They Saw They Conquered

An instantly recognisable everyman, Leo Moran of The Saw Doctors breezes into Galways’s Tigh Neachtain’s pub on a midweek lunchtime, and calls a friendly “howiya” to about five different people before he spots your Hot Press correspondent waiting expectantly in a booth. “Ah, good man, you’re here already,” he says in a Tuam accent undiminished by a million intercontinental motorway miles. “Pint?”

Wearing jeans, white shirt, a black jacket, and his trademark specs, the 45-year-old singer seems just as fresh-faced, jovial and easygoing as he did when he first shot to national fame in 1990 with the now classic Saw Doctors anthem ‘I Useta Love Her’. The years have certainly been a lot kinder to him than certain reviewers have been to his band. But Moran is acutely aware that what the Docs might lack in critical acclaim and kudos, they more than make up for in other ways. Still very much a live concern, they spend at least five months of each twelve out on the road. This year alone, in addition to numerous festival dates, they’ve so far played tours of the UK, America, Australia, Norway and Switzerland. Next month, they’ll be heading off again on another three-week tour of Britain.
Not that you’d necessarily know this from the Irish music media. Although they picked up a Meteor Award (for ‘Lifetime Achievement’) in 2008, the Docs aren’t so much slagged off in the press as almost routinely ignored.
“I often wonder if we were from east of the Shannon would we get more notice, or would there be news that we were selling out two nights in places like the Shepherd’s Bush Empire?” Moran muses. “But I know where the prejudice comes from – people think we’re rural. We were actually very urban kids in Tuam. We thought we were the bee’s knees. And when fellas would come into town on the bus we’d be laughing at their Wellingtons and all that – that was a joke to us. So, it’s a very adolescent, puerile joke, but I understand the angle.”
Would you have felt the same way if you went to Dublin for the weekend? Being from Tuam, would you have felt out of your depth?
“Well, we never feel out of our depth, but there can be a kind of superiority complex with people who think their culture is more relevant or above some other culture. It’s kind of borderline racism, really. I mean, I love Damien Dempsey, he’s one of my favourite men in the world, and he sings in a brilliant accent. And I love him singing in that accent. And I bet you there’s people in Dublin who think Damien Dempsey is brilliant for singing in that accent, and we’re a shower of hicks for singing in our accent. But that’s their problem, it’s not ours. It doesn’t bother me. The main thing for us is that enough people like us.”
The Docs certainly have an audience. It’s largely comprised of a diehard following amongst the blue-collar Irish diaspora that has sustained them throughout the last two decades or so.
“We play around 100 gigs a year,” he explains. “It’s a great life. We’ve been paying ourselves a weekly industrial wage from it since about 1990, which is quite an achievement as far as we’re concerned. It’s keeping a few lads off the dole anyways! Our limit, really, is about three weeks at a time. There’s people who don’t want to go for longer than that. That’s the way it has been for us. Though we have done six weeks, and I loved it. There was never a tour that was too long for me, but I’d say other people found it difficult. Six weeks is a good old trip, like.”
Touring aside, they enjoyed some homeland chart success again after a long period in the wilderness when their cheeky cover of Sugababes’ ‘About You Now’ went to No. 1 eighteen months ago.
“We have a great audience in Ireland now. We have a very young audience in Ireland. It’s because of all the college gigs, and the appearances at Oxegen, and festivals around the country, and the Rockbox in Killarney. But we still find it hard to get on the radio. We had a No. 1 hit single, and the next song, ‘She Loves Me’ was No. 2, and neither of them made the pop playlists on the pop stations.
“I’m not sure how many acts would have a No. 1 and a No. 2 consecutively, and neither of them makes the playlist. That makes me wonder. Like, we went to Australia in March and obviously an awful lot of our audience in Australia would have been Irish, but we played at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, which would have been very minority Irish. And we got an amazing review, and the Melbourne Age gave us this review and said that we were the most popular act at the festival – there was about 130 acts at the festival, I think.
“By contrast, this time last year we played at Cois Fharraige and we played the Saturday night – we headlined the Saturday night – we had the biggest crowd of the weekend, and I read two full reviews of the festival on the internet, and both of them mentioned every act played at the festival except the headliner on Saturday night. So I don’t know. Maybe we should come out ringing bells, saying, ‘Are we unclean? Unclean!’”
