James Prime dead: Deacon Blue star dies aged 64
The keyboard player and co-founder of the legendary rock band was recently rushed to hospital after falling seriously ill.
5
James Prime has died at the age of 64
Credit: Getty
5
Deacon Blue announced James' death on social media
5
Deacon Blue were formed in 1985 and have huge hits including Dignity
The musician passed away following a "short struggle" with cancer.
Deacon Blue announced James' death on social media this afternoon.
The post read: "We announce with great sadness that our brother, James Prime, passed away this morning after a short struggle with cancer.
"Thank you so much for the messages of support that you shared over the last two weeks, they meant so much to Jim, his family and us. With love, Deacon Blue."
The band were formed in 1985 and comprises Ricky Ross, Lorraine McIntosh, James Prime, Dougie Vipond, Gregor Philp and Lewis Gordon.
They are famed for a string of hits including Dignity, Chocolate Girl and Loaded.
Deacon Blue are set to go on tour later this year for their Great Western Road Trip.
The UK-wide tour kicks off in Liverpool on September 19.
Most read in Music
Deacon Blue will play Wembley Arena for the first time since 1990, and finish with two hometown shows at Glasgow's OVO Hydro on Friday 10 and Saturday, October 11.
Keyboardist James had previously given the group his blessing for them to continue without him while he was ill.
The band stated at the time: "We spoke to Jim yesterday about Deacon Blue's plans for the rest of the year, and he encouraged us to continue with love in our hearts and with his full blessing that the shows go ahead, even if it means replacing the irreplaceable James Miller Prime for the time being."
Outside of the band, he was also a lecturer in Commercial Music at the University of the West of Scotland.
Tributes have since flooded in from musicians and fans following the devastating news of his death.
Simple Minds bass player Ged Grimes said: "I am so shocked to hear the news of my friend Jim's passing.
"Not only was Jim a superb musician but his wit and huge personality were legendary.
"We had so many great times together when I was a member of Deacon Blue and my heart goes out to Jim's family and all my pals in the band. Love ya, Jim. RIP."
5
Deacon Blue are set to go on tour later this year
Credit: PA:Press Association
5
James Prime was also a lecturer in Commercial Music at the University of the West of Scotland
Credit: Garry F McHarg FOCAL Scotland
Former River City star Tom Urie wrote: "Such sad news. Jim was an incredible musician and a huge influence.
"I got to work with him once - for a week. He did a project with Horse and I at the Concert Hall. I was in awe of him.
"He had a dry sense of humour that was right up my street, and his piano work with Deacon Blue basically soundtracked the late 80s and beyond.
"Listen to the soaring piano bridge on Dignity - takes your breath away. Love to all who knew and loved him."
A fan added: "So sorry to read this but also thank you for the wonderful times recording and playing live with Deacon Blue.
Read more on the Irish Sun
"Your contribution to music will live on."
Another commented: "Devastated to hear this, not only a great musician but also a great lecturer that shared so much of his music knowledge with so many students."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose: One of the most thought-provoking writers working today
Women in Dark Times Author : Jacqueline Rose ISBN-13 : 9781804271711 Publisher : Fitzcarraldo Editions Guideline Price : £14.99 Jacqueline Rose's book, Women in Dark Times, claims to be about women who 'negotiate the perils of their lives' to say 'something urgent about feminism today'. Even without Trump's presidency (the preface is dated 'November 2024″), one seemingly doesn't have to look far for regressive or ultra-conservative policies being exacted on women's rights (or lack of). The book, originally published in 2014, comes with a new preface, in which Rose writes, '[s]urely, all dark times are dark for women? Today, woefully, I have to acknowledge the truth of that statement.' She might be forgiven for her pessimism. However, acknowledging truths, and difficult ones at that, we already know is in this psychoanalytically inspired writer's wheelhouse. From Rosa Luxembourg, to Marilyn Monroe, to a number of women killed by their fathers in modern day 'honour killings', to the artists Charlotte Salomon, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana and Thérèse Oulton, Rose's eclectic selection of women show us how to acknowledge other difficult truths about the patriarchy. Rose fills her book with evidence of both the public and private thoughts of the women she writes about. We're enlivened by Marilyn Monroe's deeply analytical mind, and troubled by the painter Charlotte Salomon's tragic, internal psychological conflict (both her mother and grandmother took their own lives before Salomon killed her own grandfather. She was then murdered, five months pregnant, in Auschwitz). READ MORE Either in their life or work, they all seem to be women who were on the borders of death or sanity. For Rose, proximity to these boundaries often compel, what she calls, 'the subterranean aspects of history and the human mind'. It's a slightly unwieldy book due to the varied roles and lives her subjects had. Rose's central thesis also might seem a little obscure to those not schooled in psychoanalysis or feminist theory. I wouldn't let this put you off, though, because Rose is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking writers working today. Women in Dark Times represents a more accessible way into the work of someone writing about challenging topics in a way that challenges you to think differently. Either way, it will make you want to read more about the women she writes about (and Rose I hope), which surely is the point anyway?
Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
Alison Spittle: ‘I'm treated more like a human being now I've lost weight'
Alison Spittle is so competitive, she's had to apologise to people after board games. It's one of her worst traits, but she's also 'kind of proud of it' and knows that 'if you're not competitive, you don't win as much'. When she won the trophy on quiz show Pointless Celebrities , her family took pictures of her with it 'like it was the Sam Maguire'. An official BBC clip shows Spittle explaining she's a superfan, then screaming as one of her early-round answers is revealed to be pointless (the best outcome). Her elation is pure. But the episode, which aired in January, was filmed two years earlier, and Spittle now feels deeply protective of the person she was then, which is to say the same person, only 'significantly fatter'. READ MORE 'When Pointless came out, I watched it with people who were like: 'Oh my god, you are half the size you were then, look at you there.' And I'm looking at myself and I'm thinking, 'That was the happiest day of my life.'' What she regretted about her appearance on the show was that she and fellow comedian Fern Brady didn't win the elusive charity jackpot, not her size. Now the feelings elicited by this encounter with her past self are at the crux of Spittle's new stand-up show, BIG, which comes to the Dublin Fringe Festival in September after its current, month-long run in Edinburgh. 'I really don't like the idea of denouncing myself,' she says. 'I liked the person I was. I did, and I know I f**king did, and that's the annoying thing about losing weight. You're expected to denounce the person you were.' Being a 'public fat person' has taught her that there are others who will do the denouncing for her anyway and she's sad that poster rules at the Edinburgh fringe mean she couldn't use her original title: Fat Bitch. Alison Spittle was eight when her family settled in Ballymore, Co Westmeath. Photograph: Karla Gowlett 'If I have a bad interaction with a stranger, there's always a 'fat bitch' in it, and sometimes I see it as a trophy. Like, 'You've resorted to that, I've won'.' Whenever she went on television, the online comments would either be women – mostly thin women – declaring 'go girl, you're an inspiration', or they would be men harassing her by demanding to know what she was putting on her bread and accusing her of glorifying obesity simply by being on TV. 'When I got messages like that I would wake up over a toaster and be like, 'Little do they know, the more they attack, the bigger I become'.' In the show, she talks about how she started 'roaring and shouting' at one man who called her a fat bitch on a train, embarrassing him in front of other passengers. He hadn't been anticipating a confrontation. 'He thought he could just dismiss me with 'fat bitch',' she says. ''Fat bitch' is like 'goodbye' for a lot of people.' The worst part about losing weight is noticing how strangers are nicer to her: 'People treat me more like a human being now, which is messed up.' A lot of thin people who have a go at me about being fat, they think they're better than me She never wanted to change for the benefit of 'a**holes' who would only afford her dignity if she was a certain weight. 'People would keep telling me I was not conventionally attractive, and, like, it wasn't an interest of mine to be conventionally attractive. So that was kind of my process. My process? I don't know, I've been fat since I was eight years old.' She hung on to an 'element of defiance', she thinks, in order to reject the validation of the sexist, classist comedy culture she came of age in – one in which women were there to laugh, not make others laugh. 'That's what I loved about being on telly. Men would get angry with me because they weren't being titillated. Their erection wasn't being catered for on mainstream TV.' Recently she was crying on the couch to a fat female friend about the emotional fallout of weight loss. 'She goes to me, 'I hate to break it to you, Alison, but you're still fat'. And I said, 'Thank you'. I was delighted.' But she has lost a lot – with the aid of Mounjaro injections – since the trigger of a health crisis. She contracted cellulitis, which led to septicaemia, hospitalising her. 'Ireland's too small a country to have a women's weekly gossip magazine.' Photograph: Karla Gowlett 'The doctors were like, 'You do have to lose weight now'. And when you're attached to a drip and you're not able to move for weeks, you're like, 'Okay, fair enough, yeah'.' Our interview takes place over a pot of late-afternoon tea in the top-floor bar of the Aloft hotel in Dublin 8. It's her first caffeine on a day that has so far involved a missed flight, rebooking drama and two podcast recordings and will end with a gig at Iveagh Gardens. 