I’d be OVER if I got CORONA
‘I’m going stir crazy trying to think of things to do’
‘My disease is going to be raging away’
Christy Dignam has cheated death twice and today, in an EXCLUSIVE interview, tells how:
■ He was just hours away from shooting a new video with a director who had direct contact with a confirmed case
■ His chemotherapy has been put on hold until he can get to London for more tests
■ His 60th birthday and vow renewal celebrations have had to be postponed
IRISH music icon Christy Dignam has stared death in the face on two occasions in recent years and somehow miraculously survived to tell the tale.
But the singer has every reason to fear it wouldn’t be a case of third time lucky if he was struck down with the coronavirus.
On the first occasion in 2013, the Aslan frontman was told by doctors he had only six months to live after being diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer called amyloidosis — the same incurable disease that Martin McGuinness succumbed to.
With such a serious underlying medical condition, Christy sensibly decided to self-isolate three weeks ago when this horrendous pandemic began spreading like wildfire across Europe.
Christy has to be ultra-cautious because his immune system has been irreparably weakened after three bouts of gruelling chemotherapy.
‘It’s terrifying, I think I’d be over if I got the coronavirus,’ Christy tells me in this exclusive interview with the Irish Daily Mail, which has to be conducted by phone because it is too precarious for him to receive visitors.
‘I was looking at information there yesterday giving a list of all the people most in danger of dying and I was in every category — every one of them!
‘It’s not the cancer that will kill me, it’ll probably be a cold or something like this [coronavirus].
‘I haven’t moved outside the door in three weeks. It’s horrible. I’m going stir crazy here trying to think of things to do. But what can you do?’
There’s nothing else but to sit and wait it out, considering Christy’s second brush with death was a prime example of how a run-of-the-mill viral infection could be his undoing. In 2017, he contracted sepsis, with the doctors only giving him 24 hours to live that time.
‘My kidneys were failing, my heart was failing, my liver was failing — and that was from just an ordinary flu. We were playing a gig in Limerick and there were people getting selfies and one woman was coughing and spluttering all over the place,’ he recalls.
‘The next day I woke up and I felt a bit dodgy. I had a pain in my kidneys. My wife took my temperature at seven in the morning and it was normal, 36.5. She took it again at 11 o’clock and it was gone up to 39, which means you’re at death’s door. By then I was delirious. I don’t even remember.
‘I was rushed to hospital and I was in the waiting room and my heart had gone up to 240 beats a minute! I was dying in the waiting room. So, I rang Gerald Kean, the solicitor, he’s a mate of mine. And he knew one of the top consultants in there and within about five minutes I had five doctors around me.
‘I got sepsis because my immune system is compromised with everything that’s been going on over the last few years. As I said, that was just an ordinary flu, so I wouldn’t have a chance with this one. I’ve to get flu injections every year and I get the pneumonia injection every five years, but this is a viral flu, so there’s no cure for it.’
The music legend had a lucky escape two weeks ago when he intended, albeit reluctantly, to pop out briefly to film a new music video, only for the plans to be scuppered at the last minute when the director discovered he had been in direct contact with someone diagnosed with the coronavirus.
‘He had the sense to realise he would be putting Christy’s health in jeopardy,’ the singer’s bandmate Billy McGuinness texted me after the close call.
It was, the 59-year-old now concedes, an ill-judged move for him to even consider agreeing to do the video. But the incident did drum home for him the importance of maintaining complete selfisolation without any exceptions. Otherwise, Christy would be taking his life into his own hands.
‘At the moment, yeah, absolutely,’ he acknowledges.
Aslan are clearly not a superstitious bunch either because they had scheduled to shoot the video for their new single on Friday the 13th. ‘By then we were already on the crowd distancing and all that carry-on, but we were saying, “Well, it’s just the band so, we’ll be grand”,’ Christy had reasoned, unwisely in retrospect.
‘We were doing it on the Friday, but on the day the director rang us with the news. On the Tuesday, he had done a movie with some French filmmaker and he came down with the virus.
‘That was a bullet dodged because had he not found out your man was sick and if we had gone ahead with the video, that would’ve been me in direct contact with somebody. That’s how easy it is.’
The new single Hold On — an apt title with the world being in dramatic freefall from this pandemic — had been planned for release on March 30, but has been deferred to an unspecified later date.
Aslan also had to cancel many upcoming concerts here and in the UK, including their annual St Patrick’s Day gig at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre.
‘That was a sickener,’ says Christy. ‘Apart from when I was in hospital, we’ve played it for the last 17 years, the day before Patrick’s Day. So, that was huge, even pulling that, because that came up to the wire. Everything was lined up. We were writing again, we were doing a single, we were doing a video, we had a lot going on and then the whole thing was called to a halt.’
Such matters, however, are the least of his worries at the moment. Christy is also on tenterhooks after being forced to postpone pressing plans to meet with specialists in London to discuss further chemotherapy treatment tomorrow.
‘I was supposed to be going back to London because my bloods have been going bogey,’ he says. ‘I’m getting results back from London and in the last three or four months it’s gone up. I was just getting to a point where I needed to do chemo again and I was going over to London and they were going to see
what kind of chemo I could use. I give bloods every couple of weeks in Beaumont and the bloods are sent over to the Royal Free Hospital in London because that’s the centre of excellence for amyloidosis. And they see what the prognosis is in London and then they get in touch with the consultants in Beaumont and tell them what way to treat me.’
