DRESSED in his trademark Grandad shirt, jeans and boots, Damo strides to the microphone.
With a shake of his shoulders, he closes his eyes and glances skywards as if to summon the celestial drums.
And it works as his broad Dublin frame fills with crackling energy. With a smile, a nod and a quick “Y’alroight” he strikes out with the anthemic ‘Sing All Our Cares Away’: “Mary loves the Grouse/she hides the bottles round the house/she watches chatshows and the soaps/broken hearted but she copes…”
It is immediately contagious. It hits the audience like a vocal tsunami, the goosebumps rise and hearts beat a little faster as the chorus approaches: “And we liiiiive, to fight another day.”
Strength, passion, hope, spirituality – Welcome to the Church of Damo.
Born in the Dublin suburb of Donaghmede in 1975, Damien Dempsey was, like so many of his contemporaries, inspired by the likes of Luke Kelly, Ronnie Drew and Shane MacGowan. But also on his radar in his early days were artists like Elvis Presley and Bob Marley, a singer and songwriter whose influence is never far from Damo’s work.
Damien Dempsey’s rise to folk stardom came when he entered a 2FM competition and came second with the self-penned Cardboard City. His first commercial single, ‘Dublin Town’, soon followed and reached number 18 in the charts.
It was Sinead O’Connor who spotted his talent first, offering the Donaghmede man a support slot on her upcoming tour. Impressed by his songs of social conscience, O’Connor remarked how Damien Dempsey was “the sort of voice in Ireland that is not allowed to be heard”.
She may well have had a point as Damo has spent his entire career championing the downtrodden and those failed by their governments. Suicide, working class struggle, ethnic cleansing, homelessness, drugs and political greed are just some of the issues he has had in his crosshairs over the past 20 years. So for a man cut from the same cloth as Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, what is there left to write about?
“I’ve a couple of songs that I’m writing at the minute, one of them is about mobile phones and the impact they are having on kids,” said the Dubliner ahead of his gig in the Amharclann in Gaoth Dobhair on April 19.
“I see a lot of young people with their heads in their phones all day and I compare it to my own childhood when nature was our currency. We use to get the train out to Howth and we’d go jumping off the cliffs. Nowadays kids are living in this virtual world and it’s not healthy. They are seeing nasty things and people being abusive and it’s just so far from how I grew up. I got my first mobile phone in my mid-20s but imagine having never lived without one. It’s scary.”
“My dad was a panel beater for 50 years. So give me two and a half hours on a stage any day.”
Sticking with the theme of technology, making money as a musician has never been tougher. Where previously fans would have had to visit their nearest record shop, today it is all available at the swipe of a finger. Many lament the pennies, if even that, they receive from the download world but others, like Damien Dempsey, are just grateful for the opportunity to get their songs and their music out there.
“My father worked as a panel beater for 50 years and my brother is a mechanic so give me a stage for two and a half hours any day,” he says of his constant touring schedule.
“I’m lucky I can do this and when I think of my dad getting up and heading out on a winter’s morning to go to work, I’m very thankful for what I have. I’m not saying what I do is easy because it isn’t but it’s a different kind of work.”
And it is those memories, of a father and mother grafting to pay the bills, that inspires him every time he performs.
“I’m never going to go through the motions when I get out there on stage because without the fans, I wouldn’t have a trade, I would probably be labouring or doing the door somewhere. That is why I want to give everything every time and I want the audience going away feeling like they’ve had the night of their life.”
As well as an imposing physical presence, Damien Dempsey carries with him a deep spirituality. Its intensity hangs in the air as the Donaghmede Druid shakes his fist and sings proudly of his ‘tribe’. Just where it all comes from and what it means will be the subject of a new book he is writing and stage show he is putting together.
Coupled with a schedule that saw him sell out three shows in Vicar Street before Christmas, seven gigs in April, a London concert for St Patrick’s Day and a summer show at Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens, Damo is one busy boy.
Looking to what a Donegal audience can expect he smiles broadly: “A big singalong. We’ll get a good vibration going in our hearts and we’ll get naturally high together.”
Damien Dempsey will be bustin’ into Donegal on April 19. Tickets are €27.88 and available from www.eventbrite.co.uk
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