There are towns that produce musicians, and then there are towns where music seems to rise from the walls. Tuam has always been one of them.
Long before anyone had heard of the Saw Doctors, the Galway town was alive with songs, stories and the particular kind of craic that can turn an ordinary night into something people remember for decades. In the 1960s, three showbands operated out of the Ballygaddy Road. Later came punk, with Blaze X tearing into the Scout Hall and filling the room with a new and unfamiliar energy. Their single Some Hope sounded like a town discovering another way to make itself heard.
But by the 1980s, the mood had changed. The sugar factory closed. Unemployment grew. The dole queues lengthened. For many young people, there seemed to be only one direction to travel: out. The magic bus became a familiar route to somewhere else, carrying generations of young people from the West in search of work, opportunity and a future that seemed increasingly difficult to find at home.
And yet, in the midst of it all, something was happening.
In the back room of McEvoy's Jersey Bar, guitars and mandolins were passed from hand to hand. Songs were swapped. Stories grew. Free pints helped keep the music flowing. And among the musicians gathering there were two young songwriters, Leo Moran and Davy Carton, beginning to write about the world they knew: Presentation boarders, first loves, old towns, leaving and longing, and the roads that seemed to lead everywhere except home.
From those modest beginnings came a band that would capture something much bigger than itself.
Shamtown, a vibrant new musical theatre production written by Saw Doctors manager Ollie Jennings, tells that story — not as a conventional musical biography, but as a celebration of a place, a time and a remarkable community of people who made something extraordinary out of ordinary circumstances.
Rehearsals for Shamtown start in four week's time and the show comes to Galway's Mick Lally Theatre this November, bringing the music and memories of that era back into the city where so much of the West's cultural energy was gathering. Directed by award-winning theatre director Andrew Flynn, with musical direction by Carl Kennedy, the production brings together eight actors and three musicians, including Saw Doctors drummer Rickie O'Neill.
At its heart is the music.
Songs associated with the Saw Doctors — among them To Win Just Once, Same Oul' Town, Clare Island and I Useta Lover — provide the soundtrack, but their role is deeper than simply providing familiar melodies. These are songs that carry a particular West of Ireland voice: funny and melancholy, romantic and rueful, full of characters who know what it means to stay, what it means to leave, and what it means to come home.
I Useta Lover, co-written by Paul Cunniffe, Davy Carton, Leo Moran and Padraig Stevens, became one of the defining songs of its generation. But before it travelled around Ireland and far beyond, there was Tuam — the pubs, the rehearsals, the friendships, the setbacks and the sense that perhaps something could be built here after all.
That tension between departure and belonging runs through Shamtown. It is a story born in a recession, in a community wrestling with economic hardship and emigration, yet it is also a story about imagination. When there appeared to be little money and fewer opportunities, there was still music. When people were leaving, there were still reasons to gather. And when the future looked uncertain, a handful of young musicians began writing songs that gave people a way of seeing themselves.
The production itself grew from the memories of those who lived through that extraordinary period. During the Covid lockdown, Jennings began collecting anecdotes and recollections of the Tuam and Galway arts and music scene. Those memories eventually became the foundation for a theatrical work, developed further through a script workshop with Andrew Flynn.
The result is a portrait of a West of Ireland that feels both specific and universal.
It is about Tuam, certainly. But it is also about every small town where people gather in pubs and halls, where young musicians dream of getting out while secretly hoping there will be something worth coming back for. It is about friendship, ambition, failure, laughter and the strange alchemy that occurs when a community gives its artists enough room to dream.
And the story has the kind of ending that theatre was made for.
In September 1991, the West's Awake Festival came to Tuam Stadium. By then, the unlikely lads who had started out playing in the Jersey Bar had become one of Ireland's best-loved bands. Their return home was no longer a dream. It was a celebration.
That homecoming provides the emotional climax of Shamtown: the moment when the journey outwards finally bends back towards where it began.
This November, that journey comes alive again in Galway.
For a town and a city whose cultural history is inseparable from music, theatre and storytelling, Shamtown offers something particularly special: the chance to hear familiar songs differently, to remember the people and places behind them, and to revisit a moment when the West was finding its voice.
The guitars are ready. The stories are waiting.
And after all these years, the music is coming home.
