What the Doctors saw

Leo Moran and Davy Carton don’t look much like the answers to Ireland’s problems, at least not today.

In the middle of a string of college dates, the two men responsible for charting the Saw Doctors’ course over the past 15 years cut a charmingly scruffy dash. The album they’re here to talk about is called The Cure. So what’s the disease?
“I suppose,” says Leo, “the disease is vulnerability, addiction and it just being a funny old world. The fact that you can’t go for a smoke in the pub and that the country’s changing so quickly. They’re all the little diseases that this album might be the cure for.”
The history of The Saw Doctors is, in many ways, the history of modern Ireland – the move from the innocent, rural days of yore to a more knowing, urban society. It’s a development that The Saw Doctors have documented with each album.
“It felt like the natural thing to do,” agrees Leo. “When we started to do it in public, which we were probably embarrassed about, it happened to be that the more vulnerable songs or the one that were closest to our heart were the ones that people liked the most. It was embarrassing to sing about the N17 because it felt like such an obvious, local thing to do. I remember the first night we sang it in a hotel bar in Tuam and everybody went crazy.”
Given their sustained success, though, there has to be more to their songs than a few local references. Davy nods emphatically.
“We’ve been travelling abroad now for 15 years and if it wasn’t working we wouldn’t be travelling for 15 years. All the references could be for any town, in any country, anywhere in the world. All the truths are there.”
Does that enforced distance help when it comes to taking a view of Ireland? “It definitely helps to go away and come back,” says Leo. “The first song on the album, 'Out For A Smoke', is about being really confused."
"We’re at a certain age where time goes really fast and you’re wondering who you are yourself. The whole country is changing around us so fast that it’s hard to find a solid ground where you can stand and figure out what’s going on.”
“It’s such a different country to what it was 20 years ago,” he continues. “The prosperity is fantastic and has done an awful lot of good for an awful lot of people. But with it has come more independence – and with that has come more individualism and less community spirit.
“There’s a part of the way that the country was, which I miss. There seemed to be more interaction and more interdependence and now people are more interested in their mortgage, their holiday, their cars. There’s less social interaction and that leads to less fun in many ways. It’s still there in small communities but the change is creeping towards them fast."
He lays part of the blame on the demise of what was one of the country’s favourite pastimes.
“I don’t want to be seen to be endorsing drink too much but so much of our social life was based on meeting people in the pub and people aren’t going there any more. Pubs are really struggling. For me, drinking’s not about the consumption of alcohol, it’s the conversation that goes with it. That whole part of it is being eroded, which is a loss."
Are they, and by extension their records, positive about the new Ireland?
“Definitely positive about the new population and the vibrancy of that, the energy of the young people and how intelligent and relaxed they are with themselves, far more than we were,” he says. "There are so many positive things along with a few little negatives.”
Have their travels influenced how they write about home?
“It would have to I suppose,” says Davy. “If you look at the first album, the furthest I would have travelled would have been to Dublin. By the time you get to here, we’ve done an awful lot of travelling and seen a lot of things."
Leo puts down his spring roll and launches into a good-natured but obviously heartfelt declaration.
“There’s a misconception about The Saw Doctors that we go around the world playing Irish songs in Irish pubs to Irish people, which is totally wrong. We play in theatres, in rock clubs, at festivals. Most of our audience abroad is not Irish at all, it’s British, American, European, whatever. Whether some people like it or not, we are an international rock act. There might be a lot of people who turn their noses up at us, who’ve tried to become an international rock act themselves, and didn’t make that great a job of it.”
He’s right. For all the platitudes they get at home, few domestic bands have done similar business on a world-wide level, despite the fact that most of the planet seems to be in love with the Irish.
“Certainly,” agrees Davy. “In all fairness, U2 have opened up the whole thing to Irishness, especially in America."
Is there anything uniquely Irish about U2’s music though?