'It's been a mad one, a mad one!' She's snacking on popcorn – 'which is funny' – but only because she's hungry. Before, her eating would go beyond hunger, beyond comfort; she would eat until she was uncomfortable. 'I would eat until I couldn't feel anything any more, because I didn't like feeling the way I felt about stuff, so the feeling of being overly full overtook everything else. It was like a comfort blanket, an anxiety blanket.' [ Alison Spittle's Spotify playlist: 'I love Kanye. He's an idiot, but I'm overwhelmed by his talent' Opens in new window ] Mounjaro has suppressed her appetite, meaning food is just fuel now, and she does sometimes miss the dopamine aspect. 'It's like doing your laundry, you're not eating for pleasure any more.' She has no time for celebrities who 'suddenly found willpower' just as medicines such as Ozempic and Mounjaro came to the fore. 'They go, 'Oh, it's the power of walking'. You're on the jabs, just say you're on the jabs,' she says. 'I tried losing weight without the jabs and couldn't do it, so I'm on the jabs, and if you are the same, you shouldn't feel ashamed. 'This whole idea of attaching morality to the size of your body absolutely disgusts me and now the idea of morality attached to the way you lose weight as well, it makes me so, so angry.' She knows she has a 'full-on addiction to food', and it's still there, unfixed, even if the self-injections are preventing her from acting upon it, but she had to sort her health out before it got any worse, she says, and she's scathing about people who insist weight should be lost the 'natural' way. 'They're just telling a fat person they should be in pain as punishment for being fat in the first place. Why do they want that off a person? It's very Calvinist or something. It's very Opus Dei, like whipping yourself on the back. I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that for you. I don't you owe you pain.' BIG is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, September 16th-20th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival. Photograph: Karla Gowlett It's not hard to understand why Spittle was compelled to devote a show to this subject yet is wary of the personal risk it carries. 'It is very vulnerable putting your wares on display and saying, 'Consume this, review this!' I'm very scared about that aspect,' she says. 'Even when I'm talking to you, I can feel myself getting animated. I can feel myself get emotional about stuff, and that's only with us chatting.' There are, she stresses, 'loads of jokes' in the show. Our conversation is joyously soundtracked by the bar's penchant for Noughties classics. Identifying them – which music fan and trivia-master Spittle can do within seconds – becomes her occasional side-quest as she tries to explain how she feels. Her sense is that stand-up is the 'one and only medium' where she can truly do that. People mistake her choice of 'loud' clothes for confidence, but she doesn't feel confident most of the time; she just likes colour. With stand-up, that's when she's at her most powerful. She has the microphone, she has the control. 'I can never get across how I feel about stuff, properly, unless it's through stand-up.' It would be mad to say I'm happy with my life, because I don't think anybody is happy with their life She has 'built a whole career', she tells me, out of being the funny friend. Born in London in June 1989, Spittle moved around a lot when she was kid, including a nine-month spell in Germany, as her father, a builder, sought work. It meant she was never the 'established friend' in a friend group, which prompted the discovery that making people laugh was the quickest way to befriend them. 'A lot of thin people who have a go at me about being fat, they think they're better than me, but the thing is I had to develop a personality when I was younger. 'They're f**ked! They have absolutely nothing now. And I feel sorry for them, because there's going to be so many fat people getting thinner, they won't know what to do with themselves.' She was eight when her family – she has four siblings – settled in Ballymore, Co Westmeath, where there was 'a definite pecking order' on her council estate. Being 'fat and eccentric' was her way of removing herself from it. To be 'valuable', she became 'the nice one, the people-pleaser'. She felt she didn't have the option of any other identity. [ 'My motto for life is, be sound' Opens in new window ] She 'fecked up' her Leaving Cert, but this turned out to be serendipitous. During a media course at Ballyfermot College she did work experience at Athlone-based iRadio, where comedian Bernard O'Shea was DJing. He told her she should try stand-up and booked her a gig, giving her two weeks to prepare. 