"In Ireland we're carrying the baggage of having been pop stars, so a couple of songs take precedent in people's minds, and we're constantly fighting that. Whereas in the States, they listen to all the songs equally."

Leo Moran

Saw Doctors' co-founders Leo Moran and Davy Carton, of Tuam, County Galway, never set out to be pop stars. And yet that's exactly what happened upon the release of their second single, "I Useta Lover," in 1989. The song shot to the top of the Irish charts, and stayed there for an astounding nine weeks. A re-release of the band's first single, "N17," was another tremendous success. And all of this preceded completion of that band's first album, If This Is Rock N Roll, I Want My Old Job Back. Since those heady days, the Saw Doctors have settled into a role more in keeping with what Moran and Carton had in mind -- respected, hard-working, blue-collar rock band. (For more of the band's history, see O'Connell Street's Guide to Celtic Rock.)

O'Connell Street caught up with Saw Doctors' singer and guitarist Moran by phone recently, before the band had left for an American tour that includes a stop in Philadelphia on March 14 for an appearance on Fox 29's morning show Good Day, Philadelphia, and again on March 18 for a show at the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street.

We hear you had some trouble with your American record label.
They ended up folding up, and in the time when they were folding themselves up they weren't really in position to promote [the band's latest CD, Songs from Sun Street] very well. So we got left behind a little bit as regards to having a bit of promotion done for us from a record company perspective.

When did all this happen?
It's been happening over the last couple of years, you know? We didn't realize they were going to be taken over [by a larger company] until after the job was nearly done. And it's just that all their energy had gone into fighting the take-over or whatever was going on, I'm not even sure of the details to tell you the truth. It just meant that they hadn't time or energy for promoting the band so We did, I suppose, suffer a little bit because of that.

Did it affect your touring schedule or recording schedule?
No, no, it didn't at all. It just meant that we would be over in the States doing gigs and getting on pretty well with the gigs but maybe not reaping all the benefits of doing good shows, you know what I mean? We went to the Winnipeg folk festival at one stage in the summer of '98, 10 of us flew specially over from Ireland to do the folk festival and there was no CDs at the festival. Every other band at the festival had their CDs there. We managed to get the personnel over from Ireland but not the CDs from New York, so That was a bit frustrating.

Do you have a new American label now?
No, but we're hoping to gain some note, there's a couple of labels coming to see us this trip over, and hopefully a couple more might come as well, so hopefully we'll have a new label by the summer time. We're hoping.

We also heard you've added some new members to the band.
We have a little brass section, yeah. Anthony Thistlewaite, he used to play with the Waterboys And there's a young trumpet player called Danny Healy who's a bit of a prodigy of a trumpet player. He's a local fellow here from Galway. So we're lucky enough to have the two lads with us now for this trip. It adds a different color to the sound for us, so you're playing older songs with a new feel, and then they bring on ideas for new things. It's a nice flavor for people who are used to seeing us as well, they get a different gig.

Is this a sign that the Saw Doctors might have a different sound in the future?
I don't know, really. We'd like to try and make an album with a slightly different sound this time, I think. I don't know if it will be a totally brass-based kind of sound, but we'd like to make some kind of an album that would surprise people -- not break the mold so much, but preserve the essence and dress up the songs in slightly different clothes.

What's the status of recording right now, are you working on another album?
We've a lot of songs that we need to record, but we don't have the time to record them. But I'm very confident. We have a great collection of songs and I'm really looking forward to doing it. We just need to get into the studio and decide what sort of sound or feel we want to give to them and go and get to it, because everybody wants to have an album out as soon as possible. It helps the gigs, it helps everything when you have something released for people to listen to and have at home or have in their car or whatever. It moves the plot on! [laughs]

Are you finding that your audiences in America are getting larger or different in any way?
Yeah, we're getting larger audiences all the time. We've been very lucky. The [Guinness] Fleadhs in New York and Boston and Chicago and San Francisco have been great shop windows for us, as regards people seeing us who would never have seen us before. So we gained a lot of fans from those. And each gig that we do, like Pittsburgh, say, and Philadelphia, and places like there where we've been to four and five times, it's really picking up now, and people know what to expect. The first couple of times we go to a city generally we get an Irish audience who would have heard about the band back home, or heard [of us] from their relations back home. But after each visit then it becomes a much more American audience. We get a different mixture then after each visit back. So it's very satisfying to see whole loads of different races, colors and creeds dancing around to a few songs we wrote back in the west of Ireland. It's fantastic satisfaction.

