LEO & ANTO (OF THE SAW DOCTORS) RESCHEDULED DATE ANNOUNCED FOR FRIDAY 27TH JUNE 2014 Leo & Anto - A Biography In the Summer of 2013 with The Saw Doctors on a year long sabbatical, two band members and friends, Leo Moran and Anthony Thistlethwaite, have put together an acoustic show that will include different takes on well-known Saw Doctors songs, versions of lesser-known band songs, a few from Anthonys solo-albums and other songs written recently with Tuam songwriter Padraig Stevens. Its all new and fresh and challenging and scary and exciting ..... When Leo met Anto It was May 1st 1998 in Galway and fledgling local band from Tuam, The Saw Doctors, were playing at The Late Late Breakfast Show in The Warwick Hotel - a fundraising event for the Galway Arts Festival. The songs kicked off at lunchtime and children and their arts-patron parents danced and sang along while Flanagans Bar earned victory in the cocktail competition with their lethal-proven concoction The Claddagh Collapse. Eleven miles out the road in the seaside village of Spiddal on the shores of Galway Bay, The Waterboys, who were creating a giganticbuzz having moved to Ireland from London after the international success of their huge hit album, This Is The Sea and its chart-topping single, The Whole Of The Moon, were in the middle of recording their new record Fishermans Blues in Spiddal House, an old estate residence temporarily converted into a state-of-the-art rock and roll studio. Somewhere in the middle of The Saw Doctorss marathon four-hour set in the Warwick Hotel, Waterboy Anthony Thistlethwaite arrived with his Sax and got up and started blowing along with the band; the main gig finished and the musicians moved to the dining room to continue with the powerful wave of music they were surfing. On that evening in The Warwick Hotel a musical friendship between Leo and Anto was born that continues to this day. A few months later Waterboys singer Mike Scott asked The Saw Doctors to support the band on the Irish tour the following December; this led to their supporting The Waterboys all over Britain in the Spring of 1989. Mike produced The Saw Doctors first single, N17, and Anthony arrived into Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin late in the evening after awaiting a call in the pub next door for a number of hours, and valiantly put down a driving sax riff on the outro of what has become a classic Irish single. Through much of the 90s Anthony toured Ireland, Britain, the US, Europe and Australia with The Saw Doctors and at the beginning of the new millennium when the bands original bassist, Pearse Doherty, left the practice, Anthony took over on the bass, an instrument he had originally played with the Waterboys way back. Leo Moran Leo Moran was born in the small market town of Tuam of a wet November Monday in the Ireland of the 1960s; a damp, grey state ruled by Fianna Fail, the Catholic Church and the GAA where nuns were androgynous terrorists and priests did their best to try and prevent the Sixties from arriving into the country. In 1977 he turned 12 - what a year to do so. Punk exploded in New York and London and made its way to Tuam; not just because Johnny Rottens father was originally from Gilmartin Road in Tuam - but it was a bonus. A culture of original writing existed in the town - Tom Murphy, Irelands greatest living playwright was the god-father of the local writers, who incuded Mai OBrien, Leos grandmother - and this allied with the do-it-yourself philosophy of punk got young minds racing with creativity. By 1979 some of them had at last figured out how to play a few chords and join in making the racket; Leo was in a band with the McHugh brothers, Cuser and Mouse - The Mix - who supported the local punky power-pop trailblazers, Blaze X. The two Blaze X singers and writers were Paul Cunniffe and Davy Carton, and their manager was the slightly older and wiser Padraig Stevens. Blaze X released a single and supported U2 amongst other things, and disbanded in 1981. Mouse and Leo did a spell in the mid 80s in the reggae flavouredToo Much For The White Man - a group of their friends with whom Mouse had emigrated to London for a while and had fallen in love with all things Jamaican. Leo Moran formed The Saw Doctors with Davy Carton and Davys next door neighbour, Mary OConnor, somewhere in the mid-80s. Davy had been in an exciting punky power-pop band in 1980 by the name of Blaze X, with fellow singer and song-maker-upper, the late Paul Cunniffe and when they became defunct Leo felt that there was a danger that there were great songs that might lie low and never be heard again. So Carton, OConnor and Moran began resurrecting some of the creations of the Blaze X time whilst starting to write new songs. Padraig Stevens, a master songwriter had been manager of Blaze X and he joined the Doctors, playing drums and writing. Between the jigs and the reels, they wrote a good few songs including one which they grafted on a Blaze X original, a song Paul sang by the name of I Used To Lover Her - with new verses and using the Blaze X version for the chorus, to distinguish it from the original, they called it I Useta Lover. The Cunniffe/Carton/Stevens/Moran song was released as the bands second single in Ireland in 1990 and became not only the countrys best-loved, but also biggest selling single in history. It kicked off The Saw Doctors first of seven studio albums, If This Is Rock & Roll, I Want My Old Job Back and propelled The Saw Doctors into a gigantic Irish success and an international touring outfit that has built up a supremely loyal and faithful fan-base all over the world, but in particular in the United States, where they have toured in the region of a hundred times, and in Britain where the amount of visits would simple be un-countable. Anthony Thistlethwaite Anthony Thistlethwaite grew up on the land. His parents somehow managed to combine being art teachers with running a hundred acre farm in the lush green heart of England. Early dreams of being a lion-tamer soon gave way to Rock n Roll as first The Beatles and then the Rolling Stones took over his world. To kill time during a six-month contract in the oilfields of Basrah, Iraq, he took a saxophone along for the ride. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon soon gave way to hanging out in the Cafe Mazet, HQ of the buskers in the Latin quarter of Paris. Twelve months on and hes ready to leave the City of Light for the Smoke, it being time to join a proper band and London being the place to do it. The first 33 rpm vinyl to carry his name was Robyn Hitchcocks Groovy Decay. It wasnt long before the phone rang and a young Scotsman asked him to come down and add that dirty, smokey New York alley tenor sax to his passionate songs. So began The Waterboys. Their first single, A Girl Called Johnny featuring just Mike Scotts vocal and piano with Anthonys saxophone carrying the breaks. This seed of a band went on to grow and blossom and eventually, after three albums and some acclaim their path took them to Wild West of Ireland where they met The Saw Doctors and a whole new adventure began..... Anthonys enthusiasm and appetite for Rock n Roll has led him to play with others along the way; Bob Dylan, Johnny Thunders, The Psychedelic Furs, Sinead OConnor, Bruce Foxton, World Party, Donovan, Fairport Convention, Fairground Attraction, The Pogues, the Mission, and Sharon Shannon have all given him reason to smile over the years. And, on stage at a UNICEF charity concert back in the Smoke, when a harmonica-playing blues-singing Bruce Willis hollered Saaaaaxophooooone, he didnt need asking twice to step up to the microphone and let fly.........
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 11:03:19 +0000
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