'He said do your funniest joke at the start, so people trust you, and do your second-funniest joke at the end, so that's what I did, and I loved it. I had this massive rush coming off stage. I had so much adrenaline, I felt like I was in love.' 'So I moved to Dublin then, and ... Aw, I love this song! Sorry. It's Nelly Furtado, Turn Off the Light!' In Dublin, not far from the Noughties-loving bar where we meet, Spittle rented a box room for a cheap rent from a non-gouging landlord, making it possible for her to live in the city while she performed stand-up and wrote plays. After encouragement from a producer who saw her at the International Bar, she and her boyfriend, Simon Mulholland, wrote a script for what became Nowhere Fast , a sitcom that aired for one season on RTÉ in 2017. 'I was a baba. A little baba. I had people coming up saying, 'Oh my god, you're making this and you're this age'. When you're young, you don't realise that you're young. Nobody's going to say that to me now!' In 2018 she and Mulholland moved to London, from where she has developed her stand-up career and scratched her old radio itch through podcasting. A BBC-commissioned podcast, Wheel of Misfortune – she presented it first with 'best pal' Brady, then with 'icon' Kerry Katona – means people in the UK sometimes recognise her when they hear her voice. It's over now, but she has a new one called Magazine Party, where she and co-host Poppy Hillstead dissect the wild stories contained in That's Life!-style magazines and compile their own 'Women's Bleakly'. 'Ireland's too small a country to have a women's weekly gossip magazine. You'd read a story that goes, 'I slept with the ghost of my husband,' and you'd be like, 'That's Mary from down the road, I knew that'.' [ Alison Spittle's Christmas: I'll explode if I get another bath bomb Opens in new window ] She would 'totally love' to emulate Brady and star in a series of Channel 4's comedy gameshow Taskmaster – 'I would kick a child to get on Taskmaster' – but Pointless Celebrities hasn't been the only TV outlet for her competitive spirit. She also flew to Glasgow to film five episodes of Richard Osman's House of Games in one day. 'I fell down the stairs at one point, out of excitement, and made my shin bleed. We had to pause filming for 10 minutes while we found another pair of tights for me.' Swooning reviews for BIG have since poured in, but as we speak she's still a week away from the start of Edinburgh and so conscious of her desire to do her show justice, she's waking up every morning with a pain in her chest telling her to get out her Post-it notes and work on finessing it. [ Women in comedy: 'We're not allowed to be okay... It has to be good' Opens in new window ] 'My problem is structure. I have several bits of the puzzle that I'm still working out now, and I'm moving house as well, so it's ... Dido, Thank You.' We listen to the mildly depressive first verse of the singer's 2000 hit. 'Very chill. Very pre-September 11th, an innocent time,' is her verdict. She wasn't 'a learned scholar of the craft' of stand-up. Her approach used to be 'just be as funny as possible with what you can remember'. Being around other comedians, and their love for the art of comedy, has inspired her to distil what she wants to say into a narrative and hone her onstage persona. 'My persona is I am becoming less of a people-pleaser, and I think I need to become even less people-pleasey, because it doesn't do my comedy any favours. Likeability can only get you so far.' I compliment her on a photo shoot for BIG in which her head emerges from a triangular cloud of multicoloured netting. She made it herself by ripping apart shower puffs and attaching them to a bridal petticoat using a stapler and hot glue. 'There is a part of me that just wishes everyone was like a floating head,' she says. She sings along to Kids by MGMT as she checks what time she's meant to be at Iveagh Gardens, then we talk more about her show – her walk-on playlist will be entirely women artists who have been labelled fat – before leaving the bar. The hotel wasn't open in her Dublin 8 days, though as we look down Mill Street, she gets a nostalgic thrill when she sees one stretch of wall is still home to the painted outline of a bear asking for a hug. 'It would be mad to say I'm happy with my life, because I don't think anybody is happy with their life,' she had said in the bar. 'But I really like the turns my life has taken. I couldn't really imagine it happening before.' Alison Spittle's show BIG is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, September 16th-20th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2025. Details at .
