We’ve been FAMOUS loads of times
Billy McGuinness and Christy Dignam on how to stay solid amidst the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
THE fixtures for the Premiership’s next season came out the other day but I don’t even look at them because I mightn’t be here for them,’ Christy Dignam says, grinning, and you sense there’s a punchline coming.
‘And I don’t watch box sets because I mightn’t make it to the last episode. I’m, not going to bulls**t myself by looking at the first 16 episodes and then miss out on what happens at the end.’
The Aslan frontman is still the coolest of cats — sharp, witty and incisive, even though he may be down to the last of his nine lives. Surviving this long with a terminal cancer diagnosis has given him a different attitude to everything, he says.
‘Your whole perspective changes, everything changes,’ Christy admits. ‘Your focus goes on different things and different things are important — your family, your friends. After that the rest of it is bulls**t.’
That said, Aslan are currently on tour, singing songs from their debut album Feel No Shame, and next week they’ll hit the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin for the first of two dates in their home city.
And as they sit together, practically finishing each other’s sentences, Christy and bandmate Billy McGuinness say playing sell-out shows still means a lot to them.
‘To do anything is a big deal at this stage,’ Christy says.’ I mean, we are 35-odd years going now. One thing we have always said is that we would hate to be flogging a dead horse. We’d hate for people to be thinking ‘do these not know this is over’.
‘So initially we did the Iveagh Gardens last year and thought we would do it again.
‘It sold out in a flash so we put on a second one. We have been all over the country this last while and every gig has sold out.’
It’s 30 years since Feel No Shame came out and back then Aslan were leather-clad wild boys, with a love of buzzcuts and peroxide for some.
Speaking to the band today, they still exude the same passion for music they had when they were teenagers.
In fact, just to keep things fresh for themselves, there’s a new single too called Now I Know.
‘It is the 30th anniversary of our debut album,’ Billy says. ‘We are playing a lot of tracks from that as well as the new single.
‘The songs we wrote for Feel No Shame could have been written two weeks ago. It’s a strong album even now. We are doing eight songs off it. There are one or two songs I would not be proud of.’ ‘The Hunger,’ interjects Christy. ‘That’s a s**t song.’ And both of them break into peals of laughter before getting back to business.
‘To be able to play eight songs off your debut album that hold up 30 years later, that’s not a bad thing,’ Billy says.
The new single is a song which on hearing you might think is about a relationship break-up but the video reveals it’s much more than that.
It’s more concerned with the passing of time and the loss of someone close to you, something the band are more than familiar with having also lost keyboard player Pat Fitzpatrick to cancer last year after a brief illness, making Christy all the more grateful for the time he has here on Earth.
And 35 years is a long time for a band to survive but making music is what Aslan do, Christy says.
‘I don’t really find it extraordinary because this is what we do, this is our life,’ he says. ‘When we started this we just wanted to make music and play music and that’s what we are still doing today. The world has changed around us but it’s just one foot following the other and all of a sudden it’s 35 years later.’
And though the years are flying by, Aslan still feel the same in their heads as the leather-clad rockers who blasted out This Is.
‘Until we get up on stage and start creaking,’ Billy says, laughing.
‘And on Feel No Shame there are a couple of really fast songs — there’s one song Love Me Lately which is about 140 beats per minute.
‘When you are 18 or 19 you play at that tempo no bother but now when you are older we are like, “Hang on, we need to slow that down.”’
STEPPING out on stage the buzz, they both admit, is very much still there too. ‘You couldn’t do this unless you were enjoying it,’ Christy says. ‘Because it is just too hard.
‘I have always thought that if it wasn’t for that hour-and-a-half or two hours on stage, I couldn’t tolerate the rest of the bulls**t that you have to put up with.
‘It’s not a great business. For example, you know the fame thing? We’ve been famous loads of times.
‘You don’t become famous and you are famous forever. It’s one minute your song is being played on the radio you are invited to the opening of every envelope.
‘But as your radio plays diminish, your invitations diminish in exactly the same proportion.
‘But you are in a band and you are just doing what you do, ignoring all that stuff and playing your gigs. So we don’t tend to look at what is going on all around us.’
And when times are tough, Billy says, you find out who your real friends are as people fall away very quickly.
And there have been very tough times, none more so than when Christy was gravely ill in 2013.
‘When Christy was diagnosed in 2013, for me personally, I thought that was the end of Aslan,’ Billy says. ‘I always wondered what way it was going to end, if we were we going to break up or what was going to happen. ‘But when I went up to see Christy in Beaumont Hospital I thought, “Now I know — this is it, he is never going to get back up on stage again,’ Billy says, echoing some of the sentiment behind the new single. ‘But two years later he was back up on stage in the Olympia. So everything now is a bonus.’
In the days when Christy was ill, money was tight for the band members as without gigs, there was nothing coming into the company finances.
And as they were deemed to be selfemployed, there were no social welfare payments available for them either.
‘When Christy got sick, everything stopped,’ Billy says. ‘I went down to the dole as I couldn’t work but they said, ‘Well, you’ve been self-employed for 30 years, you are entitled to nothing.”’
And for Christy it was the same story, even though his wife Kathryn had to cut her own working hours to help care for him.
‘Cancer is expensive,’ Christy says. ‘When you get cancer, no one says,
“You don’t have to pay your mortgage because I know you are in hospital for the next year, we can hold off.” That still comes out every month.’
And of the international fame that they so richly deserve but has puzzlingly always eluded them, being financially secure is the only thing the members of Aslan say they regret not having.
‘I know bands and artists who are much better than us who you’ll never hear of,’ Christy says.
‘There was a band we saw when we were touring the States and I thought when I was watching them, “This is going to be the biggest band in the world.” They were unbelievably good. And we never heard of them again.
‘So we know we are extremely lucky to get as much as we have and be doing as much as we do. We could tour Europe and Australia tomorrow if we wanted and do it at a decent level, we can make a living here doing gigs. We are at a level we love being at.’
They are still famous enough though, albeit Irish famous as when the lads are posing up for pictures, there’s quite a stir round Brook’s Hotel.
People actually pull over in their cars, hopping out to get photos with the pair, holding up small children for hugs.
But anything more than that would be awkward, Christy says.
‘I remember Brian McFadden came to a gig we were doing in Greystones and within ten minutes someone had thrown something at him,’ he says, with a note of incredulity in his voice.
‘He had to leave. I don’t know if I would like to be Bono that every fart you do is in the newspapers and all over the internet. We are operating at a nice level, we get to pay our bills and we don’t get the grief.’
And those big stadium gigs are not the ones that give Christy what he calls the ‘artistic payback.’
‘I remember walking out when we played with Bowie in Slane thinking, “This is going to be great — 80,000 people, this will be the highlight of my life!”
‘But the nearest person was far away from me. Music at its purest form is just sitting in your sitting room playing a song.
‘The further it gets away from that reality, the more insincere it becomes.
‘The payback is from those little gigs. That’s where the essence of it lives.
‘I would love that money and the security so that if I die next week I could say to my wife forget about the mortgage it’s covered.
‘But for all the other reasons I couldn’t give two flying ‘you know whats’ about it.’
Billy adds: ‘All we need to know is that we are still relevant.
‘We need to know people are still enjoying coming to see Aslav and that is very important to us. Otherwise what is the point in doing it?’
Aslan play the Feis in Liverpool tomorrow, Iveagh Gadrens, Dublin, on July 13 and July 21, The Forum Theatre in Waterford on July 28, the Revival Festival in Listowel on August 11 and the Fleadh in Drogheda on August 17. For ticket details and info see aslan.ie and ticketmaster.ie.