The Saw Doctors’ Leo Moran chats to GigsAndTours…..
What are you up to at this very moment?
Just in the door home from a day and night away in Dingle,
County Kerry – a bright and vibrant town on the South West
Coast of Ireland.
What can fans expect to experience at one of your shows?
A bunch of not-too-hard-on-the-ears songs, sung in a West
of Ireland accent and performed with energy to an
enthusiastic and loyally participating audience.
What is your favourite song to perform live?
All the ones that connect with people are most satisfying; I
particularly love ‘Same Oul’ Town’ though myself.
When you’re not performing what do you do to keep yourself
busy when you’re on tour / on the road?
I live in my birthplace hometown, Tuam, so I know loads of
people and there’s always a gig to go to or give someone a
hand with, always someone to go for a drink with, bins to be
put out, the dog to be walked, spot of fishing, un-approved
development to be challenged.
You’ve played a lot of great festivals this year, which was the best so far?
We really did have a super festival Summer of 2012; the highlight was
probably the one we played in Galway to tens of thousands of people
as part of the closing shenanigans of the Volvo Ocean Race where the
President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, introduced the band.
What’s the best gig you’ve ever played?
That’s a difficult one but our show in Tuam in 1991, our first hometown
show after we’d reached Number One in the Singles and Album Charts
was most memorable. Thousands of people gathered in the town for
the festival and the weather gods gave us the hottest weekend of the
year.
What was the first gig you ever went to?
The Boomtown Rats in Galway on New Year’s Eve, 1977. My friends.
father, Jimmy McHugh, brought his three sons and me. A momentous
night for us all.
Will you be playing any new material or a mixture of your back catalogue?
We’re a bit behind with the new material at the moment I’m afraid to say, but
we have a couple of things we’re working on – we wrote a tribute song to a
big sporting hero friend of ours in Galway who passed away a few months ago;
Chick Deacy. Chick played for Galway United and won a European medal
with Aston Villa.
Which other Artists are you listening to at the moment?
I’m terrible really, haven’t been listening to very much at all lately. I stick the
i-pod on shuffle and let it roll.
Which song do you wish you had written?
There are so many wonderful songs out there that touch people in different
ways; it’s hard to put yourself in a position of thinking you could have written
someone else’s song. Anto sang a song in the pub the other night, ‘You And
Me, We Had It All’ – you hear a song like that and you think ‘I’d love to have
written that but my and the writer’s view would never be exactly the same,
though the sentiment would be.
Who would you most like to collaborate with?
It’d be obvious to say Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits or the like, but music
doesn’t work like that; it’s much more personal and you’ll find that even the
greats like i mention don’t write their best outside their own scene. I think
I’ve collaborated with the most suitable songwriters for me – Davy Carton,
Padraig Stevens, and Paul Cunniffe (RIP).
Plans for the rest of the year?
We’re off on our annual trip around the UK from the end of November till nearly
Christmas, taking in some top of the range venues that are a pleasure and a
privilege to play in, like The Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Glasgow Barrowland,
The Manchester Apollo.