A lot of very important people are saying a lot of nice things about the Dublin-born performer For Those I Love.

Jools Holland is a big fan and gave him a stage on BBC TV which he used to declare his love for Shelbourne FC; the New York Times had him on the front page last month; the NME says his record is “immaculate and beautiful”; and there’s such a buzz, from critics and the public, around his music that a six-date tour of the UK later this year sold out in no time.

All kind words, but the imprimatur of a former footballer also means a lot to David Balfe, whose stage name is For Those I Love, the music is hard to categorise but not a million miles away from The Streets/Mike Skinner.

Damien Duff got a mention in one track on his first release: “I love the sound of me and me da going f****** nuts at the 2002 World Cup, Irish team on the telly, that’s it boys get ready, it’s Duff with the headie”.

“I don’t know if Dean Delany knows his name is in a tune, but I heard a rumour that Damien Duff was happy that I mentioned him in a song,” says Balfe.

But despite that nod from Duff, the Premier League and even the international team possess nothing like the hold that the League of Ireland, and particularly Shelbourne and their Tolka Park home, have on the 30-year-old.

One of the hottest acts to come out of the country in 2021, Balfe has a stage as well as a voice. And is happy to use them, choosing to wear a Save Tolka Park t-shirt in a photo shoot for that New York Times front-page feature as he’s very much behind the campaign to save Shels’ home ground from extinction, with campaigners hoping for a stay of execution and a rebirth. The video for his latest single, Just To Have You, was filmed at a Shels game last month and is a stunning tribute to the Drumcondra venue.

Tolka Park is holy ground, not just for Shels, but for Balfe and his friends. His own infatuation with Shels came about through his connection with best friend Paul Curran, a hardcore Reds man. Curran died through suicide in 2018, at the age of 27. Much of Balfe’s music relates to Curran, his life and death and how his friends coped with that shattering loss. “The spectre of Shels was there because of Paul. I was 18 or 19 when he became fanatical about Shels,” says Balfe.

“Shels had stopped me from doing things on Friday nights, I’d say to Paul, ‘come on, we’ll go and do something’ and he’d just say ‘I can’t, Shels are playing’.

“I knew it brought him an incredible amount of joy and relief that I didn’t see in other parts of his life. That intrigued, and confused, me. Shels added so much value and commitment to his life and I was enthralled to that idea.

“He spoke about the games like a spiritual poem, he was just constantly trying to convert me to Shels, saying ‘you have to come, you have to come’. At that stage in my life I had no relationship with football that allowed me a way to fall back in love with the game,” says Balfe. He had links with the game (one grandfather played for St Patrick’s Athletic, the other was a founder member of St Columba’s FC) and played schoolboy football locally, for Trinity FC, but dropped out at 14 to try his hand at kickboxing: his first mention in a national newspaper was in the schoolboy soccer pages of the Evening Herald. “I was absolutely shocking,” he says of his own career.

He’d prefer to spend the €15 admission fee for Shels on gigs instead, but relented when Curran demanded he come down to see the Reds.

“My first memories of watching Shels, they are not of the games but of watching Paul and Gav White. They were animated in a way I’d never seen before. I’d never seen Paul as full of life and vitality as I did when he was at a Shels game, which is a mesmerising thing when someone has been so close to you all your life, you see them in a new light,” he says.

If the early/mid-2000s saw Shels live the high life, with Champions League football and league titles and marquee signings, this period (the mid-2010s) was more of a trial, time spent in the second tier as the club, which went bust in 2007, struggled to survive.

“They were hard times at Shels. The lads romanticised the losses, the tragedy of the whole thing, and I learned that, I started to understand that. I wonder how much of the tragedy of the game attracted Paul and then attracted me. You need the dark and the light,” he says.

When Curran died in early 2018, football, and Shels, offered a release, a way of coping. A First Division match against Longford Town was the first home game of the season, the first since Curran’s death.

In a 3-2 win for Shels, amid nerve-shattering drama with a 93rd-minute winner from David O’Sullivan, Reds fans applauded in the 27th minute, to mark Curran’s age, and after the match, Curran’s friends scattered his ashes on the turf.

Occasionally after subsequent games, friends would gather close to the pitch to reflect and the admission of 100 fans this week, after 15 months of lockdown, opens doors again. The side’s winning formula right now gives cause to smile, an eight-game winning run only just halted by a draw with Treaty United. “It’s prettier football than we are used to,” Balfe jokes.

But his link to Shels, to Curran and to that Tolka Park turf all combine to stress how important it is that the ground is not lost to football. The plan in place calls for Shels to leave, forever, and move into a newly-built Dalymount Park which they’ll share with Bohs. Finance is against them as the groundshare scheme is officially backed and funded by Dublin City Council, who plan to rezone the Tolka Park site for housing, and the Dalymount project, costed at €34 million, is contingent on the sale of Tolka.

Next week a group of DCC councillors will put forward a motion for the Tolka project to be separated from the Dalymount scheme and for a way to be found for Tolka to stand on its own feet, to give Tolka a chance of survival.

For Balfe, the levelling of Tolka is social and personal, many pointing out that few of those living in Ballybough and North Strand will be able to afford to live in the housing built on the site.

“A lot of us would have a different outlook on it if we knew it would be affordable housing, that it would make an impact on a horrific housing situation. I just hit 30 and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to buy a gaff, I could be renting forever. I am aware that I would have to look at it differently if we knew the housing there would be community, affordable housing,” says Balfe.

“The driving force that’s motivating me to scream and shout about Tolka is its cultural and emotional importance to so many of us and a lot of that is due to Paul. I’d be unable to stand by and see it go down.

“His ashes are there on the pitch. We laid down his ashes in the centre of the pitch after the first game back after he passed, he died in February and this was in March. For all of us our relationship with Tolka changed, not just Shels, it’s not just the spiritual home of Shels, it feels like it’s the spiritual home for Paul.

“I feel we treat it the way some people treat graveyards. Sometimes we stick around after a game and hang out for a while, just spending a bit of time beside the pitch, and that’ll never go away. And I’m not sure I’d be able to deal with it if that’s not there. But I’m not fighting for this just for Paul, I know how important this is to all of my peers.”

Wearing the Save Tolka Park t-shirt in that shoot for the New York Times was deliberate. “Maybe someone on the other side of the world will see that t-shirt and stick the slogan into google. A bunch of people in the States might see ‘Save Tolka Park’, and I have no idea if their voices can affect our TDs or councillors here. However, it’s magnifying that voice and to have it appear in a platform like that, it helps mount a bit of pressure.”

Making a point is also why he finished his breath-taking slot on Jools Holland’s BBC show last year by holding up a flag saying ‘Coolock Reds’, exposing the UK’s indie kids to the politics of League of Ireland football.

“It was a big statement,” he says. “So much of that record is about my relationship with Paul being carried on through my current relationship with Shels and it felt fitting to raise that flag, as a representation of Paul.

“It was Paul’s flag and that was why I wanted to raise it. But I feel an incredible debt to Shels as a club, if I can in any way give back what they gave me and my peers, and one very small step was to take the first moment I had on a scale like that, on national television and give thanks to the club.

“I got some thanks from fans of other clubs, which in the League of Ireland is very special, that a Rovers fan can say to me ‘I f****** hate Shels but fair play to you for getting the flag on Jools Holland’. That means a lot.”