THE TRAVELLING MEDICINE SHOW

A Question : What verb should you most associate with the Sawdoctors ? Answer : To Boggle. Never in my most outlandish dreams could I have imagined an English audience falling for an Irish act with not one but three songs about the G.A.A!

Traditionally Brits swoon to the Irish in our most bardic and romantically ethereal mode. Ever since Thomas Moore, the real founder of Irish rock, Irish entertainers have beguiled their way to fortunes on the mainland by inflating our Celtic spirituality, a trick later artfully deployed by W.B. Yeats for the first half of his career before Ezra Pound took over as his producer.

But as Patrick Kavanagh later discovered to his regret, while Irishmen could have rainbows in their hair and silver on their tongues, they weren’t allowed to have mud on their boots. Irishmen who were earthy not airy were promptly consigned to the sumps of Camden and Kilburn towns.

So you can only boggle as Brits boogie to the Sawdoctors, a band with songs about the muddy tragedies of Tuam local Gaelic football teams, a band whose memories of the Sixties encompass not just the lure of Woodstock but the memory of the late John Donellan T.D. holding aloft the Sam Maguire when a Galway football team last won the All-Ireland. Why the Sawdoctors even have the foolhardiness to open with ‘You Broke My Heart’ whose first verse mentions the entirely alien concept of a “parallelogram” which for all I know some of them may think is Eamon Casey’s version of a kissogram. Sean Hughes, some may decide, isn’t alone in introducing strange innovative Irish comedy routines to our neighbours.

Sooner or later, somebody had to volunteer to investigate this miraclous phenomenon. Of course I’d heard reports of the Sawdoctors’ success over there but I’d partially discounted those tales as P.R. froth on the daydream. Sure, the Sawdoctors might attract the London-Irish contingent and win Celtic supporters in Glasgow but what about the Paddy-free zones of Middle England? I could accept that they might have made early inroads as a novelty act but that rarely makes for enduring appeal.

Any scepticism was profoundly mistaken. At a time when the U.K. live scene is in the doldrums through the combined impact of the recession and club culture, the Sawdoctors’ third tour of the British ‘mainland’ will sell 50,000 tickets over 29 venues. Furthermore they’ve achieved this with meagre media support.

The Sawdoctors can generally expect catcalls and curses not fanfares from M.M. or N.M.E. and they’re insufficiently antique for Q. Exclude an early boost from a Channel 4 documentary and Radio 1 broadcasting all 35 minutes of their Glastonbury show this year and the Sawdoctors’ media profile is both close to minimal and effectively scam-free. And yet here I am in Cambridge where they’ve sold out the full 1800 capacity of the Corn Exchange.

Pause and ponder that statistic and then recall how many previous Irish acts have grossly inflated their appeal abroad before being unceremoniously dropped. And then realize that the situation is even stranger, since now they’ve completed their two album deal with Solid and WEA. The Sawdoctors are undertaking this ambitious tour without any record company publicity budget to aid promotion.

You’ve surely got to ask the question, why?

As a centre of English educational privilege, Cambridge should surely be a Sawdoctors’ exclusion zone. The town’s 20,000 students should either be Young Fogies likely to flock to the next night’s entertainment at the Corn Exchange, a Henry Purcell opera, or conversely rarefied pop aesthetes into the more recent radical rock and dance.

A tee-shirt count gives no clues to the sociologist. Beyond a scattering in the good ‘Doctors own uniforms, there’s a few crusties, doubtless attracted by their Levellers, Waterboys and Glastonbury associations. Atop the balcony, I witness the bizarre spectacle of a girl in blonde crusty braids, negotiating her own variation on any Anglo-Irish agreement, gyrating furiously to

‘Michael D’s Rockin’ In The Dail’ while in the next row, a guy in a Pearl Jam sweatshirt hollers appreciatively.

But downgrade, if you won’t entirely disregard, any football supporter theory. The Sawdoctors may never have an alternative career as John Rocha models but neither are they appealing to a squadron of rowdies with more cider than sense in their veins. This is not a lad’s night out, a boozy prologue to a stag party since – significantly – the Sawdoctors also have their own female audience.

It isn’t alarmingly aggressive but an incident the night before in Portsmouth when two teenage girls waited outside in a bitingly cold downpour for their autographs might make one pause for thought. Here in Cambridge, back in the belly of the hall, a contingent of four women are cheering them on.

