TD 1
You have to focus. If you’re singing you have to
remember the next line and try and stay in time and nearly in key. Music and singing are two of the few spiritual entities in the physical world. Scientists have realised now that if you sing to water and put it under a microscope, there are changes in the molecular structure. It becomes all crystallised and beautiful. I sing to the water at home (he chuckles) and we’re mostly made up of water. Communal singing is really good for people and goes way back into our history, singsongs, it’s on Brendan. Sing all your troubles away, singsongs in all the houses in Donaghmede is what I remember as a child. I always felt safe at these, there was never any trouble. You were happy, it was magic. I grew up in a singsong house and I just wanted to carry that on to the venues, get everyone singing together. The vibration is just incredible, it puts everyone on a good frequency and you’re still high the next day, still buzzing. That’s what I try to do with the music.” This brings us on to the live experience, something which Balfe has yet to encounter under For Those I Love. In spite of the acclaimed album being released in March, the pandemic put paid to live shows around it. Finally they are looming on the horizon with a tour and a Dublin date in the Olympia in November. DB: “I parked it until a week and a half ago and I haven’t been able to sleep for the past week and a half thinking about it. I’m a bit worried knowing that I am going to go into that room and the songs I am going to sing have that emotional weight and resonance and knowing that everyone else in the room is bringing own history and relating to those songs with their own lost people in their minds and in their hearts. I’m nervous and worried about what that could do to me and do to them, understanding that there is this responsibility there and it was something I tried to take on board when I was making the music, but that changes a little bit when it comes to playing it in a live setting, to make sure that the people who leave that room don’t leave with a greater weight than they came in with. I think that’s something that feels very evident in the documentary, the cycle that it goes through very much hit that harsh middle crescendo and there’s a lot of pain in that room but when you finish things off and you’re gone and everybody is still singing Love Yourself Today, I feel you understood that sense of responsibility and left them lighter.” then. There were no killings when I was growing up, you’d get your nose or jaw broken or your teeth knocked in, but nobody died. Cocaine brought the guns and so much violence. You can do terrible things on cocaine.” He wonders if Balfe was aware of this growing up. DD: “Just get them all crying in the middle of the gig and then uplift it at the end.” DB: “That’s the formula?” DD: “Get them crying and singing at the end. I love crying, you get a great release after crying. It must be the endorphins released after it.” This brings us on to the damage inflicted by not being in touch with your emotions and the legacy of it for generations of men. DD: “A lot of the men in Donaghmede would have been beaten by their fathers or the Christian Brothers, the cycle of violence… There was so much fighting around Donaghmede when I was younger, so many scraps. By the time David came on the scene, cocaine had burst on the scene and it became murders DB: “The first one (murder) I specifically remember when I was seven, on my road. When I asked my parents they just said someone owed money, it was never related back to tangible things. Someone was killed and left on my road. I don’t think I understood it was coming from the same cycle of violence and death and despair, it took me until I was a lot older. The first time I ever left my road, Keith Cox lived at the end of the road, we had bikes and he brought me around the corner because two nights earlier a chap had hung himself with a school tie, that was my first time leaving the house. I went back and told my ma, god bless my ma and da, they’re amazing, but they didn’t respond to me faced with the idea of a suicide, but said, ‘You’re not supposed to go off the fucking road, what were you doing going off the road?’ One of the first experiences of my geography opening up was not a positive one. “Over the years, that grew a little bit more and I got to see more peripheral deaths, it became a bit more apparent. When I was in school, maybe fourth year, when a friend from class was killed in a drugs related death, that was the first time we had a verbal acceptance of the cause. And then it took years again then for us to understand what it could have been that pushed him or sent him down that avenue 19