Saw Doctors – 30 years turning the ordinary into extraordinary

You know you’re getting older when you doze off during the evening news and you wake up during Reeling in the Years – and you can no longer see the joins between one and the other.

It was the same sort of feeling last week when the Saw Doctors marked the 30th anniversary of the day I Useta Lover topped the Irish charts. Could it really be that long ago? Were our glory days now consigned to history?

Times flies, whether you’re having fun or not – and yet, when you see it as 1990, it doesn’t seem so long ago at all.

The Saw Doctors were the soundtrack to our younger days; pure Galway voices singing songs about Red Cortinas and Presentation Boarders, Clare Island and the N17; finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Their detractors dismissed their music as agri-pop, but they just missed the point. Bruce Springsteen built a career singing about Asbury Park – so why not a Galway band singing about Galway?

Of course they’re not to everyone’s taste and that’s fine, but to dismiss them as irrelevant is a different thing; they never played a gig that didn’t send the crowd home happy.

Even now, ten seconds into I Useta Lover and you’re smiling because they caught the symbolism of simple things in a way that few have before or since.

They weren’t just a Galway band – not least because about half of them weren’t from Galway – and they weren’t just an Irish band. I’ve seen them play in parts of the UK where the Irish haven’t a foothold and yet the crowd got them.

Because they knew how to entertain and have the craic – but they were also deadly serious about their art.

Read the full column in this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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