20 September 1990
We’d already had a stage culchie (Miley from Glenroe) at number one that year, plus a stage Dub (Liam Harrison) for balance. The Irish live rock music scene was thriving: bands like The Stunning and The 4 Of Us enjoyed genuine chart success and huge live audiences, the first Féile had rejuvenated the Irish summer festival scene, and The Waterboys and the Hothouse Flowers had created a viable trad Irish rock sound. Italia ’90 had unleashed a feel-good public mood of joy and partying – perhaps not the catalyst for the Celtic Tiger, as some would later claim, but certainly a tectonic shift from our ’80s national inferiority complex, a welcome break from the old insecurities, and a space for songs, novels and films that were actually celebratory about ourselves. Subversion was in the air: Mary Robinson and mná na hÉireann were rocking the system in that year’s presidential election campaign. The advent of cheaper travel and better-paid jobs meant young Irish emigrants could return more frequently, keep close to the old town and old friends, and feel their circumstances more keenly as a lived experience, especially on those sad, aching drives to the airport. All these factors play a part in why ‘I Useta Lover’ and The Saw Doctors became such a gigantic Irish pop-cultural hit at that exact moment: it was energetic, cheeky and Irish.
Ironically, where that particular cultural hinterland was one of transformation and openness, the stage culchie idiom of this song and band that grew from it was quite insular, even reactionary. A lad’s tale of leering at a girl’s arse during Sunday morning Catholic mass and then hitting onto her while she’s fasting for charity is a fairly narrow-gauge portrayal of Irish life, not least for the girl. There’s no actual relationship here, by the way: it’s all the unrequited “obsession” and big talk of an eejit. Am I blaming ‘I Useta Lover’ for the rise of Marty Morrissey, the 2 Johnnies and the Healy-Raes, of GAA lackeys hysterically hailing every point as proof of hurling as the greatest game in the world and better than that oul’ soccer World Cup diving, of county jerseys as leisurewear, and of going buck-wild for Garth Brooks? Not quite, but I suspect The Saw Doctors were the patient zero of the ’90s variant of stage culchie. (I’m not from Dublin so I’m technically a culchie, though at home I’m a “townie”. Mass, the GAA and The Saw Doctors were not part of my life in 1990 and beyond.)
So, after all that socio-cultural talk, what of the song itself? Well, ‘I Useta Lover’ is a stale ham sandwich for the ears: the clomping two-step bassline of country n’ Irish showbands, the Galway-busker mandolin and, for all its irreverence in the verses, quite a bland and corny chorus, which may explain the self-conscious mis-spelling of the title. Any song that needed so much cultural scaffolding (see above) to attain hit status probably isn’t going to stand on its own weight, and so it proves. Listening to ‘I Useta Lover’ today, knowing it was such a colossal cultural presence in September 1990, is like looking a fossilised bone and trying to extrapolate the dinosaur.
