The Love and Darkness of Seán “Doctor” Millar

Some years back, the management team working to support musician Seán “Doctor” Millar came to him to say they thought it worthwhile to take a case against another, globally recognised, artist. 

The other artist had clearly plagiarised Millar’s song “Happy Can Be”, from his debut album, they said.

Millar mulled it over, he said recently, during an interview in the Hyatt Centric in his neighbourhood of The Liberties. 

He asked how much they could make and how long the case would take. 

They told him about €150,000, Millar says, through a legal process lasting three to five years.

He thought about having to live with it for that long, as he lay in bed every night. The stress, the effort.

For about €30,000 a year, he says. “I told them, ‘If somebody offered me that as a job, I wouldn't take it. So, I told them, no.”

Millar’s five-decade music career never quite reached the commercial heights that he, and others, had aimed for in his twenties.

But of all the many important things that Millar has learned in life, he says, to walk away from unnecessary stress is up there.

On stage Upstairs in Whelans last week, he closed his hour-long show with that same number: “Happy Can Be”. 

It’s the twisted love story of a man in self-destruct mode who, after ruining a relationship, eventually gets his act together, redeems himself and wins her heart once and for all.

Millar – wearing black boots and jeans – stood at the stage’s edge, guitar muted, as the crowd gently crooned the chorus: “Happy can be, I believe that that’s true. It can be for me; it can be for you.”

And with that, among the “love and darkness” – as his tour was named –Doctor Millar took a bow.  

"Terrified", an unreleased song by Doctor Millar.

0:00

/366.0557

1×

A darkness settles

“I grew up in a basically fascist backwater, okay?” said Millar, during the interview last Tuesday.

“Run by a violent religious sect, who picked on the vulnerable in our society – unmarried mothers or gay people or anybody who went outside of the norm of very Christian, very conservative values,” he says.

His own family, however, were very left-wing and progressive, he says.

His father, Johnny, was a founding member of the Guinness branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU).

His mother Winnie was a “proto-feminist”, he says, who advocated strongly for women’s rights and issues, like adequate pay.

All of his family were inner-city people, he says.

With his wife Pom Boyd, they have raised two kids, Faith and Carlo, in the same Iveagh Trust building in The Liberties where generations of his family have lived.

He passes the flat his father was born in every day, he says.

Born in 1964, as a child, Millar lived in Crumlin till he was seven, then Bray till he was 18.

His maternal grandfather was in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Republican sentiment was always strong around his house, he says, informing views he carries to this day.

The second youngest of five siblings – he has three sisters, one brother – he learnt from them. 

From their record collections, and his sister Maeve’s love for Thin Lizzy. His brother Neil’s instruction on chords and blues licks on the guitar. 

Johnny was a great family provider, a totally devoted husband, says Millar, and in many ways a very loving and kind man, especially to his daughters.

But, for Seán and his brother Neil, their father was also highly critical. He never offered a word of praise, says Millar.

“So, if you never praise people, that means that the negative things you say are the only things that you say,” he says.

It left Millar, he says, with a negative self-image, world view, and a deep personal darkness.

On the Whelan’s stage last Wednesday, Millar opened his set with the first track of his 2014 album C48.

“You wake up outside London, sleeping on the floor // of a house that you could swear you’ve never seen before // You remember the party and getting in the car // someone rolled a number and gave you the guitar,” run the opening lines.

The narrator is left with the crushing realisation that life has moved on around him. His friends have all started families. He has nothing but a hangover – not even the bus fare back into town.

It’s at least somewhat autobiographical, he says – as are many of his songs.

A doctor in the house

Millar moved to London for seven years in his twenties, he says.

It was the 1980s, and he didn’t see much to keep him in Dublin. “Everybody I knew was on the dole.”

London life meanwhile was one of “self-obliteration”, he says, fuelled by booze and weed.

But he was also always around music.

A childhood friend, Mark Megannety, was living in Acton and put him up when he first got to London, he says.

Megannety played bass with the band Cast of Thousands. 

The band were on the rise, having signed with Chris Parry, the same publisher as The Cure, and already playing big live gigs, Millar says.

It was one of those “summers of your life” experiences, he said. “We were going to fucking rock-star parties. All that shit, you know what I mean?”

