Listen to Damien Dempsey

In the right hands, the bodhran and the bouzouki can still inflame the senses, and sometimes the oldest traditions can be entrusted to the care of younger generations. Irish folk music has reeled around the revolving door of popular approval numerous times in the past few decades. Now it’s rising again, like a rose through the concrete sprawl, tended by the immediate descendants of such frontiersmen as Christy Moore and Shane MacGowan.

In Dundalk, the acoustic poet Jinx Lennon wears the colours of his folk-punk heritage with pride. In Cork, John Spillane melds local and wider influences to win audiences in both Gaelic and English. County Kerry’s Pauline Scanlon has also been helping to take Irish folk back home, sometimes singing with Sharon Shannon, whose own long-established multiple musical dialects recently received rare small-screen billing. The honorary Irishman Steve Earle’s The Galway Girl, featuring and co-credited with Shannon, was granted the uncommon mainstream affirmation of being chosen to soundtrack the latest Magners cider commercial. The result, earlier this month, was that enough viewers were moved to buy the song as a download that Shannon gained her first ever showing on the lower rungs of the singles chart.

That was another reminder of the huge potential audience for the traditional sound of Ireland. Of course, it’s a door that’s opened more easily by a heavyweight commercial campaign, or the occasional photogenic phenomenon such as Riverdance or even the Corr family. But there are other ways of picking the lock.

Even after Damien Dempsey survived the gang fights and joyride culture of his upbringing in Donaghmede in north Dublin, he was always assumed to be heading, like his two older brothers, for a job in the motor trade. But after building a songwriting and performance career by the bootstraps, and 11 years after he first recorded, he finds himself as a soft-spoken bellwether of Ireland’s restored pride in its own sound, himself now endorsed by Moore and MacGowan, as well as Bono, Sinead O’Connor and Morrissey.

Dempsey had a top-20 hit single in Ireland in 1997, the short-term recognition of which was outweighed by a longer search for credibility. That arrived in 2000, when his first album was released and noticed by the very people he’d hoped it would be. It was called They Don’t Teach This Shit in School. “Shane had my album playing on a jukebox in New York and apparently fell in love with it,” recalls Dempsey. “Then he came to play in a friend of mine’s place in Dublin — great gig — and I fought my way backstage and tried to give him the CD. I always thought he’d like it and I thought Sinead would like it, so I got it to him and thought, ‘He’s going to lose that.’

“I was walking out the door and he says, ‘Oi, Dempsey, come back you f***ing bastard. I love this album.’ So I went on the piss with him and woke up on the ground at eight o’clock in the morning, the cleaning lady with a vacuum cleaner hitting me over the head going, ‘Get up! Get out, you loser.’ ”

Dempsey surely deserves waves of admiration even for living to tell the tale of a drinking session with MacGowan. But if this business offers endless opportunities to be glib about artists rising from adversity, Dempsey’s achievement in lifting himself out of the numbing stasis of Dublin in the mid-1980s was considerable.

“There was a big recession and very little work around,” he says, “so there were a lot of young men just doing nothing except fighting. A lot of the violence was boredom. A lot of the fellas in the neighbourhood were joyriding and a good few of them were killed.Then the drugs came along, and that went crazy. I had music from the age of 12, so I was lucky, but I still got into trouble in my teens. The house was a bit crazy because the mother had left, so there was no-one to keep you in check.

“It was just thousands of houses stuck out there, and no amenities, no youth clubs, maybe one boxing club. I did a bit of that, which kept me out of trouble for a while. I had the long hair and I was into Thin Lizzy and I was a real soft target for the skinheads, but I whacked a few of them and then they left you alone.”

He went on to record with O’Connor, who says, “I don’t think there’s ever been anyone like him”; while Moore has praised him for using his own language and “not looking to Hollywood for his vernacular”.

“Christy’s a great role model. He’s a big character and he cares for people,” says Dempsey. “I think they like that I stuck to my guns and probably sacrificed some of the commercial success I could have had. People told me early on, ‘Stop singing like that, you’ll go nowhere, you sound too Irish.’ I don’t know how they wanted me to sound. I’m not American, I’m not English.”

But after four original albums, Dempsey’s new release sends word that he is determined to remain unpredictable and that the song fabric he grew up in is strong indeed. The Rocky Road features John Sheahan and Barney McKenna of the Dubliners, as well as Sharon Shannon on accordion, and is Dempsey’s affectionate assemblage of such ancestral tunes as The Rocky Road to Dublin, The Foggy Dew and The Twang Man. They’re augmented by pretty updates of MacGowan’s A Rainy Night in Soho and Ewan MacColl’s Schooldays Over.

“When I was growing up,” says Dempsey, “the Dubliners were still big — the Pogues were kicking off \ the Chieftains and Christy. But house music came in, and gangsta rap, and traditional music and folk got pushed aside. A lot of kids haven’t a clue it was ever there, so I feel a duty to pass it on to them, because it was passed on to me.”

Perhaps he can do for Irish musical history what television and film have lately done for a swathe of classic English literature. “These songs are like little snippets of history, a true history,” he says. “A lot of them are harder than gangsta rap. There’s sex and debauchery and murder and fighting and drinking and immigration. It’s all there.” Dempsey is the man to lift it off the page and into our imagination.

The Rocky Road is out now on IRL. The Galway Girl — The Best of Sharon Shannon is out now

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