What's in a name?

Sometimes a beautiful picture isn’t necessarily about a nice landscape; it can be quite distressing but still have beauty in it”. So says Jim Lawlor of the music he makes with his band Saso. This is more than just a standard soundbite rolled out for the press because, although the project has been running for four years, this is the first time that Lawlor has begun to talk about the music he makes, the inspiration behind it, or indeed anything to do with it all. For the duration of their career so far, Saso have been cloaked in anonymity, only being revealed now as Lawlor and his production partner Ben Rawlins.

“When we started out”, says Jim, “we were still trying to get to grips with what it was. I didn’t know what I wanted Saso to be. I gave it a name but essentially it was me, Ben was helping me out but not officially. I was in control of the whole side of creating an image and trying to sell the band so I tried to confuse people, put a smokescreen around it to let people come up with their own image for it. It was a bit immature possibly on reflection. I maybe wouldn’t do it again but it was where we were at the time. This time round people wanted to know who was behind it and I wanted to communicate that”.
With debut album Big Group Hug garnering favourable reviews across the board, the theories as to the outfit’s line up varied wildly.
“We were likened to everything from a five piece band to a solo singer songwriter, various versions of the truth. If you don’t tell people what it is they invariably put their own picture on it. We didn’t even tell people we were Irish. It was quite amusing, I enjoyed it”.
Eventually though, the secret slipped out.
“Our press company in the UK had an informal chat with someone from Q and mentioned that I was from Dublin and was an architect and that was the opening line of the review, ‘Dublin based architect Jim Lawlor aka Saso….’. When I saw that I thought, fuck it, the cat’s out of the bag”.
For their second album then, the excellent I Can Do Nice, Jim has thrown himself into the full glare of the public spotlight.
“We feel that, having done the whole arty promotion thing, we’d like to do interviews and like to play live, just as an experience. So far I’m enjoying it.”
The experience has included the band’s debut live gig, as he explains.
“I wanted to see Saso play live myself so I figured other people would too. We’re very much a studio outfit and we started rehearsals at the beginning of the year for the Temple Bar Music Centre show in April. It was a process of trying to extract a studio sound and reproduce it live, it was fantastic to be part of that”.
As with every aspect of the band, Jim knew how he wanted to stage it, including a fully seated audience.
“I don’t really go to gigs anymore. I’m past that stage, people drinking pints and pushing past you. I like the whole idea of being seated and being comfortable and that it’s about the band rather than bumping into people and chatting with the music almost in the background. I wanted it to be like a theatre show where people are there to watch and listen.
“There’s more of a reservation when people are sitting down. I was surprised at the amount of silence there was, which was what I wanted but it put a lot more pressure on the four people on stage because everyone was a lot more focused on the band. That’s what you ultimately want as a performer. I’m reluctant now to play in any venue anywhere just for the sake of it. Future gigs will probably just be special occasions; I’d like Saso to stand for quality and an attention to detail”.
That approach certainly comes across on I Can Do Nice, drawing as it does on a range of musical styles and making sense of comparisons with Talk Talk and Sigur Ros.
“It’s just an expression of a mood or a feeling,” says Jim. “It comes out in a certain way. I’m into rock, I’m into ambient so all those palates are available to me as a reflection of the music I grew up with. I don’t consciously set out to make a chill out or mellow album, it just comes out and I have no control over it. I don’t enjoy listening to live music anymore, it gets a bit wearing. I get more pleasure from introspective music and that’s the sensibility I would align myself with as a writer, rather than Queens Of The Stone Age”.

I Can Do Nice is out now on Melted Snow