Christy Dignam, who died on Tuesday aged 63, was born to sing – his CIÉ bus upholsterer father, Christopher Dignam snr, loved the opera singers Enrico Caruso and John McCormack. By the time he was a teenager in 1973, Dignam had been struck by the twin musical forces of The Beatles and David Bowie. There was no going back for him, and after an early attempt at breaking into the music industry in 1980 with a band called Meelah XVIII (which featured his Finglas friend Joe Jewell), he would resurface two years later with Aslan.
Along with Jewell, Dignam recruited two other Finglas lads, aspiring musicians and songwriters Billy McGuinness and Alan Downey. The friends’ belief in their new band was relentless and rock solid, and within a few years of hard graft (which included regular rehearsals in a disused pigsty at the back of Dublin Airport), Aslan slowly emerged out of a post-U2 Dublin as genuine contenders for the title of Next Big Thing.
The key to achieving this was good songs, of which the band were adept at fine-tuning, and having a frontman who took control and looked the part of a rock star. In the days when music videos were more than calling cards, Dignam matched the best of them. By 1986, record labels started contacting them, and when they did a BBC Radio 1 session for the Janice Long Show, one of the UK’s primary music papers, Melody Maker, pronounced Aslan as the hot button music act to beat. As that year drew to a close, Aslan won the Most Promising New Band gong at the Hot Press/Stag awards and promptly signed to EMI.
Following a sequence of excellent pop/rock singles (This Is, and Loving Me Lately in 1986; Pretty Thing and Please Don’t Stop in 1987), Aslan released their debut album, Feel No Shame, in 1988. It rocketed to the top of the Irish charts and such was the strength of the songs – coupled with EMI’s marketing and distribution network – a second album was given the go-ahead. America called and what America wanted was an Irish band that would emulate the success of U2. It seemed as if the world was Aslan’s for the taking. They did just that, but not for long, unfortunately. By the end of 1988, Dignam had been sacked by the band for his unwise lifestyle choices (including hard drug use), and Aslan split up.
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Five years later, Dignam and his friends (now reunited after several years of bad blood between them) reformed Aslan for what was supposed to be a once-off community gig in Finglas. Within weeks, the band were back on track, signed a record deal with BMG, and released Crazy World, a song that would forever be associated with the band but especially with Dignam.
His drug use would continue to blight his life as well as Aslan’s commercial success, but when he returned in 2008 from a drug rehabilitation sanctuary in Thailand, he kicked his habit into touch. From that point onwards, until 2013 when he was diagnosed with amyloidosis, a rare form of incurable blood cancer disease, Aslan toured Ireland and beyond to great acclaim, with Dignam, in particular, once again establishing his prowess as a communicative, grounded frontman and expressive singer.
Dignam’s passing has all too inevitably been voiced by many tributes. “We were blessed to share the stage with Christy,” tweeted The Script. “We’ve lost a legend, one of a kind.” President Higgins issued a statement, saying, “It is hard to believe that he has left us.”