It’s not outrageous lust – the ‘Doctors’ dressing-room isn’t swathed with concupscient and amenable lovelies – but it is a strange attractor. I get to think of other Irish performers, Christy Moore, early U2, Chris De Burgh and Liam O Maonlai and what they and other Irish males have shared, a strand of masculinity that combines respect with a streak of sexual reticence, a friendly, reliable and unthreatening humour from guys who’d sooner lie face downwards in a field of nettles than make fools of themelves, dressing up as black leather cockatoos in chains with a baby-oiled torso.

Not so much the Boys as the Men Next Door. You could almost insist that the Sawdoctors could pose as symbols of John Major’s nouveau morality ordinaire except that a band who praise Michael D. Higgins, rail at immigration and take a swipe at Margaret Thatcher know that community values are not the property of the right.

But treatises forget another factor – the Sawdoctors are fun. In Portsmouth, I’m astonished to meet a publicist and old friend who’s driven all the way from London to see them for the first time.

He says he was driving to the Glastonbury festival and stopped his car in a lay-by when he heard their Radio 1 broadcast. He’s got tired by affectation, irked by acts who exist in print, the recording studio, photo sessions and video but who won’t breach or forfeit their immaculate cool to learn that entertainment is not their enemy. Certainly, whatever else the Sawdoctors may or may not do, they definitely entertain.

Entertainment is certainly needed this nose-drooling, wet and windy night. This is their Portsmouth debut and while someone claims a 1200 crowd, my headcount is closer to 800, nonetheless an impressive opening of their account on an inhospitable night when the bitter, windy weather discourages any walk-up.

I do detect some Irish accents but they’re easily in the minority.

Besides, Portsmouth knows the ‘Doctors’ songs, cues and choruses. They can confidently play ‘N 17’ as the last song before the encores knowing this crowd will volley back “stone walls and the grass is green” in their own Hampshire tones. Later I’ll be told another twist : N 17 is the Tottenham postal district, a coincidence that somehow teases their North London following.

The encores are even more surprising. I’d found their second album weaker than their debut and ‘All The Way From Tuam’ a flat celebration, yet both it and ‘The Green And Red Of Mayo’ have a conviction and a sense of community not so evident on disc. What is this – a West of Ireland Slade, with Davy Carton cast as Noddy Holder?

So back to the treatise. It’s a curious if rarely acknowledged Seventies cultural fact that Irish folk acts found an eager audience in West Germany since their own ‘Volk’ music had been traduced and despoiled by the Nazis. Might not the Sawdoctors be enacting a similar substitute role in an England whose own folk music is a museumpiece, in a society where notions of English identity have been stolen and sullied by rabid football hooligans and despoiled by the oafs and knaves of the idiot far right?

Well, I only ask but tonight, I’ve no time to find out since I’m tired by my long plane and train journey and the Sawdoctors are far from fit themselves. This tour is fleeing from the spectre of

Beijing flu. I’ve never seen so many bottles of Lemsip and Day Nurse, so many packets of aspirins and throat lozenges on the Sawdoctors’ “No Flu Till Hammersmith” tour.

The Sawdoctors don’t yet hire executive jets but neither are they suffering in the back of a scuzzy, mildewed van. With 22 on the road, they’re managing costs by travelling in two sleeper buses and then kipping down in bunk-beds at the next venue.

It’s all mostly self-contained since they invariably eat at the next venue. Leo Moran claims they don’t favour hotels and I can see this is typical of the Irish at work abroad, almost as if the Sawdoctors are a gang of superior navvies, maintaining the routine and discipline of the tour.

It’s far from rowdy as we take the ring-roads round London bound for Cambridge through the rainy night. In the sanctum at the back, packed with video and CD players, some of the band meticulously replay the night’s show.

One telling detail indicates their increased stature. Through Larry Mullen, John Donnelly has got hold of some special magnetic equipment to soothe the tendonitis that afflicts so many drummers.

Meanwhile at the front, there’s the tour’s special guest, Leo’s father, Jimmy. Sitting beside the driver and peering down the motorway, he quips he’s the navigator. Just behind him, Tony Lambert engages in a lethal backgammon contest with the tour’s special promotions person, Maureen Hughes.

All the way from Builth Wells in Wales is Tony. Earlier he’s talked about his last serious engagement as keyboard player in the final episode of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. When Alex died,someone confiscated all the band’s gear. Then they had to stop the rough cuts of their last recording session as a tribute album.