Irish Times
13 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘I would never, ever begrudge somebody for wanting to get out of Ireland'
David Balfe is hard to get hold of. He has switched off notifications on his phone and checks his messaging apps only infrequently. 'It's really f**king hard to do,' he says. It's an act of self-preservation. In the messages, which are often beautifully written, and can amount to miniature novels, he says, people tell the musician how he has changed their lives. He has received thousands, and the flow never stops. 'I wouldn't be here if I hadn't heard your music,' many say. The messages reassure Balfe that he's on the right path, but in some ways the weight is unbearable. Fame has also taken its toll on him. In 2018 Balfe's best friend and fellow musician Paul Curran died by suicide. In the aftermath he compiled some electronic beats he had been working on, full of samples and unique in character, and added spoken-word lyrics. READ MORE What began as a small release intended for his friends and family, under the name For Those I Love, quickly found a home in the hearts of strangers who discovered his music online. Later, when the September label picked it up for an official release, in 2021, he became a star, in his own quiet, unassuming way. For anybody also going through grief, the self-titled album feels like a tight hug, articulating vulnerability as few others have done in this type of music. Balfe was on stage at a festival in Belgium the night before we meet, contributing a song to a set by the Welsh electronic duo Overmono. It's a remix of I Have a Love, the standout song from that first album. [ For Those I Love review: A stark reflection of grief and pain in wake of suicide Opens in new window ] 'There are strangers wailing and coming back to life again as you play the song,' he says. 'I had to go behind the stage last night to take a breather and have a bit of a cry and text my partner.' There's a reason why he doesn't perform very often, he says. 'I have never played that song, be it in my own shows or with Overmono, without seeing pockets of people who are clearly there together grieving somebody,' says the musician, who also performed the track with Overmono at this year's Glastonbury festival. 'You can see pockets of five or six people all holding each other together. Sometimes it's just emotional celebration of what I imagine to be somebody's life.' Balfe is about to release his second album, Carving the Stone. It's a hot summer's day, and we're on his home turf, in north Dublin, to walk around Coolock and Donaghmede, places he brings to life in his music. Dressed head to toe in black, he is warm and gregarious, a far cry from the grief-stricken poet we encounter in his art. We head for a pedestrian motorway underpass where he would come with friends in his early 20s; for some soccer pitches he once scored goals on; for the Church of the Holy Trinity, which he says teenagers would climb as a rite of passage; and Kay's Kitchen at Donaghmede Shopping Centre, a formative space for Balfe when he was on the cusp of adulthood. He orders coffee and orange juice, and we find a seat. For Those I Love: David Balfe at Kay's Kitchen in Donaghmede Shopping Centre. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien For Those I Love: the playing pitches of David Balfe's youth. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Photograph: Bryan O'Brien When he's chatting Balfe is free-flowing and personable, but every word becomes deliberate, almost surgically precise, when he's talking about something important, or sensitive. Seconds pass between some of his words when he's remembering Curran, for example. There's still pain here, and a lot of love. 'I've tried to be very, very particular with this new record, not to revisit the concepts of the first,' he says. 'Partially because I just can't – my soul doesn't have it in it any more ... With that said, if anybody asks me to talk about Paul it's with utter joy I remember him. For Those I Love: David Balfe. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien 'I don't think it would be right to pass up an opportunity to say he was a remarkably beautiful person and incredibly sturdy friend, and he had a fascinating intelligence and hunger for knowledge ... The best art that I ever made, be it music or film, was made very closely in tandem with Paul.' If Balfe's first album was an ode to Curran and to his friends and family, Carving the Stone feels closer to a rallying call against a breakdown of the social contract in Ireland. The array of topics Balfe broaches is dizzying – cultural strangulation, emigration, far-right politics, technofeudalism, boredom, alienation, mental health – yet the core of the record remains the sense of love and grief that permeates all his work. On the track No Scheme he laments a Dublin he scarcely recognises any more, 'a city that's lost its shape, held together by surveillance and vapes with some distant memory of a better past ... Now I'm reading comment-section politics from genocidal hollow pricks. I'm sick. Get me out of here, please.' He calls on the listener to 'seize the means of chronic boredom from the bourgeoisie'. 