Dr Who?

If Boyzone, B*Witched and The Corrs are the disease, then Sean Millar is definitely not the cure. Yet while the singer/songwriter known as Doctor Millar may not be able to save Irish pop from its terminal triteness, he can salve the pain with his gruff, organic graveside manner, his bitter, aromatic tunes and his scalpel-sharp lyrics. Alas, like many practitioners of alternative musical medicine, the good Doctor seems doomed to languish in a dark laboratory far away from the mainstream, stringing together his strange potions, and being shunned as a quack by the general pop-guzzling population.

In person, Sean Millar does not look much like a mad professor. With his long, lank curls, wispy beard and portly demeanour, he bears a slight resemblance to D'Artagnan with a guitar; a Don Quixote, storming the citadels of Irish music power and symbolically attacking the Windmill Lane. When we met in the International Bar on Wicklow Street, Millar had recently performed a gig at Whelan's, and his second album - last year's excellent The Deal - is finally getting a general release, having previously been available only by mail order and via the Internet. "It was never a thing that I wasn't going to put it in the shops," protests Millar. "It's a practical thing because not everybody has access to the Internet. For many people, it's more difficult to buy something over the Web than to buy it in a shop."

Millar might be an old-fashioned troubadour, but he's also happy to travel through cyberspace; he's got his own website (http://www.dmcwebs.com/ drmillar) through which fans in the real world can visit his Irish office. Yet all this has taken place without a major record deal, and with no prospect of one - unless he can find a cure for integrity. Millar really is a sole practitioner: he releases his own records on the Self-Possessed label, and cuts all his distribution deals himself, ably assisted by singer Nick Kelly, formerly of The Fat Lady Sings and proprietor of Self-Possessed Records.

"Nick has a whole theory, which is, basically, `what exactly is it that record companies do? Because I can do this, I can do that, I can do that'. For instance, I can ring up a printing factory and order a thousand CD covers; I can book a recording studio; and I can ask musicians to come in and play. Nick's attitude is that unless a record company can point out what it is they can do for you that you can't do yourself, then what's the point in signing to one?"

One unwelcome thing record companies often do is try and sell the wrong product to the wrong target market. If Doctor Millar ever got a major record deal, it would be interesting to see how the label would handle the raw, earthy fare of The Deal. "I have a very good friend who's been with several majors," says Millar, "and he told me that one label had a minimum cost for making a video. Let's put it this way - it was more money than I spent on both my albums, and probably more than I spent on my entire career. He ended up selling about 10 or 20 thousand records, which from the record company point of view was a total disaster. But if I sold 20 thousand records, I'd be over the moon." Doctor Millar's healthy distrust of the music machine can be traced back to his hungry days as leader of the cult rock band The Cute Hoors earlier this decade.

While he would admit to harbouring hopes of rock stardom during his leaner years, he remains refreshingly unblinded by misguided narcissism. "I'm too f***ing old to be a rock star!" he laughs. "There comes a time in your life when you have to realise certain things about yourself, like, basically you're too old to be The Beatles. I also think if you call yourself and your band Doctor Millar & The Cute Hoors, you're ruling out some prospects for yourself. But, yeah, I was looking for a major deal, and it didn't work out - but I've no regrets about it, because I'm actually a much better artist than I was then, and a much better writer."

This is no idle boast. Doctor Millar may not be Bono material, but he can write a simple, folksy tune and paint it with some of the most poignant, evocative lyrics this side of Leonard Cohen. Listen to the gentle, exotic strains of Donna Quixote or the traditional-sounding dirge of Dead Man's Hand; wince at the brutal images in lines such as "You're one more Mick/ All balls and belly and big mouth" from Finally OK, and you can feel the strength of a songwriter who is in full command of his cottage craft, and self-assured in his old-fashioned style.

`That was always the whole raison d'etre for me: to say something interesting and say it in a tuneful way. If you can work a verse, a chorus and a middle eight into it, then you're doing better than most people. That was the idea of The Bitter Lie, that people would get into it because of the lyrics. When we were mixing the album, we would put the vocal ridiculously high in the mix, then we'd go and stand outside in the corridor, and if we couldn't make out every single word on every single song, we pushed it up further. With this album I went for a different thing - I went for more arrangements."

Sounds like Doctor Millar is learning to trust his musical as well as his lyrical instincts. The Deal features musical contributions from guitarist and key-boardist Joe Chester (who also co-produced the album), violinist Aingeala de Burca, and vocalist Miriam Ingram. The result is a record where the musical matter almost matches the lyrical depth, and where songs such as Dying For The Light and Every Soldier Knows are tinged with enough light and shade to bring the words out in bold, bitter relief.

"I felt much more confident with the music this time round," says Millar. "I had very fixed ideas on how I wanted everything to sound; I finally arrived at the place where I knew what my music should sound like. My two favourite bands are Planxty and The Velvet Underground, who are very widely apart, and I was trying to make an album that somehow sounded like both of those bands at the same time; the idea of primal beats mixed with very nice strings and guitar. There are a lot of quite Irish melodies on it as well."

Millar's tunes deal with the dark side of diddley-aye, the fear and loathing behind the cead mile failtes, the black soul beneath the pious image. Saint Stephen deals with a young priest who is smothered by his closet homosexuality, while Billy Meany tells the tragic tale of a incestuous relationship which ends in pregnancy and suicide.

"I think there's an illusion that we've reached the state of a fixed society, a cured society in Ireland," muses Millar. "You know - the fact that contraception and homosexuality are now legal. But I don't actually feel that we've dealt with our deepest demons, which is our fear of ourselves. "All I want to do is make an authentic folk document, and I don't just mean folk music. I mean something that is completely attuned to my time, but also true to people of all times and all ages."

The Deal is out now on Self-Possessed Records. It's available in the shops, or by mail order at P.O. Box 5442, Dublin 4, and on the Internet via http://ireland.iol.ie/-nkelly.