An Interview with the late Christy Dignam

It's hard to believe it is now one year since Christy passed away on 13 June 2023. I interviewed him many times during the last eight years of his life and this, the first one, was probably the best

Christy Dignam was not only an extremely talented singer but was also one of the nice guys you could possibly meet. Our path first crossed in the mid-1990s, but I didn’t get the opportunity to first interview him until 2016. We’d stayed in touch since that first interview for Hot Press. In a nice touch, shortly before our last interview in 2021, which was also printed in Hot Press and several publications, Christy sent me four tracks from his superb solo album on WhatsApp and asked me for my two cents on them. Christy, who told me he always looked forward to our interviews, admitted that he was nervous about hearing what I thought about those songs - but he needn’t have been because they were brilliant. I always enjoyed interviewing him too, because they were real, insightful and meaningful conversations in which Christy was never afraid to shoot from the hip and wear his heart on his sleeve. It is exactly a year now since Christy passed away and it still saddens me that I will never get to interview him again. Here’s the Q&A from our first ever interview…

Jason O’Toole: I can imagine the tribute gig at the Olympia was a very poignant night for you. Normally, concerts like that are arranged posthumously.
Christy Dignam: It was surreal, but great. I always wanted to go to an Aslan gig to see what the punters saw. The band were playing with different singers, but at the same time, it was Aslan. So, that night because I wasn’t singing, I was able to judge the songs on a more objective basis. It was brilliant.

Did you cry?
Ah, yeah. At one point, I was fucking bawling. At the end I got up on stage and tried to sing ‘Crazy World’ and my voice was in bits. I was really ill at the time. I was still going through chemotherapy. So, I couldn’t sing.

U2 did a video for ‘This Is’ for the night, which has since gone viral.
I thought it was brilliant. I have to mention that Paul Brady was brilliant too.

Years ago you had an argument with Bono about ‘This Is’.
We went to him with the demo of that song for Mother Records. He wasn’t into it. At the time that caused a bit of a void between us and them for years. Thankfully, that’s fucking gone now.