back!” he said.
That’s what I reckon it was, because that night we’d done the ‘Ayahuasca’ ceremony the blinds got pulled up and whacked back down as we were doing it. And the window wasn’t open. We all saw it.
I wanted to try this ‘Ayahuasca’ just to open up the mind a bit. I’d heard about it, so I tried in the front room.
“It’s for shamans. I see myself as a bit of a shaman, or some sort of white witch, or whatever.
“So that’s what I reckon it was, that’s when the noises and stuff started happening in the room.”
For a while it didn’t look like there was a ghost of a chance of the spirit departing the room.
“My mate came down from Donegal. He’s a bit of a shaman,” said Damien, who was taken aback when this friend asked if he could sleep in his front room.
The next day he told Damien, “There’s a woman in there.”
“And I said, ‘That’s the most haunted room in Donaghmede!’” Damien explained as he continued the story.
“He said, ‘Can I sleep in there again tonight?’ And I said okay.
“And he came out the next morning and he said,
‘She’s gone. She’s moved on. She was trapped’.”
Damien knows all about feeling trapped himself.
He was sick to death of naysayers telling him to give up his dream before he hit the big time.
“You’d be believing what people are saying to you: ‘Give up the ghost’,” he said.
“It was rough. I hadn’t a bleeding penny for years.
“I’d be living off friends’ generosity.
It’s for shamans. I see myself as a bit of a shaman, or some sort of white witch, or whatever.
Me and my dad would be in the family home, so he wasn’t charging me rent or anything. So that’s how I survived a bit.”
A “very stubborn” Damien kept at it thanks to the encouragement from mates and fans.
“I just knew from the way certain people reacted to the songs that something (good) would happen,” he reflected.
“You’d have certain people who you’d believe and you’d go with them. Even though you might not necessarily believe it yourself.”
One of Damien’s best assets is his powerful voice, but there was a time when armchair critics would complain about his singing in an authentic Dublinese accent.
“I always wanted to be different. I always thought, ‘Jaysus, if you’re going to play music f ***** g be different, don’t sound like a thousand other singers. Sound like yourself. Get your own style,” he explained.
“‘And if it works out it works out, but if it doesn’t you can do covers in bars’.
“At least if you’re doing covers in bars you’re spreading joy to people. That’s what I’d be doing if it hadn’t worked out, I’d be playing music somewhere.
“I’d be making people happy somewhere with music. You put them on a different vibration, a different frequency, when you play music and people move and they sing.
“Even if you’re doing it in a bar with 20 people I think you’re making the world a better place in a little way.”
It’s a true measure of the man’s character that when I ask him about his personal career highlight that he doesn’t mention the number one albums, or even supporting Bob Dylan and getting to work with U2’s legendary producer Brian Eno.
Instead, he mused: “I suppose it’s when someone comes up and says, ‘Your music saved my life. I don’t know what I would’ve done without it. It really picked me up when I was really low. I’m not sure I’d be here if I hadn’t had them songs with me’.
“People would say, ‘That song saved my life’.
“Or, ‘That album really helped me through dark times’.
“When you think of your music as saving people, or helping them through life even, I suppose that’s the biggest buzz you can get.”
Damien endured some dark times himself as a young man.
“I went through a good period of bad depression. It was getting worse and worse every day,” he confessed.
“It might’ve been the realisation that my family members are going to die someday.
“You don’t really think about that when you’re younger, but when I hit my teens I started to think about that and that really got to me.
“That really terrified me. I’m not sure if that was one of the instigators.
“And my friends were heavy smokers with the hash. I was trying to keep up with them, trying to show: ‘I can smoke as much as them’.
“But I wasn’t them – my head was different. My head was a racing head that goes off in tangents and it goes down dark alleys.
“It was a very busy, a very noisy head compared to the other lads.
“The hash was making me think all sorts of stuff. I think that might have been one of the reasons as well. It can make you pretty paranoid.
“But I went down a very dark place and I just reached out to the mother.
“I remember just walking with her one day. We used to meet up and have a walk, because she was living in the North Strand – she’d left home by the stage.
“And I just reached out to her and she said meditation is very good.
“I started going to a meditation class and that’s how I got out of that.”
It’s something he’ll often shine a light on at his electrifying gigs.
“I’ll just say to the people when I’m playing, ‘I know how important it is to reach out because we might not all be standing here if I hadn’t reached out to my mother that time’.
“Because the way I was feeling, if that had of continued I don’t know if I would have (still) been here.”
Damien is a big believer in the power of a good old fashioned sing-song.
“I come from that tradition. My dad’s family all sang. It’s just a very old link to our Gaelic past: getting together in houses and singing,” he said.
“I remember as a kid you’d feel safe at the sing-song. There was never any trouble.
“People were on great vibrations when they came in and sang together. It was just fun and laughter and slagging. People got very high from the sing-song.
“I always remember when someone would sing a song and we’d all join in on a chorus, we’d all grow wings and we’d fly over the Wicklow Mountains.
“We’d be so high and happy. And that was the kids who weren’t drinking, and that was for everybody there, like my granny who wouldn’t be drinking. And it would make people high.
“So I wanted to bring that to the stage. And that’s what I try to do: I bring the Irish sing-song to the stage.”
Damien is now looking forward to performing at the eighth annual Doolin Folk Festival in June.
Some of the other big acts include Mary Black, (circled) Ye Vegabonds and Peggy Seeger.
“The last time I’d done the festival it was just amazing. I think in that part of the world there’s a magic about it – with the cliff and the ocean and the music from there,” he concluded.
“The Burren is a magical place. I used to holiday there a lot, me and my father and brother would go down there and go to Doolin and Lisdoonvarna. And I used to go to Spanish Point.
“There’s a magic down there with the land and the people and the music.
“So the last time I’d done it, the people were in such good form. It’s just a beautiful part of the world and there’s something about it being on the edge of a continent and then 3,000 miles of ocean.
“There’s a freedom down there in the people’s souls. So, it’s a magical place to have a big sing-song.”
■■The Doolin Festival takes places between 10-12 June. Tickets can be purchased from www.doolinfestival.ie