Damien Dempsey in Dublin: A beautiful night of memory and sincerity of artist’s spirit

Damien Dempsey

Iveagh Gardens, Dublin

★★★★★

It is 20 years since Damien Dempsey’s second record Seize the Day was released, a fact that isn’t lost on him as he refers to it gratefully, and early on from the stage to a capacity crowd. That record is essentially a distillation of Dempsey’s spirit, and he radiantly mines it tonight.

What is striking is how apposite those songs remain, something like Celtic Tiger, with its lyrics that recall Dickensian poverty (“please sir can I have some more”) or Ghosts of Overdoses, with its moving acknowledgment of the effects of heavy drugs.

Dempsey tells us that communal singing is good for us, a healing force, and tonight his music does seem to translate to a kind of medicine, with the audience morphing into a choir of a broad church. Something Dempsey has always done so well is paying homage to tradition and history but reshaping it to give it new relevance, and there is something so poignant about his take on the old folk song Paddy on the Railway, which conjures up ghosts of all the hard-working generations that have gone before.

It is his version of this song that recollects Johnny Cash, and not for the first time tonight, perhaps it is partly his physicality that at times conveys tenderness, frustration, anger, and pride, an interesting mix of the ancient and modern, a brutality mingled with a kind of balletic grace, but it is also about his singularity and sincerity.

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As he rattles through the delicately rich Apple of my Eye, to the pared back grace of Factories, he makes two hours feels like two seconds, with Rocky Road to Dublin turning the space into an intimate hooley at a 1960s dance hall, and Colony starkly reminding us of how the past can inform the future (“and still they teach you in your school, about those glorious days of rule”), and Party On turns the audience inside out, with people dancing carelessly to a sobering song about the perils of excess.

He moves seamlessly from story to story, in song and in speech, he tells us how his late father grew up nearby, so poor “the ducks used to throw bread at them”, and how his mother helped him cope with his depression as a teenager, where the crowd spontaneously chants “Damo’s Ma” in appreciation.

And there is such appreciation here, from Dempsey to his stellar band (which includes long-time collaborator John Reynolds), to the audience, to Dempsey’s own sense of what really matters, and what remains important in this “crazy world”, as he delivers a heartfelt prayer up to the late Christy Dignam, interpolating that song from the sensual stridence of Patience.

Dempsey is both a serious and playful artist who understands himself and the complexities within, how the body can hold memories, and a kind of collective trauma, what he manages to do is to transform those complexities into something genuinely beautiful, with tonight a brilliant statement of that intention.