Damien Dempsey on hope, traditions and MacGowan’s advice

WHENEVER he is on stage, Damien Dempsey has one mission - to make people sing their troubles away - a magical tradition his grandmother passed down to him.

“We always used to go to my grandmother’s house. It’s only a small little house, and it’d always just be jam-packed with people. Everyone would be singing,” Damien says.

“When you're singing, you have to focus, you have to remember the next line and try and stay in time and in key. It’s meditative when everyone is singing together, it creates this vibration that's very magical, it's very special. People forget all their troubles and we all get in a sort of harmony together,” he explains.

Up until Christmas Eve, Damien will be performing across Ireland. He recently played an outstanding show at Limerick's Milk Market. Once his winter tour is over, he’ll be spending time with family.

“We'll get together, have a bit of food and a few drinks and we'll sing. We have sing-songs. No instruments now, we just sing a song each. I think the sing-song is a part of Ireland that's very special and I really hope we preserve it,” he says.

The singer-songwriter recently released Hope Calling, a song he hopes can help to lift people’s spirits.

“I always try and put a bit of hope in our music and a bit of positivity. Sometimes, a lot of our people are down. At the moment, a lot of people are still down after the lockdown, I think I just wanted to give them a bit of a lift,” he notes.

Hope Calling is not only about hope. According to Damien, it’s quite a spiritual track too.

“I believe there's more than we see and more than we think we know, so there's a little bit of that in it. It’s a little bit of visualisation as well. Manifesting things with visualisation and the gratitude and stuff like that,” he explains.

At the moment, Damien is working on his next album - which “should be released” in the spring of 2024. In his new offering, he aims to send solidarity.

“I'm just saying to women around the world, who are being sort of oppressed by patriarchal societies, I just want to send out some solidarity to them and wish them freedom,” he says.

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A few songs on the album were inspired by previous generations of women.

“A lot of them were sort of expected to give their husbands as many children as possible and it was very hard on these women, they were impoverished back then. I don't know how they fed all these children, clothed them and raised them.

“They were just like the strongest people, but they were the kindest people as well,” he says.

Speaking of women, and on a lighter note, he recalls the worst piece of advice his mother once gave him.

“My mother convinced me to get highlights in my hair when I was in my late 20s. I look back on the pictures now and I go, mother of God, that was really bad for me, it was terrible,” he laughs.

Contrastingly, the best piece of advice he has ever received was from Shane MacGowan, The Pogues’ late singer who passed away a couple of weeks ago. There is now a hint of sadness in his voice.

"He was a good friend of mine. I supported him a few times,” he says softly.

“Some of the best advice I ever got was from Shane. He said ‘get off the brandy’. I was drinking a lot of brandy in my twenties. He said ‘The brown spirits, they’re very, very bad for your liver’, and he listed people that drink had killed, you know? So I stopped drinking brandy.”

As the conversation comes to an end, he recalls the first time he met Shane, whom he was asked to play a song with. Ireland’s favourite punk poet was late, but worth the wait.

“I went to meet him at 4 o'clock in a hotel in Dublin and came to 5 o'clock, he wasn't there - 6, 7, 8, I was about to go, then I got a call, said he'd be there by 10, he wasn't there. He came in at about half 11, and by the time he came in, I was well jarred. We went to the studio and when I went to put down harmonies, he stopped me and he said ‘you're too drunk to sing’,” he laughs.