Rock documentaries frequently end up being celebrations of their subjects. Ross Killeen’s Love Yourself Today persuasively goes the whole hog. Hanging around one of Damien Dempsey’s famous homecoming Christmas gigs – a near -religious rite at Vicar Street in Dublin – the film makes an argument for the singer as the voice of a generation; maybe more even than that. Damo, Jonathan, Nadia and Packy, four citizens of differing ages and backgrounds, talk us through their problems as we cut back and forth from the concert. Dempsey’s inimitable school of urban folk offers them all hope.
Can he explain why his music gives much solace to so many people?
“I suppose I’ve been trying to help myself with music for years,” he says. “I have been trying to help myself. I can get a pen and paper and write down the things I am going through. I had to be a bit brave to do that. It was a macho place. I thought: if people are going to attack me for it then let them.”
Dempsey looks to have opened up a well of emotion among men in particular. Love Yourself Today repeatedly focuses on the faces of male audience members as they bellow along to the songs about exclusion and misuse. Something seems to have changed in this country. The Irish were not always great about expressing their emotions.
“Yeah, that has definitely changed. Ireland has changed – and in most ways for the better. People are able to talk about how they are feeling and it’s a much healthier society with the breakdown of organised religion. That has it’s downsides too. It’s pushed people away from spirituality. But you won’t be lambasted now for saying: ‘I’m not feeling great’.”
Now 46, Dempsey was raised in – and remains loyal to – the north Dublin suburb of Donaghmede. “It’s a really good community there,” he says. “I wanted to be near the people I grew up with. So I went back out there.” Watching the collective choruses at Vicar Street, you won’t be surprised to learn that he picked up his passion for music at post-pub sessions in the family home. A man of some size, he boxed for a spell before devoting himself to music. The film does not have much to do with those early years, but he does allow an interesting aside about the breakup of his parents’ marriage. There is no apparent bitterness. He notes that this was before divorce was legalised and that too many neighbours, who may have been better apart, remained bitterly together. His mother is there at Vicar Street to sing along with the (this seems like the right word) congregation.
“I saw lots of people on my road who should have split,” he agrees. “They should probably never have married in the first place. They were pushed into marriage. It was the dark ages. The Catholic Church had so much power. You should never give someone that much power over other people. It is going to end up a nightmare. I thought my mother was very brave for saying: I just have to get out.”
She must be proud he has become such an inspiration to so many people.
“Yeah,” he says, apparently not quite comfortable with so much praise. “I get a lot of positivity from my mother. She is a very positive woman. She is intuitive as well. She is a bit of a white witch. I think I have that as well. I see things and then they happen. I am intuitive. I also get that spirituality from her.”
His first commercial single, Dublin Town, was released in 1997 and performed decently in the Irish charts, but his debut album, They Don’t Teach this S**t in School, didn’t break through into the mainstream. He took time off. He went to New York from a spell. Seize the Day, his second album, produced by long-time collaborator John Reynolds, really set the legend rolling on its release in 2003. He supported Bob Dylan. Morrissey came out as a massive fan. Everyone with open ears recognised that a force had arrived.
Literally nobody sounds like Dempsey. There is a temptation to suggest this is all to do with his decision to sing proudly in a Dublin accent. There is more to it than that. Luke Kelly, an unavoidable forerunner, didn’t moderate his vowels, but the timbres of the two voices are very different. Dempsey has an extraordinary keening style that sounds as if it is addressed to or (from) a distant mountain peak. If you hear a nanosecond on a nearby radio you immediately know it’s him. Where did that come from?
“That’s hard to say,” he ponders. “I always wanted to sound different to everyone else. I never wanted to be a copy of someone else. I suppose it is a mish-mash of different influences. Thin Lizzy is in there. The reason I wanted to start playing was that I heard Whiskey in the Jar. I heard that at the ballad sessions. I started singing like Philo [Lynott]. Then I began singing a bit like Jimi Hendrix. I remember singing one of my own songs – Cardboard City it was called – in that Jimi Hendrix American accent. Then I was at a session and someone said: ‘Sing it as a ballad’. I sang it in my own accent and said: ‘I’m not changing’.”
Was there any early pressure on him to moderate the accent? I have a mad vision of men with cigars trying to get him to sound like Lindsey Buckingham.
“That was mostly from my own community,” he says. “I think they must have been a bit ashamed of their own accent. Not around their own people. But they were maybe a bit ashamed to sing on the radio in their own accent – and to sing proudly. People from my own community would say: ‘You’re very common.’ I’d say: ‘So are you!’ Ha ha!”
I wonder if that’s something else that has got a little less terrible in contemporary Ireland. Maybe we are happy to sound as we sound.
“Definitely. That’s definitely changed. It’s an in thing now. It wasn’t an in thing when I started. I was slagged off for it in the media and in the street. But I am a stubborn, stubborn man. The more someone tells me not to do something . . . Ha ha! I actually used to put the accent on a bit harder. In the earlier stuff I was putting it on harder just to go against them.”
He says that his style of delivery is an “in thing”. There is evidence to support that theory. Two of the most extravagantly praised acts of recent years – not just from Ireland, but from anywhere – deliver their messages in strong Dublin voices that admit no apparent compromise. David Balfe, who goes by the name of For Those I Love, speaks his powerful lyrics over swirling electronica. Fontaines DC deal in their own school of angular post-punk. Both sound as if they were nourished on early Dempsey. Have they said as much to him?
“They kind of have, the lads,” he says humbly. “They kind of have. The Fontaines are amazing and David Balfe is incredible. They have said that I was a big influence. But before me there was Paul Cleary [of The Blades]. There was the Dubliners, of course. But they weren’t doing original songs. Paul Cleary was singing original songs in his own accent about where he was from.”
Killeen’s film, shot in sharp monochrome, manages the trick of making Dublin look beautiful without prettifying it. Love Yourself Today is a salute to a city that has not always been kind to the four witnesses. Dempsey’s music could be defined in similar fashion. It is interesting – and will surprise some – that he is keen to volunteer that Dublin is a better place now than when he was growing up. But he acknowledges the outrages of the housing crisis. The capital is no longer any place for bohemians.
“Yeah, I remember there were lots of artists living in bedsits all over Dublin,” he says. “You could afford to be an artist and live in Dublin. It was a very vibrant community to be a songwriter in. Loads of people passed through and now they are all being squeezed out. There was a community of artists. That is the main thing we have to set up. I see [Minister for Tourism] Catherine Martin is trying to set up a pilot scheme for artists. That’s a step in the right direction. We are famed around the world for our artists. We punch above our weight.”
The next big step for Dempsey is a one-man show at The Abbey Theatre.
“It will be lots of vignettes about schooldays and who my parents were and where the songs came from,” he says. “It’s a bit like Springsteen on Broadway. The Abbey saw that and thought about maybe getting Irish artists to do something like that.”
Live music is creeping back. The great ceremony we see in Love Yourself Today will return. The doors will open. The congregation will gather.
“Scientists have realised that if you get a jug of water and sing to it the molecular structure changes,” he says. “It becomes a beautiful crystal. And we’re mostly water. Live music turns us into beautiful crystals within. So when it comes back it will be better than ever.”
I don’t doubt it.
Love Yourself Today is on general release