Unfortunately, Christy requires chemo more and more frequently in order to survive.
‘When you do chemo, If you survive the chemo and the disease comes back — which is the way mine comes back every so often — each time you do the chemo your cells start recognising it and finding ways to go around it. So you have to find a new one. The first time I did chemo, it kept the cancer at bay for three years. I was kind of cool for three years and then it came back.
‘The second chemo lasted about a year, but then I got the sepsis and they had to stop chemo because my immune system was being so compromised.
‘The third time they put me on Pomalidamide — it’s from the thalidomide family — which was less severe on my system. Everything was amazing, it just worked great but it was speeding up my heart so they had to stop that. It’s just a weird one. They don’t know what they’re going to do.
‘I was to do all that at the end of the month in London and that’s all up in the air now. So, in the meantime, my disease is going to be raging away. I just don’t know what to do. Well, there’s nothing I can do, unless the doctors here put me back on the same chemo again. I suppose it would be better than nothing.’
Never one to have a pity me attitude, Christy — a born fighter who has also had to overcome sexual abuse and drug addiction in the past — tells me all this without any great pathos.
But it’s easy to imagine he also must be now crestfallen about having to cancel upcoming romantic plans to celebrate both his and his wife’s 60th birthdays by renewing their wedding vows on June 4.
Christy and Kathryn are childhood sweethearts, having been together since they were both 14. They’ve been practically inseparable ever since, but Kathryn did understandably once leave Christy for a brief period when he was in the midst of his heroin addiction.
Christy previously told me: ‘We split up for about a year, where she just got a pain in her b ***** with it. I don’t know how she put up with me — because I wouldn’t have put up with me! Would I have had the strength to put up with her, if she had been the addict? I don’t know if I would have been able to. She’s an amazingly strong person.’
They have one child together, Keira, a talented singer in her own right, who is the young girl Christy clutches in his arms in the iconic photograph used on the cover of Aslan’s debut album, Feel No Shame.
As a doting grandfather now, Christy was clearly looking forward to marking the special occasion by walking down the aisle again with their two young grandchildren, Cian and Jake, looking on.
‘I can’t believe I’ll be 60,’ he says. ‘It’s weird, I still feel like I’m 18. I was going to renew my wedding vows, as just a vibe, because I’m 38 years married.
‘We had a woman booked to do the civil service and all, to do that. So, the whole thing had to be pulled because we just don’t know how long this is going to go on.’
Explaining why they had picked that date in May, he explains, ‘My birthday is on the 23rd of May and my wife’s birthday is the 8th of July. So, we had it organised for in the middle of the two birthdays.’
Christy has admirably maintained a glass half-full attitude while facing his life-threatening illness and is doing his utmost — even more so since going into lockdown mode — not to dwell on the bad cards life has dealt him.
‘I just don’t think about it unless I’m talking about it, like now. It’s almost like a forest fire and you’re treating each fire as it comes to you,’ he says philosophically.
‘So, each crisis you deal with it as it comes and you try and not anticipate crises unless you’re sitting like now, as I said, talking about it.
‘But, in general, I try and not anticipate things. I try and just deal with things as they happen.
‘I try and not worry about it because there’s no real point in worrying about it.
‘I think the cancer was a great thing to happen to me in a strange way because it focused me. I started prioritising my life.
‘And because I had the illness, in every other aspect of my life I’ve been taking care of myself to try and survive it — and there are obviously benefits of that.
‘I’m also loving life because for years when you’re on a drug your appreciation of things is diminished greatly. So, since I got clean the love of the whole thing is great. I just love it.’
Christy is helping relieve stress and boredom at the moment by meditating, which is something he got into after an Aslan fan urged him to take it up.
‘This woman came to the gigs and she was always asking me to try it. She’s a Tai Chi master. Tai Chi is like a form of meditation and kind of calms me a little bit,’ he says.
‘There’s another thing called Qigong, which is all breathing exercises. It’s brilliant, it’s amazing. It keeps you centred so you’re not losing your head.’
Christy’s mind has been working overtime with ideas for Aslan to do ‘a big gig to celebrate’ when this pandemic nightmare is finally over.
‘We’re trying to think of something really good to do at the end of this — if we get through it. It’s like something out of an apocalypse.
‘Do you remember these films in the 1950s where you’d look out and the streets would be empty and soldiers walking around? That’s what it’s like here now, it’s crazy.’
On hearing the suggestion that the Phoenix Park would be a good venue for such a celebratory concert, the Cabra-based singer jokes: ‘It would be handy for me — it’s just up the road!’
Christy will probably have a lump in his throat and fans will no doubt shed a tear or two when Aslan next get to perform their hit single Crazy World.
‘It’s weird, isn’t it? That was 25 years ago and the song is more relevant now than it ever was. It’s strange,’ he says.
‘Can you imagine the party in the world when this thing is gone? I think there’s going to be a new lease of life globally when this is sorted.
‘We’ve never had something where the whole world is having the same negative thing happen to it at the same time — it’s just so unprecedented.
‘So, when this thing is finally conquered or stops there’s going to be a huge feeling of joy. And I think it will change the way we look at the world. When this thing is over, I think this will have certain benefits that we haven’t anticipated and we haven’t foreseen. Hopefully we just all get through it.’
‘I can’t believe I’ll be 60, I still feel like I’m 18’