The Saw Doctors at Large

Dai Jeffries celebrates a new Saw Doctors album with a trip to Dublin

Twenty-five years on, The Saw Doctors, reunited with producer Philip Tennant, have released their seventh studio album. The Further Adventures of The Saw Doctors is being praised as one of their very best.  There have been many changes over the years but Leo and Davy Carton remain the Glimmer Twins of the band.  Without them there is no Saw Doctors.   Éimhín Cradock, roughly the same age as the band itself, is their newest recruit.

“I met Leo about eight years ago and the whole crew about six years ago – I was supporting them with a guy called Noelie McDonnell and got to know them on tour” .  And then? “It was funny the way it started: they said ‘We’re stuck for a drummer, how do you feel about it?’  Later they told me they had me in mind for the job but I fell into rather than being offered it”.

Éimhín has been a fan of the band for years and had no trouble learning the back catalogue.  Now he has co-written some of the new album – quite a step.

“It was a big surprise for me.  Leo first suggested I should be working on a few bits.  I didn’t take him seriously but then I wrote a few chords that ended up as ‘Be Yourself’ and Davy and I worked on it.  I was really surprised how easy it was to work with them because, in my eyes, they’re phenomenal songwriters.”

Kevin Duffy joined after the release of The Cure and has waited a long time to make his recording debut with the band.  “I used to go and see them when they first played in Galway.  I was in another band at the time but I was a fan from the start.  I’ve been with them now for five years – I’d heard that Derek was leaving, which intrigued me; I got the call and I was thrilled.  I never had any rehearsal with the band.  They gave me a load of CDs and I spend a few weeks playing acoustic guitar at the side of the stage and singing backing vocals when I could.  After that I took over on keyboards.”

Anthony Thistlethwaite has been in and around The Saw Doctors for more than twenty years, ever since they borrowed him from The Waterboys to play on their first album.

“The Waterboys started in London, of course, and we’d had three successful albums before we came to Ireland to work on Fisherman’s Blues in 1986.”  It quickly becomes apparent that Anthony has a perfect memory for dates.  When did he first meet The Saw Doctors?  “I first played with them on 1 May 1988 while we were recording Fisherman’s Blues out in Spiddal.  While we were there, The Saw Doctors were playing in Galway – they were a fledgling band really – and we became friends.  Eventually Mike (Scott) produced their first single, “N17”, and I played Sax on it.”

“When The Waterboys split up, The Saw Doctors asked me to tour with them, which I did from 1992 to 1995, and as I’d played on several of their albums it made perfect sense.  I took a sabbatical and went travelling, then moved back to Galway and Leo invited trumpeter Danny Healy and I to come out as The Saw Doctors’ brass section.  When Pearse left I switched back to bass and that’s the evolution so far.”

When did work start on the album?  Leo: “It must be about a year and a half ago.  We started in Rockfield – I think we recorded four songs in the first week and then we went back and re-recorded them. We scrapped a good few versions of songs; they were good but you listen back and think they were decent but we wanted to get the extra on this album.  We started with the ethos of making sure that things were as good as we could possibly make them and we stuck with it.”

Anthony: “We’ve worked very hard to make a piece of work that is recorded in the manner of today – nowadays there’s Pro Tools and all sorts of stuff that wasn’t in the studio before so we’ve been making a record the modern way.  We did a lot of sessions in Rockfield and Grouse Lodge”.

Were all the songs written before recording began?  Leo:  “No, I can’t believe it because if you told me to do it the way we did it, I’d say it won’t work.  We generally went for a week at a time and we only had maybe one or two songs and that’s not enough to go recording for a week, but we managed to get enough together each time to go home with and then come back with the next batch”.

Davy: “We always have lots of ideas, so usually we get together in the studio and put the pieces together.  The first song written for the album was ‘Goodbye Again’ and that could have been four or five years ago but we didn’t have an album at the time.”

Leo: “I’m more likely to have words and he’s more likely to have tunes.  We don’t throw them on the floor, but we have these bits and pieces and we juggle them around and see what fits together.”

Despite the modern techniques, the band still records organically.  Anthony: “We play live when we put the band tracks down.  The spirit is in the songs and the arrangements – you can never get away from being The Saw Doctors.”

Producer, Philip Tennant has a long association with The Saw Doctors and oversaw the new album.  “I don’t think the process of recording is that different.  We use a bit more technology with Pro Tools and digital editing but we always used to do that; we were always at the forefront of technology in whatever period and the key things with The Saw Doctors have always been the songs, Davy’s voice and Leo’s low guitar lines.  They are the constants and the fact that we have a modern studio doesn’t make that big a difference.  We set up everybody live, including vocals, and we go for it and a lot of tracks on the album are first or second takes.’

Leo:  “That’s where the buzz is – the interaction.  I don’t know what it is but you know it when you hear it.”

So how much of the recording process is art and how much is artifice?  Surely you can fake a lot in the studio?  Philip: “I’m not sure you can – the heart and the soul of a band cannot be cheated.  Maybe you can tune something, maybe you can correct some timing but you can’t instill energy into a track and you can’t create something that engages unless whoever has performed it is engaged”.

It has been five years since The Cure and I wondered if that was the natural life cycle of an album.  Leo was answering the question before I’d finished asking it.  “It’s always too long.  It may be our natural life cycle but it’s too long.  I’d like to do them more often but I don’t know why it takes us so long.”

Davy: “Because we tour so much, we find it hard to get into the studio and for us that five-year period just went by so quickly.  For people waiting for an album I’m sure it feels like a long time.  In Ireland they thought we’d broken up years ago.” Davy reckons that the UK is still the band’s biggest touring market although they make two or three trips to America every year.

‘Well Byes’ is the latest of the band’s songs that seems to an outsider to depict a mythical Ireland, something from a TV show about working class Irish lads and their preoccupations with girls, football and drink.  Leo: “It’s all very real.  I believe I could bring you to Tuam this week and show you everything that’s in our songs.  My house is only 150 yards from the square but sometimes it can take me an hour to walk that distance because I meet so many people.”

Éimhín:  “It would happen to me in my local town and for Leo in Tuam, sure.  The album photographer, Steve Gullick, went round the town with him and was amazed at how he was revered and the banter that went on in the pubs.”

So are the tales in those early songs autobiographical or fiction?  Leo: “A lot of it is autobiography because I’m not imaginative enough to be good at fiction. . I don’t know how people write plays and books – I have great admiration for them.  Most of our songs are based in our own little realities”.  Davy:  “It’s observing people as well but a lot of things happen to yourself.  Leo’s a great man for recounting his memories so most of them are based in fact.”

Some of those songs – ‘Presentation Boarder’ for example – don’t feel quite so comfortable coming from a middle-aged band but Leo is unabashed.  “I think audiences like the songs – we play them properly with humour and energy – and we play to an awful lot of young people.  I don’t think they care what age we are.  Davy married a Presentation boarder so it’s a part of his life.”

At the time of the album’s launch, Squigley McHugh was storyboarding the comic that appears in tantalising fragments in the album booklet.  Davy:  “Squigley had the saying ‘The Further Adventures’ and I think it stuck in Leo’s head. He had the idea of setting up the young feller on the cover.  Squigley says the comic starts out like Scooby-Doo and ends up as The Blues Brothers.”

I asked Leo to explain the band’s name.  He told me the story and summed it up like this:  “It’s a title of false self-importance we gave ourselves.”

Dai Jeffries

R2 Magazine - January/February 2011