The Saw Doctors
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Saw Doctors | ||
|---|---|---|
 The core members of the Saw Doctors, Davy Carton and Leo Moran
|
||
| Background information | ||
| Origin | Tuam, Republic of Ireland | |
| Genre(s) | Rock Celtic |
|
| Years active | 1986 to Present | |
| Website | The Saw Doctors' Official Website | |
| Members | ||
| Leo Moran Davy Carton Kevin Duffy Anthony Thistlethwaite Eímhín Craddock |
||
The Saw Doctors are a folk-rock band from Tuam, County Galway in the west of Ireland, named after the itinerant craftsmen who once traveled from sawmill to sawmill sharpening and repairing saws.
The band boasts a fervent following both at home and abroad and hold the record for Ireland's highest-selling single ever.
Ireland's Dublin-based music cognoscenti have often sneered at the band's rootedness in "backward" West of Ireland locales. However, the Saw Doctors have nevertheless proved themselves a true "people's band," their reputation often spreading faster by word of mouth than through official music promotional channels.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Origins and Lineup
The Saw Doctors had their genesis in 1986 when Leo Moran, a former member of Tuam reggae outfit Too Much for the White Man, started accompanying local vocalist Mary O'Connor on guitar. The band became a threesome when Moran recruited Davy Carton, a former songwriter and guitarist with short-lived Tuam punk band Blaze X (1979-1981) who was then working in a textile factory to support his wife and young children. After playing a few small local gigs at Tuam's Imperial Hotel, Moran, Carton, and O'Connor were joined by singer, guitarist, and mandolin player John "Turps" Burke and by drummer Padraig Stevens (Blaze X's former manager). O'Connor, the only woman in the band's history, left the group in 1987 and emigrated to London.
Leo Moran and Davy Carton have been the only constant presences in the band's ever-shifting lineup. The band currently comprises Davy Carton, Leo Moran, keyboard player Kevin Duffy, bass and saxophone player Anthony Thistlethwaite (formerly of The Waterboys), and drummer Fran Breen (who has played with The Waterboys, Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams, and others). Other notable Saw Doctors over the years include bass player Pearse Doherty (1988-2002), drummer John Donnelly (1989-2000), keyboard and accordion player Tony Lambert (1991-93), keyboard player and guitarist Derek Murray (1994-2005), and drummer Jim Higgins (2001-2004). Davy Carton's son David, guitarist with local punk trio Gurt, has occasionally filled in on bass guitar.
[edit] The Early Days
In 1987, when the Saw Doctors were playing a six-week residency at the Quays Bar, Galway, their show attracted the attention of The Waterboys, who were then recording their Fisherman's Blues album in nearby Spiddal. Impressed by the band's energetic performances, the Waterboys recruited the Saw Doctors as their supporting act during their 1988 Fisherman's Blues tour of Ireland and the UK. Waterboys' frontman Mike Scott also produced the band's first single, "N17," a song about an Irish emigrant longing to be back on the N17 trunk road that connects Galway with the Saw Doctors' hometown of Tuam.
Although "N17" did not chart upon its original release in 1989, the band's second single, "I Useta Lover," a humorous paean to an ex-girlfriend, became Ireland's biggest-selling single of all time in 1990. The song spent nine weeks at number one and prompted a scolding from the Roman Catholic Church because of a lyric in the song that describes a boy as being more interested in his beloved's backside than the mass he is attending. Re-released following the success of "I Useta Lover," "N17" reached number two in the Irish charts by Christmas 1990. In 1991, the band's debut album If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back entered the Irish charts at number one. The album's front cover features the band members' fathers wearing black leather jackets and holding guitars. The album's back cover shows the Saw Doctors themselves in an identical pose.
[edit] A Saw Doctor Wins the Lotto
In April 1993, the Saw Doctors' keyboard and accordion player Tony Lambert, who had previously played with Bonnie Tyler and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, won £800,000 (Irish punts) when he hit the jackpot in the Irish National Lottery's Lotto game. He had purchased his winning ticket in a local shop in Claregalway. Lambert at the time was living in a converted bus that he had driven from his native Wales to Galway and parked just off the N17 road. He subsequently left the band and settled in County Galway, where he restored an old house and built his own recording studio. The Saw Doctors' song "To Win Just Once" had been written shortly before Lambert hit the jackpot. It is the only song on the Same Oul' Town album that features his musicianship.
[edit] Music
The band is often compared with American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen due to their frequent invocation of local atmosphere, haunts, and characters, and their penchant for singing about ordinary people's lives in economically difficult times. Some Saw Doctors songs take autobiographical youthful memories -- of an attractive schoolgirl from the local Catholic boarding school ("Presentation Boarder"), of a missed opportunity to score a goal in a gaelic football game ("Broke My Heart"), of driving with a father while he points out local landmarks ("Galway and Mayo"), of first love ("Red Cortina"), of clumsy teenage seduction ("D'ya Wanna Hear My Guitar?"), of dreary Irish summers ("Will it Ever Stop Raining?"), or of farmers' harvest banter ("Hay Wrap") -- and weave them into wry but often touching portraits of rural Irish life. Other songs, written from more mature, serious perspectives, explore themes such as depression and desperation ("Same Oul' Town," "Sing a Powerful Song," "To Win Just Once"); emigrant longings for home ("N17", "The Green and Red of Mayo," "Midnight Express," "Going Home"); and cravings for adult love, acceptance, and togetherness ("Share the Darkness," "Clare Island," "Wake up Sleeping").