“It does seem to hover somewhere across the Atlantic,” Leo, says, smiling. “The problem is that a fair percentage of people still think of the country in an outdated, ultra romantic way."
“Certainly in a lot of places in America,” Davy agrees, “you meet people who think it’s still like The Quiet Man. If they came here and saw what it is they’d be shocked. Our songs can hopefully explain the reality a lot better.”
Leo picks up the subject. “You’d hope that it would work like that. The audiences come because they hear it’s a good live band. Our audience has spread through word of mouth. I think that the indigenous audiences in each country understand what we’re trying to say and see it in a different light, that this isn’t the Ireland of 1938."
From the Ireland of 1938 to the Ireland of 1977. Both Davy and Leo are of a certain age, so were they punks? “Absolutely,” laughs the latter.
“We used to put on the clothes and throw on a few safety pins. We made our contribution towards the punk style. We were very excited because John Lydon’s father was from Tuam, so we had an 'in' to the punk scene”.
Did they come to gigs in the capital? “I came up here for The Stranglers one time. We had The Jam in Galway, The Boomtown Rats, The Undertones. U2 used to play Galway. They haven’t crossed the Shannon in over 20 years by the way."
“Davy was in a brilliant band called Blaze X that The Saw Doctors really started out from. I was a punk too but I stumbled into a reggae band because friends of mine were in London and they got interested in the Jamaican culture over there. They came home and they wanted to start a band, I had a guitar and an amp – and there you go."
He still sees it as an influence. “You didn’t have to be a virtuoso musician. A fella came up to me in the pub the other night and told me I looked like the guy out The Saw Doctors. “'They’re not great musicians,' he said, 'but they’d good songs and they made the most of themselves. Fair play to them'. I couldn’t argue with him really. It’s not about virtuosity or guitar solos, it’s about having a simple song and trying to get the idea across as quickly as possible.”
Davy also sees that the DIY nature of punk had an influence on the decision to set up their own label. “It probably was. The big inspiration was that we were with Warner Bros for a while and they had no idea what we were. They thought we were the new Pogues. That was frustrating for us, and in the end we bought all our stuff back from them.”
Another influence comes from the complete opposite end of the spectrum in the songs of people like Bruce Springsteen.
Leo grins. “I love all that American stuff – Tom Waits, Springsteen, Hank Williams, Steve Earle. They’re the kind of songwriters we would try and emulate more than any other genre.
"We’d love to write songs like Creedence Clearwater Revival. When it all boils down to it, and me and Davy sit down at the kitchen table, we want to be John Fogerty.”
All these various strands come together on The Cure,. It’s not a giant leap forward, but nor is it designed to be. What it is is a well crafted, intelligent rock record that is totally aware of its surroundings and could easily work as a snap-shot of modern Irish life and how two semi- middle-aged men feel about it.
As such, it’s not that different from any previous Saw Doctors' album. For one reviewer, however, it came as a surprise with its ‘sudden sense of unease’. Leo knows said reviewer won’t be the only one to feel that way. “The misconception about us is that we’re just a good-humoured novelty act, but every album that we’ve put out has had serious songs on it that are nothing to do with jumping round like an idiot. ‘Same Old Town’ was about someone feeling trapped in a small town in the west of Ireland in the winter time. ‘Every Day’ was about a young woman going to England for an abortion.”
“It comes back to the ‘I Useta Lover’ thing,” says Davy. “We don’t want to get away from it – but there is more to us than that. We wouldn’t have been going for 18 years if that wasn’t true. Thinking about it, we shouldn’t have made it the first track on the first album. That was a mistake but you learn from your mistakes.”
Yet, really, Moran and Carton could probably care less. The lack of respect from a few people people with the capacity to influence their fortunes (when was the last time you heard The Saw Doctors on Irish radio?) obviously annoys – but would they swap that for the career they’ve built up? Would they hell!
“We’ve made a space for ourselves and we’ve a unique identity. We wrote some songs in Tuam and they’ve taken us all over the world. That’s something we’re delighted with.”