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in the first place. Again, that cycle of despair
that he lived with for years and the lack of hope, the lack of economic stability. It took me a long time to see the drugs issue in the first place and it took me longer again to try and make sense of what brought people down that path, whether it was building an addiction or trying to build a life from the sale and distribution of drugs, all extremely tragic. “I wouldn’t be a big crier and when I lost my best mate, I went very cold and I think the meds that I take probably quell it a bit. The first time I watched the doc, I did cry and cried a lot because when I was watching it I saw one of my best friends in the crowd singing his heart out and that show would have been end of December 2019 and end of November his younger brother was shot.” Balfe goes on to talk about some personal details concerning this which are best kept off the record. He does relate how seeing his mate with his “arm around a pal, feeling freedom and ecstasy, made me not worry about him for the first time in a long time.” He even put on some Jackson C Frank that night such was the power of the documentary. DD: “The ‘80s were tougher than now but there was fuck all suicides. I wonder if there was still a bit of faith there? It all broke down in the ‘90s with the church scandals and people went atheist. I can’t remember any suicides in the ‘80s even if it was dog rough. Maybe the drugs weren’t around then.” We talk about the importance of community and getting kids into sports and the arts before Dempsey crumples the paper and asks his next question. DD: “You’re obviously an emphatic, sensitive, ‘aul soul brother, but I have a hunch that you feel the pain of the world more than most of those around you. Have you ever tried to dull that pain with the dangerous tools that people use to do this? Or was writing the songs enough?” DB: “I’d have the on-and-off pains of the drink that gets its claws into me sometimes. I’m on a current self-imposed sabbatical at the moment. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been able to spot when it’s getting a bit much, but there was a strong long period, after I lost me best mate (the mate he refers to is Paul Curran, the poet who died in 2018 and to whom the album is dedicated to). There was two to three months where I didn’t drink at all because I know that this formula doesn’t work.” Dempsey talks about self-preservation, the “survival mechanism kicking in” and how the worst thing you can do is “go on the bottle.” DB: “I thought it was grand, because it was at first, but I did turn the tap on then and I felt relief, I felt total relief. I felt better but that didn’t last and that continued, maybe it took a higher and higher level and ultimately I was seeking total oblivion day in and day out and was going to work drunk on the bus. “It drained me of everything else, it numbs you. I definitely wasn’t very creative at that time. Maybe I had sparks and wrote a few little bits but there was no excitement and no sense of honesty. I knew I was lying to myself going, ‘This is great, I’m out every night talking to girls.’ “It was because there was an unbelievable weight of pain and if you settle into it, it can eat you alive. I’ll be also quite honest and say there’s a part of me that thinks I wouldn’t do it different again, because there’s a part of me that thinks I needed to seek that oblivion, I needed to numb myself. I know that there’s much, much, better ways to deal and cope with that pain. I was still training and kickboxing. Sometimes I think I don’t know how I’d have been able to survive if I didn’t numb myself for that long…it got very dangerous towards the end and relationships fell apart, the terror of getting up and knowing it’s got its claws into you. And it took me a long time to be able to break away from that and it was very traditional methods that did let me break away from that. It wasn’t the singing and making music because I was still several steps away from that. It was traditional therapy, it was trying to break away from the alcohol and reestablish the connection of love in my relationships and all of those things freed up whatever it was that I needed inside me to get the creative activity flowing again. And it wasn’t until that happened that I actually started to exorcise and loose some of that pain instead of just pushing it down and pushing it down, and it gets harder to push down each day, so you need more to push it down. You’re obviously an emphatic sensitive ‘aul soul brother, but I have a hunch that you feel the pain of the world more than most of those around you? 20