One of the most surprising glimpses into the life of Christy Dignam, the approachable frontman of Dublin rock perennials Aslan, is also one of the most subtly illuminating.
We see Dignam at home, earnestly tutoring somebody in the art of bel canto singing. That the music, first learned from his father, is still a source of succour is perfectly obvious; his eyes are sealed shut and his hand conducts Schubert’s Ave Maria in rapture. But Dignam’s understanding of the music goes further. For him, it’s a matter of survival.
“The more you sang, the stronger it made your voice,” he says of the style. Losing his own in the early 1980s, as it cracked under the strain of punk (“Nothing on God’s earth is as horrifying”), Dignam took inspiration from an unlikely source. And so, in This is Christy (RTÉ One, Tuesday, 9.35pm), his life story goes: an eventful journey between the horrifying and the divine, success and struggle, isolation and support, in constant cycles.
Anyone familiar with Aslan will know that music has not been Dignam’s only addiction. From the outside, Aslan’s looked like a grimly familiar story, the sudden implosion of a promising band derailed by drug abuse. Director David Power, angling his documentary somewhere between a biography and a tour diary, knows that the truth is more complex, that the story must be told from the inside.
In this, he is has been granted access all areas. Dignam’s childhood, as one of 10 children in working-class Finglas, the formation and development of the band, the excess of 1980s rock’n’roll culture, all come with the efficient flicker of “Behind the Music” archive material. But how often do you see a musician interviewed in his sitting room, or his kitchen, or, as we do here, sitting on a hospital bed beside his wife, dryly considering his treatment for cancer? “I never thought I’d go out this way,” says Dignam. “I thought I’d die of old age like everyone else.”
His diagnosis, which Dignam learned in January, gives the programme a sense of urgency. Unable to complete one performance in London, he worries about others, and the documentary – no slave to chronology – is bookended by a bravura performance from just a few days ago, in the Iveagh Gardens, the band’s first outdoor performance in 29 years.
In the space between, Dignam, his band mates and his family (it isn’t always easy, nor useful, to distinguish between the two) revisit immensely painful memories. Of being sexually abused as a child – something he realised only in recovery, when he’d been fired from his band – Dignam says, simply: “I was changed after that. I was never the same.” Power places Dignam’s recollection of abuse between two consoling sequences, a touching visit to his proud, sharp-witted father, and then to a chirping aviary (“That’s where I learnt all my singing,” he jokes) where we see the fragility of hatchlings.
Likewise, the programme does not shy from vulnerability, but if it doesn’t strike you as a portrait of suffering, it is because Dignam has been able to articulate it, in speech or song, and the people around him have learned to hear it. “I’ve far exceeded anything I ever dreamed I would,” he says, and though the show doesn’t delve into his writing, he takes quiet pride that two of his songs will go down in Irish history, This Is and Crazy World. Songs of resilience and reassurance both, they ring out again with a deeper resonance.
