Leo Moran from The Saw Doctors was on the N17 on Friday night when his phone started to blow up.
As he was heading home to Tuam on a bus after a meal in a Japanese restaurant in Galway City his mobile started pinging with text messages.
Friends and family were lining up to tell him that the US president Joe Biden had just quoted liberally from a song he had written with fellow bandmate Davy Carton and Galway native Jarir Al Majar more than 30 years ago.
Recalling how Ballina had responded to his victory over Donald Trump in 2020, Mr Biden marvelled at how the town had been bedecked in red white and blue “with cars and crowds gathering in Market Square, singing The Green and the Red of Mayo.”
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He said the response had meant the world to him and his wider family, many of whom are still living in in the west.
“And I can tell you what: That song speaks to me,” he continued. “It goes like: “Oh, the feeling [that came] over me to stay… forever more, forever more. Stay forever more. The Green and Red of Mayo, oh the Green and Red of Mayo, oh the Green and Red of Mayo.”
“I fell asleep on the bus coming home and when I woke up, I looked at the phone and had all these messages. It was funny really,” Moran told The Irish Times on Saturday morning.
The band wrote the song after playing a small festival on Clare Island in 1990 and it featured on their second album.
And while it has, in the intervening years, become an unofficial anthem of the people of Mayo at home and abroad, it didn’t make much of an impact early on.
“I remember we were on tour in England and the song was fairly popular there and people were quick to sing along but at one stage we came home and played Castlebar at Christmas time and when we played the song it kind of went over people’s heads. it had not really registered with people at all at home at that stage,” he said.
It certainly has registered now and is frequently heard as the Mayo football team go on another heartbreaking - and sometimes agonisingly close - All Ireland run.
Moran laughed when asked how a fierce football fan from Tuam had managed to write a song which has become an anthem for his county’s fiercest rivals? “I can’t really pinpoint how and when that happened. It just kind of gradually find its way in. And Davy says it’s not the curse that is stopping Mayo win the All-Ireland, it’s the song.”
The Saw Doctors had been invited to play in Ballina on Friday night. “We couldn’t get the band together as not everyone was around,” Moran said.
When asked what impact the reference to the song might have, he was pretty laid back.
“It definitely won’t do us any harm anyways,” he said. “It’s another little register of the existence of the band, I suppose. It’s hard to say, really. It would be interesting to see if it spikes on Spotify.’ “I’d be interested in that.”
While the band have been on a bit of a hiatus in recent years, absence has made the hearts of their fans grow fonder and tickets for summer time concerts in Galway and Scotland sold out in minutes while almost 10,000 tickets for two shows in the US were gone even before they went on general release.
Like Moran, band manager Ollie Jennings said he was unsure what impact the nod from President Biden might mean.
“It’s hard to know, these things tend to be kind of little talking points more than anything else. It is the kind of thing that could get you invited to play the White House next year.”
It is an invite the Saw Doctors have never had although they came close when they played at the Speaker’s St Patrick’ s Day lunch.
“We were dead and buried 18 months ago we hadn’t worked in five years. But there has been an amazing turnaround since last year. And it might take us to the White House yet.”