Davy Carton has explained the blend of sadness and exuberance in many Saw Doctors' songs, saying "There has to be a dark side because there's a dark side to life. We see that, but we're kind of cynical optimists, I suppose. I look at myself that way. You always like to see the bright things. That's the uplift in it" (Interview, The Boston Globe, April 20, 1997).
[edit] Morality and Politics
The Saw Doctors' have often been controversially anti-clerical, as when they appeared on the 1991 IRMA Awards (broadcast on live TV) with Davy Carton dressed as a priest and the remaining band members dressed as altar boys. Opposition to Roman Catholic morality permeates their songs. "Tommy K" commemorates Tuam DJ Tommy Kavanagh, whom a bishop drove out of the town for the crime of holding a disco during Lent, a time when Catholics were traditionally forbidden from attending parties and dances. In "I Useta Lover," the Lenten fast of a young woman becomes the scene of comic sexual proposition when the singer promises to "seduce her, in the future, when she's feeling looser." "Bless Me, Father" parodies Catholic confession with its saucy lyric "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned / She had big brown eyes and silky skin / Bless me, Father, I couldn't resist / Oh, Father, you have no idea what you've missed." Blasphemy is not necessarily the Saw Doctors' goal. Instead, they strive to show how anti-authoritarian and sexual impulses run as deeply as faith and religious belief in the Irish psyche; they also strive to redirect self-flagellating guilt into self-deflating irony.
The Saw Doctors have relentlessly exposed moral hypocrisy within the Catholic Church, as in "Howya Julia," a song about disgraced Bishop of Galway Eamon Casey, a staunch defender of priestly celibacy who in 1992 was discovered to have fathered a child some eighteen years previously with an American divorcée. The song's chorus ("Oh, mighty, mighty Lord almighty / It's off with the collar and off with the nightie / Jesus, Mary, and holy Saint Joseph / The beads are rattling now") combines cutting criticism with the Saw Doctors' typically effervescent humor.
On recent albums Villains and The Cure, the Saw Doctors' longstanding affection for their native land has led them to criticize the country's Celtic Tiger economic boom. Commenting on how the manic construction of highways and gaudy new houses throughout the Irish countryside disrespects land and ancestry, "Out for a Smoke" features the lyrics "The bones of our ancestors / Are buried in the field behind the shed / They could be lying there oblivious / Underneath cement before I'm dead." Given the band's deep feeling for the landscape and local history of western Ireland, such sentiments are not surprising. But having chronicled an era of economic depression, poverty, and emigration, the Saw Doctors find themselves in the ironic position of being unable to approve, either, of how "the good times" are changing their country's social and cultural fabric.
[edit] Live Shows and Recordings
Although the Saw Doctors have released only six studio albums over their two-decade career, their sparkling live shows have brought them international renown, and on many occasions have seen them upstage bigger-name acts at music festivals (Van Morrison at the Fleadh Festival 1997 in New York had to endure the crowd chanting throughout his set for a Saw Doctors encore). In 2004, the band finally recorded their exuberant live show before an enthusiastic sold-out crowd at the Black Box Theatre, Galway, and released a live audio CD and a concert DVD, both titled Live in Galway. In addition to the concert, the DVD contains a 50-minute documentary, "A Different Kind of World," following the Saw Doctors around their favourite locales in the West of Ireland (including a trip to Clare Island) and on tour in Brooklyn, New York. A follow-up live album, New Year's Day, again features the band in the Black Box Theatre, Galway, this time on New Year's Day 2005. The band donated profits from this album to victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
[edit] Other Projects
The Saw Doctors' song "She Says" is used as the theme song to the BBC Northern Ireland comedy series Give My Head Peace. Under the name "The Folk Footballers," Leo Moran and former Saw Doctor Padraic Stevens released The First Fifteen, a collection of songs that celebrate the Galway football team in the wake of its success in the 1998 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship. Re-released in 2001, when Galway again won the All-Ireland football championship, the album includes a host of Tuam talent on many of its songs. Further collaborations brought a self-titled album by another side-project band, "The Shambles." Guinness used the Saw Doctors song "Never Mind the Strangers" in a multi-million dollar ad campaign for Harp Lager in the USA. The Saw Doctors made a film appearance in Walter Foote's directorial debut, The Tavern. The song "Same Oul' Town" is featured in the film.
[edit] Fans
The Saw Doctors have a rabid international fan base that has been compared to that of the Grateful Dead. Fueled by those in Ireland as well as those of Irish descent in the US, UK, and elsewhere, this unofficial fan club prides itself on seeing the Docs live as many times as possible. They meet online in a forum on the band's website and enjoy an interesting global ongoing conversation about the band.
[edit] Albums
- If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back (1991)
- All The Way From Tuam (1992)
- Same Oul Town (1996)
- Sing A Powerful Song [compilation] (1997)
- Songs From Sun Street (1998)
- Villains? (2001)
- Play It Again, Sham! [compilation] (2002)
- Live in Galway [live] (2004)
- New Year's Day [live] (2005)
- The Cure (2006)
[edit] Discontinued Releases
- Friends Demos B-Sides [contains other artists as well] (1994)
- Somewhere Far Away (1999)
- Live On New Year's Day [limited to 1000 copies, then re-released as "New Year's Day"] (2005)
