Bebo

Irish Connections <ICONSFESTIVAL>

	The SAW DOCTORS | By Steve Morse	863 Tage her
	The Saw Doctors have been called Ireland’s most popular band since U2, but they appreciate the effort of this year’s ICONS Festival to move beyond strictly a Celtic base. “It’s nice to see it diversifying. It isn’t just drawing Irish people alone,’’ says Saw Doctors guitarist Leo Moran. “It’s nice to see it moving out across the community. I think that’s always a good thing.’’ The Saw Doctors, who have scored a number of hit songs in Ireland, perform Friday, Aug. 10 at the ICONS Festival in Canton, on the same bill with the Black Crowes and Black 47. “Festivals are all about people enjoying themselves,’’ adds Moran. “And it’s good to have variety at a festival. We’ve even played some bluegrass festivals. We’re by no means bluegrass, but we have profited from the fact that people would have been listening to bluegrass all day and it’s just nice to get a break. I think in modern times that festivals are getting less picky about their definitions. Whatever entertains people and whatever makes them enjoy themselves, I think that’s a good thing.’’ The Saw Doctors have been around for 20 years, but thanks to their remarkable, cranked-up enthusiasm on stage, they keep attracting a youthful crowd. “We’re delighted that our fan base is as energetic as it is,’’ says Moran. “One of the great things for us is that we’re getting a lot of teenagers and younger people coming to the gigs and liking the songs and giving back their energy, too. If you have an audience that is generally aging, you’re going to lose a few points on the energy level. I don’t know why, but we’re able to replenish the audience all the time with younger people.’’ Aiding in that process is the Saw Doctors’ ability to connect thematically with that age group. Consider their recent single, “I’m Never Gonna Go on Bebo Again.’’ It’s about being pursued by an ex-lover on Bebo, which is a rival to Internet giant MySpace (and is more popular in Ireland and Scotland). “We were just having fun with the Bebo song,’’ says Moran. “But we do have Bebo pages and we realized it’s a great way of reaching a certain amount of people very quickly. … When all the people connected with you open their home page, they can see when you’ve posted something, which is better, I think, than having MySpace or having your own website. … You get immediate contact with people. If you have a bit of news, or if you have a blog, or if you have a gig coming up or whatever, it’s good for that. Moran also understands the philosophical implications of this high-tech revolution. “Obviously, people are so much more vulnerable to being contacted nowadays than they would have been 10 or 15 years ago. And Anton, our bass player, was just saying that ‘Nothing is private anymore.’ Because if you get up and sing a song in a pub or wherever, somebody has a (cell) phone and the next thing you know, you’re on YouTube the following morning. It’s definitely pushing toward that type of world where everything is public.’’ Maybe one reason that the Saw Doctors stay so current is that they hail from free-spirited Galway area in the west of Ireland. (To be exact, they’re from Tuam – about 20 miles north of Galway City.) “Galway City is changing a bit and becoming a bit more homogenized, but I think it still has that essence of being free-spirited,’’ says Moran. “There were times that I lived in Galway City and walked up the street and I couldn’t meet anyone who wasn’t an actor or a musician or a playwright, you know? It was a great center for creativity and the arts – and that was a great influence on us. We had to stand in there and become part of that. Maybe ‘compete’ is the wrong word, but there definitely was a lot of quality creativity going on around you, and you had to up your game.’’ The Saw Doctors have been able to do things their way by writing about ordinary folk from their home area (they’ve been compared to Bruce Springsteen in this regard) and incorporating their regional accents into their music. “When we started out, there were a lot of big bands in Ireland, obviously U2 being the biggest one,’’ says Moran. “But everyone seemed to be singing like they lived out in the mid-Atlantic. There was nobody singing with an Irish accent. And there was certainly no one singing in rock ‘n’ roll with a west of Ireland accent! And that seemed to be what we fell into doing. “I supposed we thought, ‘If Hank Williams was able to sing about where he lived, and Steve Earle could sing about where he lived, and the Jam could sing about London, then we want to emulate them, but not copy them.’ We want to do what they did with their language and their words and their accent. I think that’s what we were working from. But I think it was subconscious. I’m not sure how much we thought about it!’’ Ultimately, the success of the Saw Doctors is due to the songwriting partnership of Moran and singer Davy Carton. And just how does the chemistry work? “What happens is that Davy lives 15 miles from me and I go up to his house and we put on the kettle … and some days we pick up the guitars and some days we don’t,’’ says Moran. “I’m probably more of a lyrics man and he’s probably more a tunes man, but it’s not always like that. Sometimes it works – and sometimes it doesn’t. We don’t even know how it works. “We were just very lucky that we wrote a few songs that were popular enough in Ireland to carry that popularity abroad -- and then we were able to go abroad and build on that. It was very lucky. We definitely didn’t expect it.’’ Steve Morse is a longtime writer for the Boston Globe and current Critic At Large for WBOS-FM. He can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com.
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