Roster Category: ROCK

Doctor Millar (aka Seán Millar) ought to need no introduction, particularly in Dublin, his home city. He’s a remarkable singer-songwriter and ‘theatre maker’ who has rightly notched up massive praise for his albums and theatrical projects. The Irish Times called him ‘the poet laureate of Dublin’s dark side, an Irish national treasure’, while Hotpress praised him as ‘Ireland’s greatest songwriter’, and for the RTÉ Guide ‘he remains Ireland’s best lyricist’. But yet his music has never been commercial. As he says “My first solo album The Bitter Lie (1997) was probably the best-reviewed Irish album that year, but it sold fuck all – nobody bought it! But elite hipsters still come up to me in bars and say it was the best Irish album of all time!”.

So what went wrong? Many people never got to hear his songs because they were rarely played on the radio or TV in Ireland, let alone the rest of the world. He was presumably considered too shocking or original. And he wasn’t helped by an incident when he was booked on a major RTÉ radio show when The Bitter Lie was released and he was chatting to the presenter. “It was 11AM on a Sunday morning, and the main listenership was people in their cars coming home from mass. I started playing, and he said ‘what were you doing last night?’, and the line came out ‘last night I made love with your wife in your bed, again’ (the opening to You’re Not Paranoid). I just imagined all those farmers crashing into ditches….”

Seán’s lyrics can be more startling than those of any punk band, but his aim is to tell stories of everyday lives, unexpected as these might be. His influences include both that classic Irish band Planxty and The Velvet Underground, and he sees himself as “a folk musician doing punk rock’n’roll stuff. Part of the folk tradition is telling the stories of one’s own time. The folk tradition also offered a sort of ant-showbiz performance thing that I loved. An honesty of expression, a way of being with an audience that didn’t feel like lying”.

That debut album proved that he was a great story-teller, often matching easy-going melodies matched against bravely original lyrics. It also included the bravely honest Alcohol Problem, and Saint Stephen, a beautifully-observed song about a man who becomes a priest because it seems there’s nothing else he can do (‘you’ve no particular talent, but nobody seems to mind. You’re a priest, Stephen’). Later songs included Donna Quixote (from The Deal, 1998), which is “a short story about a vain man and a beautiful woman” and sounds like a poignant Leonard Cohen ballad. You Just Can’t Let Things Go (from Always Coming Home, 2002) is a thoughtful piece about ageing and changing values, while Ruining Everything (2022) includes the upbeat Communion Money, “a celebration of love for my family”. The album includes contributions from the great Dónal Lunny (of Planxty fame) and “one of the great Irish musicians of all time. He was only supposed to be there for one song but ended up playing on a few because he liked the stuff. I was thrilled”.

Doctor Millar’s own story is as intriguing as his songs. After graduating from University College, Dublin with a degree in English Literature he headed to London to join friends who had moved there, and started a band, Doctor Millar and the Cute Hoors. They became a cult success in the UK, Switzerland and even Sicily, but then it all went wrong as “major labels saw us and expressed interest, then one by one started to pull out”. Seán ended up “working as a grill chef and trying to drink myself to death”.

Back in Dublin, the brilliant reviews for his first solo album didn’t help pay the bills. He was now happily married but “really struggling”. So he began to work as a community musician, hired by different organisations and using music to help solve social issues. He worked with young people who had been in court and told to do training in the arts. He worked with a community group in an area “with massive drug problems”, and another that helped women who had just come out of prison. Many of his projects involved community-based performance pieces, mixing music and theatre – and he went on to create much-praised music and theatre work for a far bigger audience.

Silver Stars told the stories of older gay Irishmen, based round interviews Seán had made in Ireland and New York, and the aim was to surprise and show that “these are extraordinary people having extraordinary lives”. Staged by Dublin’s celebrated Brokentalkers Theatre Company, the show played at the Bealtaine Fesival in 2008 and the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2009 and was then performed in New York, Paris, Finland and New Zealand. His second collaboration with Brokentalkers, The Blue Boy (for which he was musical director and provided the “dark, minimalist score”), was also a hit and toured widely in Europe. His many later theatre projects have included two shows that he wrote and directed himself, himself, including The Last ten Years, made with a group of recovering addicts and exploring the drug trade and the lives of Afghan opium farmers.

He says that “theatre is what I have lived on and raised my family on for the last twenty years” but his work as singer-songwriter “is the closest thing to my heart”. He has never stopped writing songs, and his musical adventures have included collaborations with his close friend Nick Kelly. They played together in the 5-piece Unelectables, reviving their punky roots, and are back together in Dogs, who play together as a duo “if nobody else can make it”. And they are doing rather well – they have played at Glastonbury for two years running and even had two singles play-listed on RTÉ.

But it seems extraordinary that so few people have heard that back-catalogue of massively-praised albums. “ I’d love for my albums to be better known”, said Seán. “That would be a dream of mine, for more people to hear them”.

It’s the very least he deserves.

(Robin Denselow, The Guardian)

“One of Ireland’s greatest songwriters” Hotpress“

“Millar is half Leonard Cohen and half Jarvis Cocker… he remains Irelands best lyricist” RTE Guide

“Full of honesty and integrity” The Journalist

“He is the poet laureate of Dublin’s dark side, an Irish national treasure” Irish Times