Damo Gives Me Hope…
Occasional Albums Thing 031 - Damien Dempsey “Shots”
If you’ve been with me for a while here you’ll very likely know how I feel about Damien Dempsey. Although the records I’ve been able to write about have been few and far between and of variable quality. Due to the time through which Damo (as his fans know him) has been recording almost all of his albums were CD only releases, those were the times we were in. But 2 years ago his 2nd album “Seize The Day” got a 20th Anniversary vinyl release and now the same honour has been bestowed upon 3rd album “Shots”.
When I first heard “Seize The Day” it took me a short time to “get it”, but when I did it was like being run over by a train. By the time ”Shots” was released we’d travelled to Ireland to see him live, and we were literally gagging to hear this new record. That in itself can be a good and bad thing. Your eagerness to immerse yourself in these new songs can weigh them down with a burden of expectancy that they may never live up to. So what did Damo give us to kick off ?
We sing, sing all our cares away,
We'll live, to love another day…
We grow strong, from it all,
We grow strong, or we fall…We grow Strong…
Sung in communion with other acolytes at one of his gigs “Sing All Our Cares Away” is a joyous hymn to human indefatigability. It's another of those character songs I'm a sucker for, the verses populated by Mary who likes a drink a little too much, Michael who is unemployed and depressed, Stevie who is angry about everything and violent, single mother Rita and her smiling daughter, former junkie Joey who’s trying hard to stay clean and Maggie, in a wheelchair after a crash while joyriding but still smiling and giving Damo the chance to rhyme the words boil and smile as only an Irishman could. And after all those grim stories Damo lifts us with the power of that chorus...and that’s just the first song !
I know fans of Damo’s that would argue that “Shots” is his best album. I wouldn’t shoot them down for that but I could also make a case for his best being the one before this (“Seize The Day” https://www.whiterabbitrecords.co.uk/blog/read_203876/2023-albums-thing-107-damien-dempsey-seize-the-day.html) or either of the two that followed it (“To Hell Or Barbados” and “Almighty Love” neither of which are (yet) available in the vinyl LP format). It really was an astonishing run of 4 albums and many of the songs from “Shots” still make up much of Damien’s legendary live sets. The subjects dealt with in the songs are very much those he addressed on “Seize The Day”, drugs, alcohol, sectarian attitudes and violence, but shining through it all there is always positivity and hope. As the grafitti’ed wall in Dublin once said “Damien Dempsey gives me HOPE”.
“St Patrick’s Day” discusses very Irish problems in the verses, Industrial School, the Black & Tans and the Irish diaspora being forced on Irish people due to poverty, famine and civil war as much as something done willingly. But the chorus then revels in the achievements of that disapora who then “…marched in Amerikay…danced down Cricklewood way…sang around Botany Bay”.
Each side ends then begins with songs that you will hear in every Damo live set. Side ones “Party On” lays out the pleasures and dangers of recreational drugs, the people you meet and the damage the drugs can do, all wrapped up in Uilleann Pipes and ultimately a band crashing in to a devastating ending. But then you hit one of those huge, communal terrace chant choruses that sees a positive outcome until you get to the but…the junkie’s curse…
I'm giving it up I swear in the New Year...
No more of that for me, you'll see...
I'm going to be going straight I can't wait,
Until this year is gone, party on…
Side two’s “Colony” is an Irish history lesson wrapped up in a plea for oppressed people’s around the world and a rage against Colonialism and religion all delivered in just over 7 minutes. There’s a lot of words in this song, a lot to take in and again at the end the payoff is one of positivity and hope and good advices. From around 3 minutes in Damo goes off on a spoken section decrying the evils of the colonial nations (“You came from Germany, from France, from England and from Spain, From Belgium, Holland, Portugal, You all done much the same”) and the people's they damaged but ending on this
But if you've any kind of mind,
You'll see that all human kind,
Are the children of this earth,
And your hate for them will chew you up and spit you out
that last line sung back at the singer by an entire audience is spine tingling.
Final song “Spraypaint Backalley” feels like a dreamy warm afternoon’s look back at younger (sometimes) simpler times. It finds the beauty in the deprived world the narrator is growing up in, losing himself in cheap cider and hashish, the image of his punchbag in the shed taking “some heavy shots” giving the album its title. There’s a line in the second verse, “Watch my father and my brother, fixing old cars”, on which Damo subtly shifts the vocal melody and the song begins to lift. It ends on Oscar Wilde’s famous line “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” from the play “Lady Windermere's Fan”…someone else’s words but there is that sense of hope again.
In my world Damien Dempsey stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the great songwriters in my lifetime, Weller, Strummer, Bowie, Springsteen, my brother, Ian Prowse, Jason Isbell, he’s that good and I’d urge anyone to listen to him or go see him play.
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