Tony slunk back to Wales vowing never to play again.

Next day, there’s only one chore before the show, an afternoon interview with the local independent radio station where the ‘Doctors will also acoustically busk two songs. With only 8 tickets left to sell, it’s now hardly a pressing priority but the band’s strategy has always involved courting such stations.

En route, we hear about John Major’s daughter and her appearance at the Corn Exchange. The P.M.’s Huntingdon constituency is near Cambridge and his daughter, playing in a local school show, sent Mater and Pater surprise tickets.

Which caused all the usual disruption of sniffer dogs and hot and cold running special branch men, casing the Corn Exchange before the show. Young Miss Major, I was told, had been recommended to send no more surprise tickets to her parents.

Frankly, the interview is also a bust. The dee-jay who invited them is a flu victim and his deputy with only two hours notice has scant knowledge of and interest in the band.

His first two questions are lobs, of the you-tell-me-I’m-ignorant variety. “How did you come together?” and Leo quips “Ah, that’s a long question . . . could you do an hour special?”

“I see it’s going to be one of those afternoons with eight Irishmen in the studio,” he responds, immediately granting Tony and Anto Thistlethwaite eligibility for the Irish World Cup squad, “could you tell me the secret of your success?”

“Will you give us a two-hour special?” returns Leo with eminent logic.

And then the Cambridge presenter makes me cringe in the corner of the studio: “You’ve been called designer bogmen – what exactly are designer bogmen?’

I want to interrupt and tell this vast audience, spotted around the Fens of Cambridgeshire that it’s all my fault. Facetiously and good-humouredly, I christened them “designer rednecks” in an early Hot Press singles review, only for Declan Lynch to subtly misquote me in a generally approving Sunday Independent piece and the “designer bogmen” jibe passed into the vocabulary of their critics.

Two more times I flinch as he uses the dreaded cúpla focail. Now I know how Jon Landau’s famous quote about Bruce Springsteen got corrupted. Now the Sawdoctors know what happened when the gospels got translated from Hebrew to Greek. My embarrassment is hardly soothed when they busk their two songs and Leo plays his guitar, lying on his back on the studio carpet.

The Cambridge show introduces another character to the cast: the A&R man. I’m delighted by his presence and his interest in the Tuam Small Business Development Plan but, frankly, I’d expected to see the A&R queue, lined up around the block.

After all, once you combine the Sawdoctors’Irish and U.K. audience and then take into account successful sorties into Scandanavia, Australia and the North-Eastern states of the U.S.A., the ‘Doctors, before any hype, must be guaranteed sales of 100,000 for their next album even if it was a tribute album of covers of Samba And The Philosophers.

After all, isn’t that what record companies are for? To sign a self-sufficient, well-run, diligent and notably tantrum-free band with guaranteed sales plus the added attraction that they’re unlikely to bankrupt the budget through studio indulgence?

It hasn’t always been seen that way. Manager Ollie Jennings recalls that after their Féile coup, he met a very senior executive at American Capitol who sincerely loved them but passed because he hadn’t a clue about how to market them.

One could surmise indeed that today’s junior A&R figurines would run a London marathon on horse tranquillizers before being seen consorting with the Sawdoctors but Ollie Jennings demurs.

The Doctors haven’t fallen down the traditional cultural chasm between Dublin and London. Rather, Jennings insists, news of their availability has been slow getting around, naming three majors, Epic, EMI and Polygram who’ve been sighted at their shows or expressed interest.

Meanwhile our A&R man in Cambridge is delighted and courting Leo and Pearse Docherty. But can he offer them a brass-band?

It’s one of the weirder tales of a bizarre year when The Sawdoctors trooped off to a Swedish festival together with Pele, the Shamen and the Stereo M.C.’s. First off the plane, they were met by a Swedish oompah band and says Pearse: “Everybody thought they were for us.”

But after the show, Cambridge isn’t so welcoming. Fourteen of us traipse around the town looking for a warm disco with cold drinks but suddenly, we encounter student exclusiveness, private parties that only those with N.U.S. cards can enter. We want to help these clubs make money; we hope the bouncers weren’t thinking no Irish, designer rednecks or not, need apply.

On a rainy night in Cambridge, I leave Leo and Pearse on a street-corner, talking about Christy Moore. We haven’t cracked the Cambridge Late Show but I’ve hopes about BBC 2.

Sarah Dunant Goes To Tuam has a nice ring about it.