Healin' Groovy

THE FANTASY world of adolescent teen-scream music, that Alice in Wonderland world of rock’n’roll cabbages and kings (which, in the case of Elvis, at least, was one and the same thing) paint a reality that even a 16-year-old must find hard to swallow. Yet swallow it they do, often continuing to treat these myths as if they were ideals well into their own superannuated, mortgage-paying years.

The ‘We want to party and do what we want to do’ school of pop culture which climbed to dominance in the ‘50s continues to rule the roost to this very day. Never so much about love as a self-conscious accessory to sex (and the getting thereof), these types of songs never even try to address the congested gridlock of crossed signals and missed opportunities that modern loving entails.

Is it a kind of propaganda? Half-thought-out chunks of cardboard sentiment designed to mislead the children of the Western world about what’s in store for them? The hard truth, of course, is that the passionate, mutual, eternal-love aspirations we all cherish are valued more for the impossible expectations they excite in us than for their actual rate of occurrence. Though only a child could fail to see that ‘Happily Ever After’ is an oxymoron, few of us are willing to confess it, even in the light of our own experience.

The flip side though, the ‘My Life Is Empty Without You’ syndrome, is nearly always equally false. Disappointingly, perhaps, most of our emotions are rarely so grand or solid. That record companies keep assiduously repackaging the same naive sentiments explains itself away as a reflection of the fact that people don’t want to spend good money for what they could stay home and get for free. Truth and entertainment, for the most part, keep very little company together nowadays.

One man who may yet successfully give the finger to all these rules, befuddle the experts and create a whole new audience for adult, lyric-oriented songwriting could well be Doctor Sean Millar.

Born in Bray in the mid-’60s, he started to play and compose when he was 13. Most recently known as the frontman/songwriter for The Cute Hoors, Dr. Millar left the band to work on his solo acoustic material. Now, two years later and with well over a hundred new songs (and nearly Seven hundred gigs between here and the rest of Europe) under his belt, his tart blend of analysis and heartfelt yearning make him one of the freshest and most distinctive voices in the current crop of emerging writer/songwriters. We met last week in the Ormond Buildings just after a photo shoot for the album he hopes to have out this May.

JOHN FARRELL: The thing that people really seem to respond to in your music and writing are the wry, yet authentic, insights you offer about love as lived. Yet I suspect you’re something of a romantic still.

SEAN MILLAR: Well, the first question really cuts to the heart of things as far as I’m concerned.

But you do manage to be both cynical and sincere at the same time.

I’m kind of surprised when people think I’m cynical. What I’m always trying to do is create a real love. One that recognises what actually happens in life. I don’t believe in unachievable aspirations. I think that’s wrong for people. I think you’ve got to keep one foot, if not in the grave, then at least on the ground. You can’t touch people’s lives if you don’t touch reality.

It’s impossible not to be cynical if you’ve lived and experienced life – to some degree. Either you’re stupid or you’re cynical. But, true cynics are basically people who are afraid to love. One of my main things is getting rid of things that come between people, things that stop people from having the types of relationships that they could have.

In what sense?

One of my songs is about a friend of mine who died – it’s hard to believe it was a year ago – and the last month of his life was an incredibly moving experience for me. And, I have to say, also quite beautiful, and his death was actually a beautiful one – no two ways about it. He was loaded up with drugs, had beautiful music, a room full of friends, his lover standing by his side. In one way so tragic, but also amazing in the way that that death spanned a massive cultural gap between some of the people involved.

He was a Spanish guy from a typical Spanish family and they had to come to terms with the fact that their son, who they didn’t even know was gay, was basically on his deathbed – and that the guy they had come to love as his best friend was also his lover. Looking after him and taking responsibility for his life and being an incredible person. What was going on there, in all kinds of directions, was about real love and love overcoming differences.

So the fantasies about love in most pop music, are they lies?

Well, there’s more to life than being eighteen, right? I decided long ago that the stuff I was interested in doing was stuff that didn’t pretend to be anything else. I didn’t want to go on stage and do that. Yet, like, all the bands that sing about teenage stuff in the last five years, they’re all in their 30s. But the point is, they have to pretend to be 18, so they have to write beneath what they’re experiencing.

But are they lying?

I think a lot of people are quite willing to put on their leather trousers and lose loads of weight and suck their cheekbones in and pretend that the world is different to what it is and, yes, basically, lie to young people about it and I think that’s wrong.

Any exceptions?

Iggy Pop. He’s not lying. He’s actually saying what he thinks and that’s an out-there vision which I really relate to, but he’s not lying. I’m trying to write songs for couples, for people who know that life’s a bit more complicated, a bit more hassley than ‘Love, Love Me Do’. Maybe that kind of thing was fine when public romance ended at the age of twenty and you settled down, married for life, but that world’s gone. We don’t live in that world anymore. I’m not married and I’m not looking like I’m gonna be for a long time, so there you go.

So, is most pop music some kind of nostalgia?

What most of it is, basically, is crap. I mean, writing’s the biggest problem. Some people can’t write. They’re really good at fronting bands, they’re really good musicians, they’re brilliantly talented performers but they cannot write to save their lives. And you just see it over and over again – mediocre, mediocre songs. We avoided it for a long time here because we’ve got such a brilliant musical tradition, but the Americanisation, the attempt to make sense of what we do on a global scale, is just killing a lot of it off.

So is rock’n’roll dead?