You guys have had quite a journey. Did you ever expect to achieve as much as you have when you were setting out?
No, no. I mean, our first ambition was to release a single, and we managed to do that. And then we managed to release a second one, and it went to number one. So we thought we were on a train that was out of control at that stage. And nowadays that sort of euphoria of the phenomenon of having a hit single has died away completely now, so we're much more just a band that's recognized for doing good shows, has good songs and puts out decent albums -- which is a much more comfortable way to be perceived, actually! [laughs]

Less pressure?
Less pressure, and it's just a more real thing. We never really wanted to be pop stars, but we kind of fell into it for a while just because we had a couple of songs that just went up the charts. I mean, it's a great stepping stone and it does bypass a lot of the harder rungs on the ladder as regards being able to do bigger gigs and getting to a wider audience, but it's lovely now to be more like a -- I suppose it's more in the tradition of the American rock and country bands who do loads of gigs. I think that should be our role model, really. Try and emulate the likes of a Steve Earl or a John Prine or something like that, where they do lots of gigs and they're well known for having decent songs but they wouldn't be pop stars by any means.

Do you feel that your early success gave you a certain amount of freedom to pursue the kind of music you wanted to?
Well I suppose we felt justified in that we had created some music that people liked and took to, and yeah, I suppose it encouraged us to keep doing music and keep sticking to the essence of what we do, which is sort of bringing a west of Ireland vocabulary and accent to pop music -- which I would see as our, sort of, manifesto.

How would you differentiate your music from other Irish rock and pop bans?
Well, our music is more community-based -- it's based in a location, it's a small-town scenario we're involved in, whereas a lot of the more famous Irish acts would deal more in universal kind of artistry, I suppose. Like U2, who kind of sing like universal pop hymns, or Van Morrison, who would have been very influenced by his trips to the States and blues and all of that. We are quite influenced by a lot of American music, and by a lot of different music, but our essence is that we're from a small town in Ireland, which hopefully we try and relate to any small town, anywhere. But we will depict our details, which will hopefully be understandable, and recognizable to people from any such place.

Is the reception of the crowds different in American than in Ireland?
Slightly different. In Ireland we're carrying the baggage of having been pop stars [laughs], so a couple of songs take precedent in people's minds over other ones, in Ireland, and we're constantly fighting that. Whereas in the States, they listen to all the songs equally. They haven't been inundated with any particular song. So in some ways it's more comfortable for us to do a tour or a show for that kind of audience. And there's a very subtle difference as regards the rhythms that American audiences like The American audiences love a real four-four, straight rock four-four kind of a rhythm, whereas you find in Ireland the one-two rhythm is a bit more prevalent in people's nature. And we found that when we played in Germany it was even more prevalent -- you know, that dum-cha, dum-cha. Whereas in America they like [sings] 'Why do I always want you' -- that kind of steady, rocking, I suppose like the Cars or something; I suppose they would be the epitome of that style.

What kind of music do you guys listen to?
I'm very likely to listen to Tom Waites or Bruce Springsteen or Hank Williams, that kind of stuff -- myself, now. Everybody else [in the band] listens to different stuff. Davy's a big Credence fan. Pearse [Doherty] would probably be the most up-to-date of us, he's a Beck fan, he listens to all the newer stuff. And John Donnelly's a rock fan, he loves rock music [laughs] -- he's the drummer. Derrick our keyboard player is a disc jockey all his life, so he's always conscious of something you can dance to, he likes dancing and that kind of music. So it's pretty mixed up in there, you know what I mean?

Have you had the experience of young musicians telling you that you were an influence on them?
Well, I find it hard to believe, but it does happen sometimes, yeah. Not too many of them, though. We wouldn't be recognized as being virtuoso musicians or anything, I suppose. Our qualities are that we have a few songs that we make up that people like to listen to which are quite simple songs, so we've never had people coming up and saying 'I wish I could play the guitar like you' [laughs].

But the same would be true of Bruce Springsteen.
Yeah, I suppose, something like that, yeah. We do have people that say 'How do you write the songs' and 'I love them' and 'I'd like to try and write songs like that' or whatever. So yeah, we do. Which is quite flattering [laughs]. But I still don't know how we write them.

Past installments of Q&A:
Thomas Cahill, author
Gary McMichael, Northern Ireland politician