A WORKING-CLASS HERO. The northside Dylan. A young Christy Moore. The new Luke Kelly. If there’s one thing troubabour Damien Dempsey has never been short on, it’s plaudits. Emerging against the great swell of singer-songwriters that dominated new millienial Ireland, Dempsey always sounded that little bit more formidable than some of his more fey contemporaries.
Where others were content to strum three chords, make like David Gray and trill through personal poetry, Dempsey, a born crusader, was out raising the rafters with robust street anthems.
“It was the most natural thing in the world for me,” recalls the 32-year-old. “There was a ballad boom going on when I was young. A lot of the old ballad crowd were still knocking around playing the Abbey Tavern in Howth and the Sheiling Hotel. My da sang ballads. My uncle sang ballads. There were always singsongs in our house or the neighbours’ house. That was the soundtrack to my life for as long as I can remember. There was always a lot of music around.”
He’s not exaggerating. Born in Dublin’s Donaghmede in 1975, Dempsey’s hometown address at Holywell Crescent is held to be charmed among the local rockerati. “There was something about that street,” says Dempsey. “There was Derek Herbert up the road with a band called Les Enfants and Shaun Mulrooney from Humanzi. Three of us ended up with record deals from this one small place. And all of us were doing our own thing; different things.”
Growing up on the Crescent, young Damien honed his craft by jamming along to Thin Lizzy and Bob Marley, but soon found a preference for “that natural acoustic sound” and grassroots communiqués. From the get-go Dempsey’s lyrics, humorous, heartfelt and profoundly honest, seemed to emanate from an entirely different nation to the one inhabited by the lovelorn romantics and scenesters.
“I wrote what I saw,” he says. “Growing up was like a movie playing in front of you everyday. It’s a melting pot out where I was. There were plenty of people with good jobs and plenty of people with none. There was a lot of deprivation right beside a lot of privilege. But there was a sense of community and going along together.”
Ignoring the vogue for waifish introspection, the singer-songwriter instead became an unfashionable voice in the wilderness during the boom years. By 2001, the anthemic Celtic Tiger was already putting macro-concerns regarding "the fastest growing inflation rate in the world" in verse. Reviews of Dempsey's earliest albums, They Don't Teach This Shit In Schooland Seize the Day, were often quick to dismiss such thinking as economic and political naivety.
“I never got it,” he says, “I think the boom missed a lot of people. And I was one of them. Most of the positive effects were temporary. The jobs came without security. The money was short-term. From the start it looked like a scam. It looked like we were being set up to get knocked down. It’s hard not to feel aggrieved about the situation with the IMF. When you read up on the history, it’s hard not to believe the IMF didn’t have a plan for us. It’s not a conspiracy if there’s a pattern of behaviour going back to the end of the second World War that is very close to how a loan shark does business.”
A balladeer with the voice of Luke Kelly and the soul of Dublin 13, Dempsey and his socially-conscious vérité has mostly taken cues and inspiration from folksy domestic minutiae. The songwriter's poignant musical accounts of small skirmishes with the law (
Bad Time Garda)
, institutionalised abuse (
Industrial School
) and communities ripped apart by avaricious property developers and heroin were championed early and often by assorted luminaries from The Dubliners and The Chieftains. "To hear Damien sing," celebrity fan Morrissey once wrote, "is to realise the magnitude of his astounding voice and heart."
"It was a long time before I made any money doing this," says Dempsey. "After Ballyfermot Rock School there were maybe 11 lean years. I hadn't a penny. I was struggling through gigs, losing money on the gigs. But along the way people I really, really admired started showing up. And after a while I noticed that the people who were into it were really, really into it. If I hadn't been getting that kind of reaction and I hadn't got that praise from all those musicians I probably would have given up."
Business eventually picked up; the exile circuit, in particular, has been kind. Dempsey's current fanbase extends through such historic Irish destinations as London, Birmingham, Manchester, New York and Sydney. "The nice thing about it," he says, "is that every time you come back to a place, there are fewer Irish and more locals."
Still, the man who called his first EP The Contenderis, one feels, just that. Those powerful pipes and that magnetic stage presence, professional pop pickers argue, ought to have landed him a spot at a Hibernia-themed White House reception by now. Surely, the argument goes, a talented Irish folk artist who, standing at six feet two inches might pass for a Celtic superhero, should have stormed Greenwich Village as the Clancy Brothers once did.
Ballads, unhappily, have not been an easy sell for Dempsey. Too many indigenous punters reject the entire form on account of its political and Republican associations. The notion, meanwhile, of lending a Woody Guthrie-style voice to the people, was hardly going to be modish during those me-me-me Celtic Tiger years.
"Ballads came out of recession and unemployment and emigration," he says. "There's a definite relationship between those things. There was a big revival in the 1980s for traditional songs, when unemployment was high. Maybe we're ready to listen to those songs again."
Between the Canals, an energetic new film from the promising young Irish director Mark O'Connor, fits neatly within Dempsey's thoughtful milieu. A gritty St Patrick's Day caper set in Dublin's north inner city, the movie marks Dempsey's big-screen debut as a local hoodlum.
"Mark approached me and asked me," says the singer. "I wasn't mad on the idea to tell you the truth. I didn't want to make a bollix of myself. But he kept at me and he explained that it was all local people involved. It was a community-based shoot with a lot of non-professionals. So that got me interested. It was interesting taking on a whole different persona."
Rough hewn and rambunctious, Between the Canals does more to capture the real St Patrick's Day than any film before it. Shot partly against Dublin's 2009 parade and offering a nexus of low-level criminality and high jinks, film fans and patriots will be relieved to hear that nobody bursts into You Don't Have to Be Irish to Be Irishon camera.
"St Patrick's Day is a mad day," says Dempsey. "And it's completely imported. The parades started in America as a show of strength. It was a community on the march. When we get our hands on it, it's a bit different. I don't think we can handle our gargle as well as we think we can. We Irish really need to be more continental about the way we get pissed."
Between the Canals will be running in the Irish Film Institute until Friday 25th March. See damiendempsey.com
