Brutally honest music biographies

My Crazy World by Christy Dignam

In a brutally honest and frank biography, Christy Dignam looks back at his remarkable life and his passion for music. He grew up in Finglas in North Dublin where his two passions were birds and music. In 1973 at the age of thirteen he saw David Bowie on Top of the Pops and knew he wanted to be a rock star. 

By the late 1980s Christy had formed his band Aslan. They were all set to hit the big time. Their most famous song “This Is” was number one in the charts, when suddenly everything exploded. He recounts in vivid detail how his heroin addiction spiralled out of control causing the band to sack him. The tabloid press were on his case and he owed money to drug dealers; basically his life was falling apart. The only thing that kept him alive was his family and his love of music.

Christy re-joined Aslan in 1993 and the band continued gigging and touring but he was still struggling with his addictions. By this stage he had moved on to crack cocaine and was practically a walking corpse. He went to a monastery in Bangkok where the monks treat heroin addicts. Their radical treatment works by cleansing the body as fast as possible and showing addicts they have a future. It helped him become clean.

In 2013 he was diagnosed with Amyloidosis which is a form of cancer. He is now on chemotherapy to help him deal with it. His body is in such a state that the chemotherapy nearly killed him. His immune system is so weak that an infection could kill him.

Christy has been to hell and back and now lives from one day to the next. It is a miracle that he is alive at all. This book is a written record of the crazy world that Christy has lived in for the last 60 years. It is an excellent read and I would heartily recommend it. 

Bruised Never Broken by Phil Coulter

In this autobiography Phil Coulter takes us on an amazing musical journey  - from growing up in Derry in the 1950s, moving to London, winning the Eurovision Song Contest with Puppet on a String, and having even more success with his Classic Tranquillity records.

His life has been shaped by many different events; he was able to go to Queens University because he benefited from the British educational reforms of the 1940s. He left Queens without finishing his degree, but by this stage he had already written his first hit and London was calling.

Music has been his inspiration and his salvation. It enabled him to live a fulfilling life and gave him solace and comfort as he coped with personal and family tragedies that could have easily destroyed him.

As he says in the book, "Music has saved my life on so many different levels”.

His most famous song is The Town I Loved So Well. It is both a tribute to his native city and a lament. It is the type of song which any emigrant can relate to, its stirring emotional lyrics are inspired by growing up in the troubled city of Derry.

His his love-hate relationship with his hometown is a constant theme throughout the book. In a recent interview he was asked what his greatest achievement in the music business was to date - his response - that he was still in the music business after 55 years.

This book is a poignant record of those years.

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Submitted by John G. in Inchicore Library.