Millar started to play his own songs for his friends, casually. They dug what they were hearing, he says, and encouraged him to get a project going.  

Millar stumbled into a London pub one evening, looking for matches on his way home.

The woman behind the bar, who also worked as a glamour model, he says, misheard him. She thought he asked about playing there – and he went with it.

The manager, Tony, appeared and asked him “why should I book a drunken Irish navvy?” Millar says. 

Millar said he had a degree in English. Met with disbelief, he embellished and upgraded his qualification to a PhD, on the fly.

He got the gig.

When he came back the next week to play, a huge window-filling poster read: "Tonight - Jazz and Blues with Dr Millar".

Reviewers from City Limits magazine were in the crowd, leading to his first write-up. So, he took the stage name “Doctor Millar” full-time.

After a push from Jim Walker, guitarist with Cast of Thousands, he started his own band.

The line-up settled on Megannety on bass, Mark Huggett on drums, Phil Martin on guitar, and himself on rhythm guitar and vocals.

“Doctor Millar and The Cute Hoors” was born.

On the assembly line

Music manager Robert Stephenson signed up Millar and his band after he saw them gig in a London restaurant.

“I could see straight away his talent,” Stephenson said recently, on the phone from South Africa. “For me, he’s one of the greatest Irish songwriters of the last 50 years.”

The Cute Hoors hit the ground running.

Millar remembers high-energy gigs at The Mean Fiddler, Reading Festival, and The Fleadh in Finsbury Park.

They appeared on MTV, the BBC, and ITV’s arts show, 01-For-London.

“We were constantly on tour and we were packing out venues. All that stuff. It was just frenetic live performance,” he says.  

“That's basically what The Cute Hoors were. We threw ourselves at every gig. We didn't stop moving from the moment we hit the stage. And it was just up, up, up all the time,” Millar says.

Time Out Magazine named them “Gig of the Month”, ahead of acts like David Byrne and Morrissey. They said it was like watching The Pogues fronted by George Michael, Millar says.

The band released their biggest single “Romance in A Flat” on Stephenson’s own independent label, Treasure Island.

It charted in the top 20 in Ireland.

Once your song hit the charts in those days, he says, you had to print more copies in case of a sudden surge in demand.

But while the band were doing well on paper, they weren’t making any money. 

They were on the dole or slogging at side jobs when they weren’t on tour, he says.

Millar and guitarist Phil Martin took shifts on the assembly line for a company manufacturing cassette tapes.

“Phil's working on the assembly line. He's number 12 in the charts. We're on tour. We're Time Out band of the fortnight. And he's working away for 65 pence an hour. And what comes down the assembly line? Our record!” Millar says.

“That was the reality of our lives,” says Millar. “We were penniless.”

The road to Italia ’90

Stephenson worked to get them shows all over, he says. 

In the build-up to the 1990 World Cup – which saw Ireland reach the quarter finals –  Stephenson says he had an idea.

He would buy a big van, and get the band to Sicily to play for the Irish fans.

Stephenson arranged a string of dates with an Italian promoter – he thought.

Two weeks out, he hadn’t anything in writing. He flew to Palermo to confront the promoter, who admitted that he hadn’t actually booked anything.

Stephenson scrambled and booked some last-minute shows, he says, through one of the local mafia families.

Millar remembers planning for one big gig in a 1,000-capacity Sicilian club, which was going to make the trip worthwhile.

“What we didn't know was that there was a fan curfew of nine o'clock. And we started at 10, so they couldn't come and see us,” he says. 

“They were all staying in allocated areas outside of town, right? And the buses stopped running there at nine. Everybody lost their hole.”

The band hobbled along after that, he says.

They grew something of a following in Sicily, off the back of the shows they did manage to play that summer. They came back for sold out shows, and played on television. 

In those days, bands were all chasing those coveted major-label deals, he says. It was too hard to go on long-term without investment.

But, one by one, the labels all passed on Doctor Millar and The Cute Hoors.

“We never played a gig where the people who came to see that gig didn't go, ‘That's a fucking great live band’,” says Millar.  

“But in terms of the commercial industry, we became sort of the eternal support band,” he says. “Transferring up from that to being the main attraction took money and investment, and we just never got it.”

The band officially broke up in 1992.

