Victoria Mary Clarke

Christy Dignam Interview

Christy Dignam Interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2001 1200 words.

Rock-star Christy Dignam, is the lead singer with Irish band Aslan, who currently top the album charts. He’s also a recovering heroin addict. Tonight, he and the band are at the EMI offices, a rather glamorous building in Dublin’s embassy district, getting ready to go on the “Late Late Show”. We meet in an imposing looking drawingroom, hung with gold, silver and platinum discs and strewn with rock and roll paraphernalia. The first thing I notice is his eyes. Blue, angelic, soulful, like a Renaissance painting of Saint Anthony. The hair is black and cut short and his frame is slender and delicate, like a young boy’s.
I’m not sure how to begin. I’m well aware that heroin addiction is a sensitive subject, that there is a stigma attached to being a junkie.
Why do people take heroin? I ask him.
“For different reasons,” he says, lighting his cigarette. “When I first took heroin, it was like I’d come home. You know when you’re hungry, and you have a kind of gape, inside you? It just filled it. So you say to yourself “I’ll play with this and as soon as it starts getting serious, I’ll knock it on the head.” But by the time you want to stop, it’s too late.”
There’s a feeling of peace, isn’t there, I say, when you take heroin?
“Absolutely,”he says. “Any little discomfort or inhibitions that you have are gone. Everything seemed better. Because I was always looking over my shoulder at this gape.”
Describe the gape, I say.
“It’s like a hole inside you, an emptiness. And I’d never been without it.”
Never?
‘No. I was raped, when I was six. I think that had something to do with it”
I ask about the rape, how it happened.
“ This guy down the road tied me to a chair and did it. I wasn’t that perturbed. I actually felt a little bit special. Years later, I felt bad, for feeling that. For not being appalled. That caused more anxiety than the actual rape.”
Were there things about his family background that might have contributed to becoming an addict? I ask. Christy thinks carefully and lights yet another cigarette.
‘I don’t think so, my parents didn’t even drink. But both of my grandfathers died in pubs. So they were children of alcoholics . I’ve spent years trying to analyse it and I don’t think I’ll ever get to the bottom of it.”
Stephen Rowen, the director of the Rutland Centre, in Dublin has worked with addicts for twenty five years and he admits that he doesn’t know what causes heroin addiction. “People from socially deprived backgrounds do seem to be more inclined to use heroin,” he says. “But if you eliminate poverty, you don’t eliminate the problem. Heroin addicts do seem to be of above average sensitivity and intelligence, though.”
I put it to Christy that he might be more sensitive than most people. He smiles, but there is sadness in his eyes, even when he smiles.
“I probably am,” he admits. He tells me a story about how, when he was a boy, his mother made a hat for a friend of his, but another boy’s mother hade made him a more impressive hat, with a gold paperclip on and the boy picked that one. “That destroyed me, that he had done that to my mother,” he says. “I can still feel it. And our album has been number one for two weeks, but there was one poxy review in Hot Press and that’s all I concentrate on. I think all musicians are insecure. Every day, you get up on a stage, looking for people to say you’re okay. Because you don’t feel good about yourself.”
Stephen agrees that creative people are often to be found in the Rutland Centre. He says they put it down to performance anxiety, combined with the fact that celebrities have plenty of disposable income and exceptionally easy access to drugs. Christy says that when he’s stoned, his anxieties and the sensitivity are numbed.
“Initially, you think it heightens your creativity, “ he says. “Even though I hate to say that, in case anyone reads it and thinks it might be worth trying. But then it dulls everything. Every emotion is cocooned, heroin lets nobody in. Even with sex, you can’t really come, when you’re stoned. I used to think that was great, because you would be going at it like a stud. But the wife would just say get off me, you prick!”
I ask him if he thinks poverty was also a factor, in his case. He laughs.
“ I was raised in Finglas,”he says. “saw gaffs like this one we’re in right now and we said nobody has a right to stop us from having this. And when you start to realise that the whole political and educational system is geared against you having this, that can really fuck with your head. The utter hopelessness.”
There’s a misconception that only working-class people do it, I say.
“Oh Jaysus, no. When you live in a slum, it does take away the pain of living like that. But you could be living in a gaff like this and be on your own, and that would be just as painful. Heroin cuts across sex, creed, race, everything.”
Christy no longer uses the drug. But statistically, out of the estimated sixteen thousand users in this country, only twenty per cent will recover and remain clean. So how did he quit?
“I just looked in the mirror, one day and had a moment of clarity. I saw myself, pinned, with blood pissing down my leg, abscesses all over my arse and I thought “What the fuck are you doing to yourself?’ I remember going down on my knees and saying “God, please help me, I’m fucked.” That was the start of it.
What was it like, coming off?
“The withdrawals are a nightmare. That’s a lot of the reason why people won’t stop. I had tried loads of times, to stop, but for some reason, this time, despite myself I kept running into things that were stopping me taking gear, and I stayed off it.”
Christy has to leave now, to get to RTE, and offers me a lift home. On the way, he tells me that he did have one life-changing experience, which he believes could help people with heroin addiction. Recently, he met a Su Indian shaman, who told him that he needed to stop trying to fix the hole inside him by looking outside of himself, to heroin, for a solution. Christy wasn’t impressed with this advice, initially. But the shaman changed his mind.
“He said my problem was that the chakra which governs wisdom and understanding was blocked. So he put his hand over me and I felt this rush of energy go through me. I didn’t stop smiling for three days and I didn’t take any gear at all!” I ask him if he’s going to take the shaman’s advice. He says that he’s now reading about Native American philosophy and is most definitely pursuing a more holistic approach to healing his addiction.