Irish roots rock

The Saw Doctors: From Tuam with love

by Jeffrey Gantz

The Chieftains, U2, Sinéad, Van Morrison, the Saw Doctors -- the Saw Doctors? All right, so this quartet from Tuam (a small cathedral town 20 miles northeast of Galway) aren't yet up there with the high kings of Irish music. But they're minor royalty in Ireland and England, and they're becoming a cult phenomenon in America, their infectious sellout shows sparking what New York Times critic Jon Pareles called "slam-reeling." On their three releases -- If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back, All the Way from Tuam, and Same Oul' Town (all on their own label, Shamtown) -- they create Irish pre-Beatles pop, with real tunes, and back-to-basics lyrics about girls, cars, friendship, making your way in the world. Mostly girls. It's too uncalculated to be retro -- call them a throwback band. Now they're touring America again (Northampton this weekend, Boston next), bringing songs from their upcoming fourth album (no title yet) and hoping to find an American distributor.

The Saw Doctors -- the name refers to traveling people who'd go around sharpening saws in the mills -- started to form up in 1987, with the two Tuam lads, Leo Moran (from a reggae band, Too Much for the White Man) and Davy Carton (from punkers Blaze X), getting together and attracting the attention of the Waterboys' Mike Scott, just down the road in Spiddal. U2's success would have been an obvious influence/goal, but as bass player Pearse Docherty (phoning in from a pub in Clonbur, near where John Ford shot The Quiet Man) points out, "The Saw Doctors are their own band. We're plowing our own furrow and are quite happy to do so."

In fact this group -- whose line-up is rounded out by drummer John Donnelly (from Roscommon) and button accordionist Derek Murray (like Docherty from Donegal; they all met at University College Galway) -- don't sound the least bit like U2, or like other Irish pop/rock bands (Waterboys, Hothouse Flowers, Pogues, Horslips, Stiff Little Fingers). Pearse identifies Leo as a big fan of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits, but you can also hear earlier voices -- a Duane Eddy guitar twang here, an Everly Brothers harmony there, echoes of a more innocent world, with the foundation of guitars, bass, and backbeat percussion given Irish color by accordion and mandolin and tin whistle (the Saw Docs are all multi-instrumental, and they have lots of guests).

Not entirely innocent: in the band's first hit, "I Useta Lover," our heroes are distracted from the Mass by "the glory of her ass" (and no, the Catholic Church wasn't happy about that). Then there's "Presentation Boarder," about a "fourth-year dead feek Presentation boarder" -- that is, a boarding student at Presentation College for girls in Tuam. But "dead feek"? Pearse gets a little flustered when I ask. "It's, well, uh, it's a girl you could, uh, go places with." So in a school run by nuns, there wouldn't be many like her? "Right, she'd be a very special Presentation girl," he concludes, obviously relieved not to have to explain further.

You'll have gathered this is a proudly local outfit -- "Too many bands are apologizing for where they are," Docherty insists -- and that accounts for a lot of the Saw Docs' charm. Their second hit, "N17," reflects nostalgically on the simple joy of tooling down the motorway from Galway to Tuam. "F.C.A." is about joining the Fórsa Cosantach Áitiúl, a kind of Irish national guard; in the middle there's a hilarious marine-drill break. "Macnas Parade" salutes the stunning Galway theater troupe whose floats and costumes graced Cambridge's St. Patrick's Day parade two years ago. Band members drummed for Macnas when the troupe led Dublin's St. Patrick's Day parade; Docherty, revealing the Saw Docs' good taste, adds, "Anytime we can afford Macnas, we get them on stage with us."

"Macnas Parade" is from Same Oul' Town, where the band rise to new heights. The title song is a blunt look at Irish country towns: you gotta get out, you wanna go back (the dour lyrics fade into bells from one of Tuam's two cathedrals). "All the One" tells us "we're all the one," but there's no folk/new-age wimpiness here, and no attitude, just country toughness and good will. "To Win Just Once" has been adopted by the Irish national football side (they should have listened harder before last week's disaster in Macedonia); "Share the Darkness" is an honest plea for closeness that incorporates a bit of Gaelic from Bríd Dooley (who sounds fetchingly like Clannad's Máire Brennan). Docherty says there'll be more Gaelic on the new album. But the best news is that there'll be a new album; perhaps some American label will have the sense to pick it up. "We'd like to think," Docherty concludes, "that 10 or 20 years from now, people will still be singing our songs." Don't bet against it. n

The Saw Doctors appear at the Iron Horse in Northampton this Sunday and Monday, April 13 and 14, and at the Roxy here in Boston on Patriots Day, April 21. Copies of their three releases have been spotted at local Irish stores like the Boulevard Deli in Dorchester and the Faneuil Street Market in Brighton; HMV has All the Way from Tuam.