'This city needs a saviour,' he declares. What kind of saviour, he admits now, he doesn't know; his plea is driven by a desire for a simple solution, even though he knows it can be anything but. His memories of the motorway underpass come from another era, another way of living. 'There's something really magical about feeling like you know somewhere entirely inside out, and then finding a new addition to your life within that space, within the same geography you've walked for 10 to 15 years,' he says. Balfe and his friends would kick footballs off the walls and talk about music, films and the ups and downs of life. It gave the group an independence, a sense of a different world. 'Because it's this mystery area in between pockets of obvious community and culture, this just takes up a bit of an anonymous space. It feels a little bit more lawless.' The underpass walls, once brought to life by a succession of graffiti tags and notes from passersby, have since been painted white. This strikes Balfe as a retreat from what gave this place life. 'When we first came down, we were writing on top of what felt like years and years' worth of other people's scrawling, and none of it was particularly pictorial. It was people's names. 'A lot of it felt like real-time memorialisation: you're seeing these markings that people wrote of their own name, or of them and their friends', and it's a statement: 'I was here at this time. I was alive.' And I think there's something really powerful about that.' With the history painted over, the space takes on a new orientation, for new teenagers to claim. Boredom comes up a lot on Carving the Stone. Balfe blames the 'cycle of algorithmic tunnel vision' caused by social media: as well as Fomo, or the fear of missing out, that accompanies what has become a primary reference point in modern culture, 'great swathes of your time are spent just scrolling a never-ending feed of predominantly useless information. For Those I Love: David Balfe in the pedestrian motorway underpass in Donaghmede. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien 'The feeling of boredom seems, within my life and many of my peers', to be more present than ever,' he says, 'yet, at the same time, the feeling of immediate satisfaction is more pertinent than ever too. 'The ability to be mentally satiated by what I guess young people call brain rot, or whatever, seems to just mask the boredom until you remove the phone or the laptop for a second, and that sense of boredom becomes even more vast, even more pertinent, stronger again and louder – and we combat that once more with going back to the well and re-engaging with it, giving our data back to the machine.' Balfe's struggles with technology – with an increasingly taut space that rewards the binary, and where our diminished attention spans make us look for distilled, simplified content – are also a theme of the album. He references Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis . Balfe has reread it several times. Lately, however, he has opted to listen to a 30-minute summary of the book that he says was probably created by artificial intelligence. 'There is a great irony with having an AI summary of a book on technofeudalism.' Although he has tried to reject social media outright, Balfe begins each day with a scroll on Telegram, seeking out conflict reporting and 'thought pieces from people who have radically different views than me. I think it's very important for me to constantly have my viewpoint challenged if I want to be able to hold it with a sense of internal authority,' he says. 'And I'm a bit fearful of the echo chamber.' On the album track Mirror, Balfe tackles the insidiousness of ethno-staters, which is to say people who want to make the State ethnically homogenous. I ask him about the song, and the jolting chant of 'c***s' at its close. 'I feel like [ethno-staters] have been able to fool people who are suffering into thinking the way out of this is to continue to punch down further, as opposed to collectivising and working toward a common goal of improving the lives of all working people – all minority people – against the better interest of the ruling class,' he says. 'They've done an incredible job at convincing people that those who are most like them are most unlike them, that the answer to progress is further hate towards those who deserve it least and need it least, and that does nothing other than benefit a ruling class and people with a very specific ethno-state agenda.' That Ireland is an increasingly untenable place to make a life has led some towards the fringe and driven many to leave altogether. On his new track Of the Sorrows, Balfe oscillates between a sense that this place may no longer be for him and chasing something that once was. There's something haunting about the song, about the tragic dance that young people in Ireland perform, and the indecision between 'I have to leave' and 'I'll never leave'. 'The trade just hasn't been equal,' Balfe says. 'What I'm giving here, I'm not getting in return. The cost of living is so high, and what you receive in return is so low except for the love of friends and family – which has no cost; there's nothing that I would ever trade for that. 