What the Saw Doctors teach writers about voice
The Saw Doctors were formed from the remnants of other bands in the mid-1980s, out of Tuam.
Growing up just over the Mayo/Galway border in Ballinrobe, I felt like I had stumbled into the maternity ward for the birth of a new musical dimension.
Something had arrived that hit us in a completely new and unexpected way. As is often the case, you didn’t know what you were missing until it came. Those who once pushed square wheels up hills know the feeling.
They wrote about the Concern collection, the twisting, turning, winding roads of Galway and Mayo, and Sunday Mass, and all that goes on there, including, deliciously, what probably shouldn’t.
They confirmed what we already knew deep down. There is more than the obvious way to break a young man’s heart. Say you travelled down (we’d say “up” in Ballinrobe, in Tuam apparently it’s “down”) to “Roscommon CBS” on a “dreary afternoon” and didn’t get the final pass to put you in for an open goal.
Like the Docs, you knew the heartbreak experienced was comparable to anything you’d suffer at a Clonbur Community Centre disco – sport imitating life and vice versa.
In that song, one of the great omissions in Ireland’s musical canon – namely the lyrical potential of the word parallelogram – was finally exploited.
Buy On The Way Out in your local bookstore or from our online store
What really makes them stand out, from a writer’s point of view, is that upon finding their voice, they stuck with it. It’s as if Leo Moran, Davy Carton and the rest of them embarked on a mission to write the songs they themselves wanted to hear and never deviated from that.
Followed by fashion
They didn’t follow fashion. A type of fashion – a word the lads might blanche at themselves – followed them.
You can hear their commitment to who they are and what they believe in all the way through Never Mind the Strangers, including the understated mantra that “at least we took the challenge, we didn’t just pretend.”
For anyone writing, there’s something in that. It is so easy to try to shape things to fit a moment, or to meet the zeitgeist. Often, what you already have is enough, if you work with it.
Paradoxically, by never trying trying to be anything other than what they are, they became something larger entirely. They are truly the voice of people like themselves. To apply a mystical, magical sheen to the apparently ordinary is a great gift – a “gift of the divine”, to quote the words of their co-conspirator Padraig Stevens, like “turning water into wine.”
New generations, old impulses
Their words and music are still landing. The world has changed but watch a minor match between Mayo and Galway – “summertime in the stadium” – and you recognise the same impulses at work. Young people are still getting their hearts broken against Roscommon CBS. The red Cortina is gone – in most places anyway – but its symbolic value endures.
Their ‘true to themselves’ nature is also evident in the tiniest moments. It is impossible to listen to Leo and Anto Thistlewhaite perform Carmel Mannion’s Son without feeling anchored in the place from where their music emanates.
In that classic, we learn that the father of Carmel Mannion’s son, Tony Barrett, got a job ‘up above’ in Galway. Only an ear fully tuned to the nuance of colloquialisms appreciates the value of touches like that. And the same song gives us “abroad in Loggawania”. Will I rest my case?
Buy On The Way Out in your local bookstore or from our online store
The Saw Doctors took their songs out along the N17 and far beyond it, but they never sounded as if they were from anywhere but Tuam. Being grounded locally didn’t hold them back. It propelled them forward.
For a writer, the lesson is plain enough. If you’d like to read it, write it. It might find someone else. And if it doesn’t, sure what harm?
At least you’ll have taken the challenge. You’ll have done more than just pretend.
If you’re not a Saw Doctors fan but have found yourself moved to exploration by this paean, might I also recommend the aching I Hope You Meet Again and every enrapturing second of Share the Darkness. They’re the two greatest songs ever performed by the Saw Doctors. And if you don’t agree, I can find two more, and two more, and two more until we get you sorted.
More on the craft of writing: See HERE. I’m adding to this on an ongoing basis. As I learn, hopefully you can too. Every day is school day for us all.