Do bad reviews bother you?
“Nah, I love bad reviews. It’s being ignored that bothers me. If somebody doesn’t like us, I’d love for them to say why. You know, I might even agree with them. And I know there’s ways that the act should be improved, I’m not going to say them in public, but if they hit that on the head I’d say fair play to them. I know there’s weaknesses, you know. But if they just think it’s bad because it’s the West of Ireland that’s a problem. If they think they are bad songs, or they are badly played, or they are badly sang or whatever – grand.”
Have you ever been hurt by anything negative written about you?
“Not really, no, because I know people who don’t like Bob Dylan. They think he’s a crap singer and he’s not a great songwriter, so there’s no way… you know, if somebody’s that good, it doesn’t bother me that people don’t like The Saw Doctors. What’s important to us is the people that do get it, and they enjoy it.”
We’re meeting ostensibly to discuss the band’s first album in five years. With new drummer, co-writer, and vocalist Eimhin Cradock completing the current line-up of Davy Carton (the only other founding member), Kevin Duffy and Anthony Thistlethwaite, The Further Adventures Of... heralds The Saw Doctors’ defiant take on the Irish music scene (“celebrating the parts of real Ireland that most other bands don’t reach,” according to our own Jackie Hayden’s four-star review).
Produced by Phil Tennent, the first sessions for the album were recorded in Rockfield Studios in Wales. “The Manic Street Preachers were working on their one out in the other studio at one stage. And The Proclaimers were in there as well. And then we finished it off in Grouse Lodge. Two brilliant studios.
“We really did enjoy recording it, and the funny thing about it is, we went for a week at a time recording it, and each time we went we only had about one-and-a-half songs, but we ended up getting three songs out of each week before. So, maybe we’re good under pressure. I would never have asked to do it that way. I wouldn’t have thought it was a good way to do it, but it worked for us. And we worked really hard at it. We really did try and polish things up.
“We had a great time. I think we probably did make a conscious decision to think – ‘Well, we’ll dress these songs up now’. It’s like sending the kids out to school. We’d better dress them up in slightly fashionable clothes, rather than just dressing them up in the clothes that were in the wardrobe.”
Moran doesn’t necessarily disagree when it’s put to him that, throughout their career, The Saw Doctors have always put more effort into their live shows than their recorded output.
“Yeah, well we always tried hard with the albums, but for some reason we probably just didn’t work quite hard enough at them. And this time we got this impetus to just do it, and just work on the little details. There’s an awful lot of little details in it. And it’s the first album I can say now – so soon after recording – that I can listen to it with pleasure, because on all the other albums you were hearing imperfections and stuff you wished you did. This time round, we got it 100% right.”
The album comes complete with its own Beano-style comic book, drawn by Tuam artist Squigley McHugh. “It’s amazing, some people are more interested in the comic than they are in the music,” Moran laughs. “Squigley said, ‘It starts off a bit like Scooby Doo, and then a little bit of Midnight Express, but you can’t see that because it’s a bit too dark. And then it ends up like The Blues Brothers’.”
While it probably won’t do much to dispel the notion that The Saw Doctors are more of a novelty act than anything else, Moran is at pains to point out that the band do have a more serious side. He points to the lyrics of ‘Same Oul’ Town’ [the title-track from their 1996 album of the same name] as an example: “A song like ‘Same Oul’ Town’ for me would be a very important kind of ballad where we deal with that kind of depressive side of Irish life: ‘Same oul’ faces/ same oul’ streets/ same oul’ people is all you meet/ Too long waiting standing round/ I’m sick and tired of this same oul’ town’.
“It’s about a person who is caught in a small town who doesn’t see a way out, like. They’ve lived there all their lives, and you’d meet them down the pub and they’d say, ‘Ah, I’m fed up with this place’. You know, but they don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
“It’s a pity that it’s difficult – perception-wise, it seems – for us to have a fun side and a serious side. People don’t want to deal with that kind of complexity. So, because we have a fun side, that gets exaggerated. And the other side of us kind of gets neglected. But it’s always been there, and I think it’s there on the new album, too.”

The Further Adventures Of The Saw Doctors is out now.