'So many of my peers have left, and I applaud every one of them who has left and found what they're looking for. I would never, ever begrudge somebody for wanting to get out of this. I understand why so many of the people that I love have looked around and said, 'How can I justify staying when I give so much just to live in a box room?'' Balfe is generous with his time as we walk – his only concern is to be able to buy a Shelbourne FC ticket at 7pm. (He's an enthusiastic Shels fan, and our chats drift in and out of soccer.) The musician is not religious, but the local church took up a mythological space in Balfe's mind when he was growing up. As a rite of passage, teenagers would climb its steep roof and stand atop the cross. 'When people go into Donaghmede they go, 'Yous have a f**kin mad church, don't you?'' he says as we approach the distinctive building, the four sides of which have sharply angled roofs that lean against one another. 'It's very hard for me, and some of my friends, to talk about [Donaghmede] without referencing the church.' For Those I Love: David Balfe at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Donaghmede. Photograph: Bryan O'Brien Balfe never climbed it. Soon before it would have been the singer's turn, one unfortunate boy fell and broke both legs. (According to local lore, he managed to cycle all the way home afterwards.) 'With that, people were, like, 'No más.' So, in my head, that person – who will go unnamed – is the last true Donaghmeder. I haven't heard of anybody doing it since.' He's quick to add that it's not something he'd advise anybody to try, either. 'Like I was saying about people writing messages on walls, there's a cultural narrative to places that make them what they are,' he says. 'The idea of building importance into things that traditional culture or the State or your parents would tell you is silly, or without value, is something that comes up a lot across this record.' 'Carving the stone' – chipping away at a project to reveal a finished core – is a phrase Balfe has found himself using when asked about his music. 'You start with this mess – a big wall of sound, a large stone – and you're slowly chipping away and revealing the image or the narrative that you want to tell at the end. 'I think it's also very reflective of the process of making the record, which took years. It was a really, really long process, a very laborious, intense and extremely exhausting process – probably a lot more so than the first record,' he says. 'Maybe you're losing parts of yourself in the process, but ultimately you're doing it in order to try and find that thing at the core, like a new sense of beauty, a new sense of self and, ultimately, a new sense of emotional security.' In the spring of 2023 Balfe spent a month secluded in a house in Co Leitrim, with little more than wild goats for occasional company. 'I wrote from morning until night every single day,' he says. 'I'd stand outside sometimes and shadowbox and do some push-ups. Otherwise I was back inside writing – and I just wrote garbage. Absolute garbage. I was forcing something I wasn't ready to write. And I think I needed to remember that all the best writing I've done has been at home.' He finds it cliched to recount now: on his final day in Leitrim, after he'd packed up most of his gear, he felt a draw to try one last time. He'd soon written the chords for the final track on the album, I Came Back to See the Stone Had Moved, by far its most distinctive and uplifting song. The name gets at a sort of resurrection Balfe felt when he returned to Dublin. Still, there's a deeper layer of meaning stemming from 'something a little bit darker and more valuable, something I'm a little bit more uncomfortable to speak about but coming back to a desire to be here'. Its piano chords, uncertain, gradually build into something cohesive and propelling. Balfe revisits harrowing themes from earlier on the album and drips in pieces of hope – hope about building a 'better cultural and social future for working people in Ireland', he says. It 'ultimately arrives at a very life-affirming point, a very brazen statement on the desire to be alive and to be here. And I think the writing was reflective of the place that I was arriving to in my own self through years of work, great therapy and incredible love from the people around me.' I try to dig a little deeper, but Balfe is hesitant. 'I'd probably hold on to an element of privacy around some of the lyrics on the record,' he says. 'Despite the fact that this record is a record that I'm sharing publicly – with the knowledge that I'm sharing it publicly, unlike the first one – there are still parts of it that are written very directly for just my friends ... I'd never want to get to a place with this project where it turns its back on what it originally was.' Listen closely and at certain points on the album you can hear Balfe talking in the background, buried odes to the people he cares about, to make them part of Carving the Stone's DNA. At the close of the final song there's a thunderous bagpipe interpretation of Amazing Grace. Here, transformed, the hymn becomes a euphoric counterpoint to the dark insularity of other parts of the album. Balfe's final lyric, 'I'm choosing to live,' bookends a project he's not sure has a future but can only reflect an artist secure in himself, in a city that gets stranger by the day. Carving the Stone is released by September