I love rock’n’roll, you know, cranking up the old ‘One, two, three, four’, but to be good at that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have a viewpoint, have to have an opinion about anything. Like Joey Ramone said, ‘All you need is three chords and a grudge’. I’m into that but what I’m trying to do is write songs for people who just can’t believe in the notions of romantic love that we’ve been given. There’s a need there. I mean, when I first started playing it was that kind of heavy rock thing I was into. Maybe that’s why I find it so difficult to understand why anybody wants to do that anymore.

Unless they are 18?

Yeah, that’s what I mean. You grow up, things happen, you change.

How did you make that transition from heavy rock to what you’re doing now, which seems to draw from an eclectic range of songwriting and performing styles?

Growing up in Bray, my parents were what we used to call ordinary people, working class people – my mother left school at 12, my father at 14. They were never trained as musicians but they were very musical. Great storytellers, too. But the songs I heard when I was growing up were a real mixture. They were still of a generation who still knew all the Irish songs, but they were also into that whole ‘30s/’40s American music. There was always music going on. People I really liked who influenced me would have to include Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie – serious songwriters.

Serious – but also interested in language?

Yeah. The biggest changes came when I was about 19 or 20 and I wanted to find a way to write the type of songs I’m writing now – not very good, but wordy – trying to use language. Where I am now is quite prosey – I write in complete sentences as opposed to little catch phrases. I remember buying a book about Ira Gershwin with all his lyrics and really trying to figure just what it was he was doing. Lyrics have to be tailored to a musical need. You don’t write lyrics on paper, you write them on music.

So, is rock’n’roll really just a continuation of the pop music scene that came before it?

What I think’s wrong with rock’n’roll is the presupposition that it’s necessarily a radical outlet for anything anymore. I don’t think it is. Basically, it was sewn up by the music industry ages ago and what they’re trying to do is control something that’s basically out of control. It used to be that the craziest thing you could do was be in a rock’n’roll band. Nowadays, let’s face it, it’s a career option. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for people to pretend it isn’t – well, that’s bullshit, too.

What’s rock’n’roll anyway? It’s ‘Dancing In The Streets’. There’s a lot of stuff going around calling itself rock’n’roll which just isn’t. Originally it was a kind of interpersonal revolution – people were still trying to keep the sexes apart and, basically, rock’n’roll was about bringing them together. That’s gone a bit by the boards now. There are different things keeping people apart now and, for the most part, what we call rock’n’roll has its own gender role-playing too.

In the beginning it asserted a kind of ‘We’re gonna be free’ attitude, but you’re saying, what, that nowadays it’s just perpetuating its own set of stereotypes?

Rock’n’roll’s a cliché machine. That’s it. You can watch MTV all day and every band you see it’s all four guys. I mean, really, what art form virtually excludes over 50% of the population? Like, how radical is that? It’s all about churning money out of something that was basically just meant to be about people. Everything’s quantified today, like so-and-so’s a great guitar player because he can play 63 notes in a second, or so-and-so’s really good looking and that’s why he’s a star. Nobody cared how good a guitar player Richie Valens or Elvis were – that didn’t matter. What mattered then was the whole person. What made Elvis great was who he was, the wrong kind of person to have on TV. That’s what he was about. It was the energy and soul and hurt that was there. That’s what mattered there.

Yeah, but even Elvis wasn’t able to go much beyond the Sun sessions and the swivelling hips before he became a parody of himself. I mean, he certainly never matured as a person and you can hear it in the later stuff. Is that kind of thing to be expected in an industry which infantalises its stars?

I think Western culture, despite all the terrible things we do, despite all the shit that we are in, is in the process of growing up. That is what’s causing all the tumult that’s going on. People are finally realising, for example, do I give a shit who you sleep with? No. Is God striking us all down? No. We’re growing up – but most people don’t want to. They’re just afraid to step into the light, they’re so afraid of their own skeletons, their own dark little closets.

Didn’t you think you were stepping into a territory that was never going to prove commercial, that was never going to establish a following or anything else?

Yeah, quite honestly, I did. I just felt there’s no way anybody’s ever going to make a million out of me. You know, it’s not a question of you making loads of money and then other people benefiting from that – the reality is that for you to just make enough money to live on, three other people in that record company are going to have to become rich. Otherwise, they’re not interested in making a little bit of money out of you; they’re interested in making a lot of money of you, or else, ‘fuck off, I can make a lot out of someone else’.

Pretty corrupt you’d say?

What isn’t? The problem with Ireland is that the more we aspire to the classic capitalist model, the more we kill our soul, and that’s the thing that always made us special as a people.

* * * * *

WALKING HOME later in the rain, listening to the cassette he and manager, Robert Stephenson, had made last summer, I found myself listening closely and often laughing out loud. More unnervingly, though, his songs have a prescience that often made me think they’d been written especially for, if not quite, about me. The result, if your life’s anywhere near as complicated as my own, is that you’re as likely to find yourself ashamed as amused by some of Millar’s targets.

When I got home, wetter than a swamp rat in a monsoon, I found some friends huddling around the stereo. Playing the tape for them I found much of the same reaction, with alternating chuckles and bristles, faces turning white with recognition and eyes welling up from the memories triggered.

Dr. Millar’s songs, whatever his real qualifications, certainly make a case for calling him the shrink of Ireland’s current musical scene. You know you may not always enjoy the treatment but going back for more will probably help you become a better and saner person and, who knows – maybe that’s what this whole revolution they call rock’n’roll was really meant to be about?

Dr. Millar plays Slattery’s on Capel Street on the 5th, 12th and 26th of March. He also heads off to New York for a special showcase gig at Bleecker Street’s legendary Bitter End on the 22nd.