Aslan Again

How is it that some bands record albums of well-crafted, well-played, beautifully-harmonised, eminently hummable pop songs and end up becoming megastars whose every doing is chronicled by the international media and ticket sales for whose concerts disrupt the traffic on major city thoroughfares all over Europe, while other bands do much the same thing and end up in the Conrad Hotel being interviewed by me? That was what I really wanted to ask the members of Aslan after I had listened to their extremely beguiling third album, Here Comes Lucy Jones. Needless to say, I didn't. Coward that I am, I began instead by asking Aslan if they were happy with their new album. Now, let's just pause for a second and recreate the scene: a table in a reasonably quiet corner; tape recorder in the middle of the table; two interviewees drinking pints and one drinking tea; and then the fourth arrives halfway through and the questions get all muddled up and everybody is talking at once.

Well, not quite everybody. Guitarist Joe Jewell has been avoidably detained elsewhere, so he says nothing at all. Drummer Alan Downey says very little. Bassist Tony McGuinness restricts himself to a few sharp-focus comments on the band's difficult past. Singer Christy Dignam is a born talker - articulate, frank, intense. And Billy McGuinness (guitars, backing vocals, and whatever you're having yourself) is enthusiastic and funny. No rock star poses, no pouting, no sulking. No wonder I'm stuck for an opening question. So . . . the new album?

"Yes, well," says Billy McGuinness, "the album was recorded 12 months ago and it was touch and go for a while as to whether it was actually going to come out, so it was a big relief to see it in the shops last Friday. And we're very happy with it - even our choice of producer worked really well for us. "We could have gone for somebody who would make us sound like Oasis or Blur or whoever, but we went with Declan Sinnott and people said `Jeeze, he does Mary Black and Sinead Lohan, that's a weird choice' - but Aslan is about melodic songs, so Declan was perfect." Still, you know, sing-along tunes, a bit of harmony, that guitar sound - can they really put their hands on their hearts and say they haven't been influenced by Britpop? Billy laughs. Aslan has been doing Britpop, he says, for 15 years.

Time, perhaps, for a brisk trot through the Aslan story. The band emerged from Finglas and Ballymun and settled into its present form in 1982. In May 1986 the single This Is became the longest-ever playlisted single on 2FM; the album which followed, Feel No Shame, shot straight to Number One in the Irish charts and went gold within a few months. It seemed the sky might be the limit - but in the summer of 1988, at the height of its success, Aslan imploded amid a welter of accusations and recriminations. Why?

"At the time we thought it was Christy," says Tony McGuinness. "He was getting more and more addicted to the drugs that he was on and we were doing everything we could to get through to him, but nothing worked. With hindsight you can look back and see that it wasn't just him - we lost our whole reason, our whole direction after we got a record deal with a major label.

"But at the time it seemed like it was Christy's fault. Me and him were falling out every day, clashing big-time. He was the driving force in the early days and then he started to slowly disappear. It was as if he was being possessed. We ended up thinking, `we'll have to do something - we'll have to let him go, because if anything's gonna help him, getting rid of him will help him'."

It did. "Had the split not happened I'd probably be dead now," says Christy Dignam. "I don't really have much doubt about that." He is now able to talk about his addiction - and about drug culture in general - in disarming detail. "Heroin chic," he says scornfully. "It's now being promoted as though it was cool. That wasn't a cool part of my life; it was a nightmare, and everybody who was involved with me during that time is either dead or in prison. Bar none."

What about the film Trainspotting, I ask - did he consider that it glorified heroin addiction? "Oh, it's a great film and it's real grainy and - different, from an artistic point of view," he says. "But it's not only artists who are looking at it - ordinary kids are looking at it too. "What sickened me was that people were going on about `man, that's what it's really like on heroin'. And it's not a bit like that. They'd show a spoon shaking under somebody's hand to show the `reality'. That's not the reality - the reality is waking up at six o'clock in the morning, shaking, wondering `where am I going to get 40 pounds to get some gear?'. That's the reality. Or robbing some old lady's handbag to get her money . . . " His voice tails off.

"No, I shouldn't have answered that," he says, quietly. "But people talk about heroin chic as if heroin is something that might, say, nip your finger. It's whole lives that get messed up - and not even the life of the person that takes the drug, but the lives of the people around that person." Christy Dignam now believes his drug dependency was sparked off by an incident of sexual abuse by a neighbour which took place when he was six years old. "I remember coming home and trying to explain my addiction to my father. I was trying to apologise, actually, for letting the whole family down and I was asking him could it have been caused by something that happened when I was a kid; and he started looking at me as if to say, `do you mean to tell me all this is because I didn't hug you enough when you were a child'? And I could see the hurt on his face. It was awful, because that wasn't what I was trying to say at all - and as I was driving up the road this memory of abuse just started coming to me."

Allowing that suppressed memory of abuse to resurface has obviously helped him to rebuild his life - but music has played its part, too. After the split he went to the States and was trying to build an acoustic career in New York when, in 1993, he returned to Ireland for a holiday. During the good days, one of Aslan's regular gigs had been a charity concert in Finglas, and the organisers had repeatedly tried to get the band to regroup on a one-off basis for the event; that summer, they finally succeeded and five years to the day after the split, Aslan took to the stage again.

To everyone's surprise, the creative spark was still there, as Billy McGuinness explains. "When Christy came back for the charity gig in Finglas it was like putting on an old glove, you know? We had stayed in the business as The Precious Stones, but it was like U2 without Bono. When he came back, a lot of water had gone under the bridge - everything had been said, all the fights had been fought. Anyway a band is like a family. You go through a lot." With a record deal for the US in the offing, a spot at the coveted Midem Festival at Cannes arranged for next spring, Boyzone and ITT looking to record the band's songs, a biography by Damian Corless due for publication this month and Here Comes Lucy Jones on release at last, things seem to be coming together again for Aslan.

But this is, if not a bitter band, certainly an older, wiser one. For Christy Dignam, in particular, the whole process has made him realise where his priorities - both musical and personal - lie. "When you're famous your phones are hopping and you're invited to everything that's happening - but as your radio plays diminish the phone calls diminish accordingly, so all you're left with are the albums that you've made.

"We want to make records that we can hand to our children and be proud of. We don't want to have to say, `here's my fifth album, and when you listen to it I want you to realise that it's not that the album's crap but just that merry-go-round pianos were in at that time'. The music has to stand up on its own. I believe we deserve commercial success - but deserving doesn't mean anything. If it happens, it's a bonus."

At the mention of the words "commercial success" Billy McGuinness makes a wry face. "When people say `Why aren't you successful?' I say `Hang on a minute'. We're five guys who've been in a band for 15 years. We've released three albums, we're still here, we're still playing. That in itself is success." Which is, of course, not a bad answer - to the question I never asked.

Aslan plays Midnight at the Olympia on Friday November 21st.