Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Instead of the N17, on the road to God knows where

My band spent a lot of time playing gigs at 'cool' venues, with mixed results. In the US, however, it was also worth hitting the neon shamrock circuit occasionally

Tolu Makay has managed to connect different eras with her version of the Saw Doctors' N17.

On the road to God knows where, instead of the N17 They had the wrong road for a start. The N17 should not have been inspiring songs as Ireland entered the 1990s. The road you wanted then was the M50, the road to the future. It only ran from J6 to J11 at the time, but you could see where it was going (around and around). One day, it would enable you to get stuck in traffic on a ring road, like in proper countries.

The N17’s time had passed. It was Italia 90! Ireland was moving out of the ‘exporting its population’ phase and into the ‘taking over British media’ phase. We were about to send them Graham Norton, Dara O’Brien and Father Ted. This emigration was lighter, more fun and, crucially, you could go home.

The Saw Doctors continued their outdated approach in the UK. They opted to go the ‘Irish Route’, playing Irish venues rammed with appreciative, adoring, audiences. In Something Happens, we made no such mistake. We faced into the ‘UK Toilets'. Venues like the Duchess Of York, barren and unwelcoming but with English audiences, sometimes in double figures.

In the USA, mind you, Irish venues were harder to ignore. There, one or two gigs in an Irish venue could offset the losses from three weeks of the ‘cool’ ones like CBGBs or Max’s. We christened these the ‘Neon Shamrock’ tours as every venue had one, bright, green, ominous and always on.

The audiences were interesting. At a gig in the Bronx a guy took off his winter jacket and folded it at my feet as I sang onstage. He quickly showed me the gun in the pocket and winked in a ‘keep an eye on that’ way. Then he carried on dancing while I minded his gun. When the gig was over he got onstage and played the kit. We let him.

I met another guy in a book shop in Colorado, babbling excitedly and dressed for this new American life as a young David Crosby. And a quiet couple with their new born, Bostonian, son, a ‘Young American', we joked. Or the audience at Tracks in Queens, one of whom said after that gig: “That was amazing! Like a Saturday night in Newmarket.” They were just ordinary Irish people coming to terms with the fact that, somehow, they had, it seemed almost by accident, found themselves in a position of making a life for themselves in a foreign land.

The same wasn’t true in Ireland. It was one way traffic at the airports. No one, it seemed, wanted to come here to live. And why would they? All we could offer was unemployment, crap food, and bad weather. Not to mention the Church. The idea of people coming here was ludicrous.

And then it changed. I won’t mention the Tiger, but suddenly there were motorways, jobs, a building boom and a population influx. An influx! Here! We were stunned. “Look at them,” we might have said a la Stewart Lee, “comin’ over ‘ere, with their skills, and their improved cuisine and their more diverse gene pools.” I felt mild discomfort. It was like people arriving unannounced at your door when you’re not sure the place is clean. You panic. Will our ‘good room’ be up to it? Have we clean towels? But they didn’t seem to mind. Then I heard someone say that the M50 was a “carpark from the day it was finished”.

“This is it,” I thought, “we’re a proper country now with actual immigration and a ring road ‘not fit for purpose.” Like all the great countries in the world!

Which made the crash of 2008 all the harder. People had thought those days were gone, the days of dropping their children to an airport, possibly for good. A man on the radio talked to me about his house being empty at Christmas, one child in Canada, the other in New Zealand. It had never been empty before. He was bereft.

All of those thoughts went through my head when I saw Tolu Mackay sing 'N17' on RTÉ over the new year. People holding up placards to say ‘hello’ to loved ones that they couldn’t get back to due to Covid. Tolu, somehow combining all of those Irelands, connecting all those worlds, old and new, so gracefully, so beautifully, so powerfully.

And she did that with a song about the N17 and not the M50! My discomfort, to realise that the Saw Doctors may been onto something, knows no bounds.