The Bitter Lie

The Whelan’s crowd were in full voice as they sang the outro to Millar’s classic “Alcohol Problem”.

It’s the story of a down and out writer, who feels they’ve blown it all.

The narrator spells the word “DRINKING”, a separate musical note for each letter. The melody descends, each note sinking lower than the one before it.

To some, it’s a fun singalong moment.

When Millar wrote it, he was living it. He says he felt, at the age of 26, that the music business as a whole had passed on him.

Depression took hold, he says.

“I knew an awful lot of people at that point who had come out the other side, on the wrong side of the music industry,” says Millar. “We were all looking at what the fuck we were going to do with the rest of our lives.”

The darkness that had brewed since his childhood, the worthless self-image, the feelings of rejection that began with his father, came to a head.

He put it into his 1995 debut solo album, The Bitter Lie – of which “Alcohol Problem” became a flagship song.

It’s a record of complex storytelling, shining a light on characters and corners of Irish society that were still in the shade.

“St Stephen” tells the story of a young man in rural Ireland whose older brother is left the family farm, and who doesn’t have the aptitude for medicine, or the stature for the guards.

So, in search of a purpose, of belonging, he joins the priesthood. “You develop a taste for the theatre of it; you love dressing up in the clothes.”

The tale culminates with Stephen discovering himself while on a trip to New York and finally coming to terms with his sexuality.

“With him you celebrate the divine mystery // and the rest as they say Stephen, is history.”

Millar says someone in RTÉ once told his radio plugger that Ireland wasn’t ready for a gay priest. 

In 2022, when asked what track changed his life, Scottish singer-songwriter Paulo Nutini told Hot Press magazine it was “These Days”, also from The Bitter Lie.

“These days, there’s so much pain inside the actions of a man I hardly recognise,” the song declares.

“In fact, every fucking song on that album is amazing. The lyrics, the way he sings ... It’s just what I needed at that time,” Nutini told Hot Press.

It’s a stripped-down, drum-free affair, focusing on Millar’s voice and guitars, with help from old friend Jim Walker, guitarist of Cast of Thousands.

After some time out when the band broke up, Stephenson returned to Millar’s team and helped to release his solo work on Treasure Island label.

He played a string of successful tours and industry showcases. They were all really well received, Stephenson says.

After one particular gig, then-Minister for the Arts, Michael D. Higgins was in the audience.

As Millar remembers it, the now-President of Ireland turned to him after the show and said that it was great to see someone take the English language and give it a good thrashing.

Around the time these songs of loneliness, frustration and redemption, which would become The Bitter Lie, were being written, Millar – still only in his late twenties – met Pom Boyd.

They were set up by mutual friends, comedian Kevin Kildea and his wife Anne.

Boyd, herself a celebrated writer, actor and comedian, was working on her first play at the time. That play Down onto Blue, would go on to win an Stuart Parker Trust Award in 1994.

They weren’t obviously compatible at first, he says, but an intense, passionate connection soon emerged, he says.

“We both were people who had seen sad things in life, even at that young age,” he says.

Boyd brought him a feeling that he was valued, at a time when he felt anything but. 

In the liner notes of The Bitter Lie, Millar wrote “For Pom, forever”.

Always Coming Home

Millar says that his relationship with his mother was difficult into his thirties. 

But with time, it changed – a shift that he captured in the title track of his 2002 LP Always Coming Home.

As a young man, he completely rejected her worldview, he says. “I was very, very different to my mother as a person.”

His mother believed that all that matters in life is your family, marriage, and children. He resented what he saw as her naivety, he says.

“That’s what that song, ‘Always Coming Home’, is about. It’s me realising that my mother was right about so many things,” says Millar.

The song talks about Millar living the troubadour life of uncertainty, as his wife and child sleep, he finds a sort of contentment with his lot, with the journey.

He sings on the final line: “It’s like my mother says, it’s much better to travel in hope than to arrive.”

Without much income from The Bitter Lie, Millar had taken a job as a painter and decorator as he worked on his follow-up album The Deal. 

But in the late 90s, he found a new, paid outlet. 

Millar was invited by a group called Café Community Arts for Everyone, to work with a men’s group on Dublin’s northside, writing songs centred around their life experiences, he says.

Word of his work spread. More doors opened, he says.

“Essentially, I kind of stumbled into making experimental theatre,” he says.

In 2008, Millar worked with theatre company Brokentalkers on a song cycle called Silver Stars.

Millar interviewed gay men who had each, across several decades, left an intolerant Ireland to build lives for themselves elsewhere and achieved great things.

Drawing on these stories, he composed an original song cycle, performed by a separate cast of gay men.

One piece tells of a man’s reunion with his mother: “My mother came to see me in Paris // I was frozen inside // She said, ‘my god has told me, your life is a sin’ // Then she said with tears in her eyes // ‘I love you more than God’”.

It was life-changing, says Erich Keller, who was in the Silver Stars cast.

“We'd present these people back to the Irish audience as a sort of look at what became of these, in a way, ordinary people that are celebrated elsewhere, that we don't even know about,” he says.

The show debuted in 2008 at Project Arts Centre as part of the Bealtaine Festival.

Eventually, the show would go on the road, playing theatre festivals from New York to New Zealand, Keller says.

Says Millar: “It played in venues that no way would Doctor Millar have gotten to play.”

Most of the cast had no prior performance experience, says Keller. It became a journey of discovery for them all.

Keller had left Ireland himself in the early 1990s, moving to Paris. “I just thought, ‘I can’t be gay here. I can’t do that to my family.’”

While he had a couple of gay friends before Silver Stars, for the first time in his life, Keller says he felt he’d found a brotherhood.

Millar’s work on Silver Stars, and his theatre work broadly, Keller says, gives people the chance to feel elevated and loved, respected and valued.

“You don't need to be gay. You don't need to understand what it was like in the ’70s, ’80s, or the ’90s in Ireland as a gay man, to get the power of what Seán was able to put into his words and his music,” he says.

Working with Millar on Silver Stars gave him the courage to make other big changes in his life, he says. He left his work setting air fares for an airliner to retrain as a psychotherapist.

Community theatre work remains an enormous part of Millar’s life, he says.

Last year, he worked on Everything Falls with Brokentalkers, which centered on carers. “It’s about how, essentially, our society would fall apart without them.”

Millar is gearing up to work again with Brokentalkers on a new show to debut in 2027, he says.

For him, the attraction to this community work is creating a process that helps people to value their own lives and experiences as being worthy of art and storytelling, he says – instead of consuming British or U.S. culture.

“You're dealing a lot of time with people in very extreme circumstances. So, they express themselves in very extreme ways sometimes,” he says. “Or their life experiences can be very extreme.”

Millar is non-judgmental by nature, he says. “I’m able to just kind of roll with people and make work.”

Army of love

That angry twenty-something year old is still a part of him, Millar says.

But one he has learned to understand and harness, he says, through time, self-work, and the love of Boyd and his kids.

Darkness is always there, he says. But today, he tries to live like a “soldier in the army of love”.

The work he did on himself in his thirties, through therapy and spiritual avenues – Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity – helped him to better understand how humans work, he says.

Commercial success eluded him in his younger years and that was a disappointment he says. But he now sees his life as total success, says Millar.

“If you found somebody to love, who loves you, right? You have a good relationship with your kids? You’re a success story. That's it. End of,” he says. “Everything else is fucking jam, everything else is just a bonus.”

Besides, the music hasn’t stopped. 

The Cute Hoors even reunited to release an album Hair Like Blood in 2017. 

Another outlet is with a two-piece project, Dogs, with Nick Kelly, best known musically for his work with The Fat Lady Sings. 

The project was born during the pandemic. Millar was isolated and in ill-health, with a diagnosis that his heart was working at 30 percent capacity and needed three stents. 

Two months after the surgery, the pair made a documentary film called The Song Cycle. It followed their journey to play Glastonbury Festival in 2022 – performing smaller shows along the way, trying to prove you can tour without using petrol, Kelly says.

Kelly cycled. Millar, only after heart surgery, took public transport. It won the Best Independent Film Award at the Galway Film Fleadh last year.

Its UK premiere is set for 25 October as part of The London Breeze Film Festival.

The most recent Doctor Millar album was released in 2022, Ruining Everything, with contributions from Irish music icons Donal Lunny and Liam Ó Maonlai.

There is another Doctor Millar release on the slate for 2026.