John McKenna meets the men of Horslips

Lipsos Vogue: Do you like the idea of rock'n'roll as a pose?
"As a piece of flesh that throws itself around on stage, then yes, very much. People I want to see have good shapes. I mean you want to see good shapes on stage, you want to see Jerry Lee Lewis wreck a piano. It's the best thing in the world to see shapes.
"There are bands who do it. I mean we've seen them in the States, bands like Blue Oyster Cult... such a fabrication, they're boring little runts. They're just boring timid little farts. Guys like Bachmann Turner Overdrive, huge, fat men - they claim to believe in a spirit of rock'n'roll, but I can't see how they do.
"The intimate rock'n'roller, the guy who plays juke joints, if you put him in a 2,000 seater it still works, those are the sort of shapes that work.
"If the shapes are authentic they work, but if they're not authentic, they're just fuckin' silly."
Onstage, Johnny Fean now has his Nugent backbends off-pat, clearly relishing even an old whore like 'Shakin' All Over'. Charles O'Connor is, of course, a posey old tart into standing in front of bedroom mirrors:
"I have recently because I've had my hair changed and it's fascinated me. A couple of months ago I was doing a lot of posing with a Grestsch guitar I'd got, sussing how high the strap should be. I'm allowed to now, it's not a cricket bat anymore."
No, more often a Telecaster, that animates O'Connor onstage as Horslips rattle and roll through six songs off the new LP, songs with more space and a new direction, extra gaps where they're needed. The packed house in Belfast, naturally, snuggled the old chestnuts to its sweaty breast, but I gave up an audience a long time ago.
They seemed entirely unaware of the kick in the band when a new number, let's take 'Richochet Man' because that's the only title I can remember, was unveiled, largely unappreciative of the new developments, and Charlie's excellent guitar playing. And it is very much O'Connor who seems to have upset the traditional Horslips cart, posing, preening and singing for all he's worth, giving something more to a combo who, at least on the evidence of my last viewing, were beginning to draw into themselves to an absolutely disastrous extent. It all seems fresh now, it's all fun once again. Sally loved it.

And Eamon enjoyed it:
"My problem is that it's very difficult to pose, with a drumkit. The kit tends to upstage you. It's also very difficult to impress chicks, em, like saying you're a drummer isn't hip enough. Producing a guitar is great, but everyone claims they're a drummer."
Eamon Carr knows so much about music, it's awesome. Regaler of great stories about Spector and Lennon and Leis and Drug Squads, heroin-speed cheekbones that make James Chance look like Conway Twitty, a resemblance to a young Jack Kerouac - and there, he thought lay the trouble. In as much as that author was a spectator of life, pulling the odd great shot but then descending disastrously into self-pity, self-torment and alcoholism, Carr seemed a fan, unable to produce great shots anymore; bored, Evening Press soundchecks, routine 'rock' music that insulted a really great band. In Belfast, it just seemed so different. I mean, that snare is only for retirement now.
Eamon loves rock'n'roll XX

He's not really sure if there's much chance of Kiss coming to Ireland: "Well the Pope did, and Elvis Presley didn't, so whether Kiss will or not I don't know, it's open to speculation." Rather like the Pope, Horslips are an Irish institution. They play more often of course, and they don't know as many languages, but their influence is vast.
Declan Lynch: "When I was thirteen, if Charles O'Connor had shat on my head, I would have said, y'know (gesticulates thumbs-up), alright.
"Most Dublin bands have a snobbish attitude to the rest of the country. If they go to Cork, they talk about it in a totally derisory fashion. It's their fuckin' loss - I mean people in Dublin consider people in the country to be fuckin' stupid, for fuck's sake. The Undertones are the type of people that would be coming to see us in Donegal. Those kids are not stupid."
Everyone should go (has been?) to a Lipsos gig in a ballroom. Drunkenness, fornication, sweat and rock'n'roll, the floor does the El Watusi, little nipples bounce on top of shoulders, you meet the girl of your dreams, but can't find her in the end because she's realised you could never look like Charlie O'Connor.
"Our big frustration with this gig tonight is, when can we get them up. Can we get them up after the second number? You just want to see kids jumping in front of you, you want to get in with them and dance basically - that's the sign of a good gig. You just want to fuck the instrument away and start dancing.
"It's a party, which is why we relate to bands like the J. Geils band, because they go out and play their fuckin' arse off. They have a great time, the audience have a great time, and luckily enough the likes of Steve Harley and people like that are gone."
That ethic is perfectly realised in Belfast: the audience are up after five songs, and it all seems such a piss-take, it doesn't seem so forced, any ideas as to careful planning really go out the window. The point about Horslips business sense is that it is one of common sense. The point about Horslips is that a spark still remains. This tour has sold faster than any other, Barry Devlin still eats corn on the cob and Jim Lockart still plays like he means it. Enthusiasm still remains, due, I believe, to the retention of control:
"... We were in and out doing tapes and we just said let's do it ourselves. We were aware of the history of small labels in the States. It's easy. The thing became a hit, which was the luckiest break of all, because it meant we got a load of gigs, and we played all that summer in Ireland, and we decided, why not do an album, because we could get our hands on the rest of the bread that was needed, and we could do it in Ireland by bringing in the Stones' truck, and we were in control. The sleeve that Charles designed cost an outrageous sum of money at the time, and we even put it over on Atlantic, and got it out, just before the vinyl crisis and the cardboard crisis was hitting the States, and everybody from Jimmy Page to Crosby, Stills and Nash went into Ahomet Ertegun and ate the fuckin' head off him. I mean, who were these fuckin' eejits from Ireland with this elaborate sleeve and all these colour photos? The Stones couldn't even get a gatefold at the time, and this was, as far as I'm concerned, as major a kick in the arse for people as what Rotten did."
Indeed? The mention of new wave music continually crops in Eamon Carr's conversation. Those principles, debased they may now be, hold true, it's just a question of application. Horslips were independent long before it was considered feasible, never mind hip. Do Horslips believe they were predecessors of new wave values? Do they?
"I do, yeah. Even bands I don't like, I know that Larry the drummer, who lived down the road from me, was busy practising to his Horslips records - and while I think he should have been practising to Charlie Watts records, I know it's there. I know it's there with people like the Radiators, even to an extent with some English bands..."

These things crop up...
"It was then that I heard Smokestack Lightning by Howling Wolf - there was something about it that virtually transcended everything else. Being introduced to black musicians playing that sort of rock'n'roll, it was just outrageous.
"There was this great record shop where there was this crippled lad, very into music, an amazing guy about 35, I was about 16, and he had a little back room in his record shop and he'd be playing the Beatles or whatever was the tops at that time in the shop, and he had basket work black and white chairs, two or three of them around a table, and he'd make coffee, and put records on. He had a deck in the alcove, so he'd play all the singles he'd be buying for himself - he'd order one or two and try to turn a few people on - it was really fun y'know, four or five 15-year-olds, like a lot of the kids at the gig tonight, asking for T-shirts, just asking him questions, a very straight looking white bloke - his mouth was whooh, you couldn't understand him anyway."
Do you still enjoy playing?
"Oh yeah, great. Yeah, studios is just two weeks of your life, hopefully, if you can get it over with in that time. It's just the thrill of knowing that there's a possibility that the audience are going to fuck things up at you - or else they're going to like you a lot. It's just that risk element. It's just the natural excitement of doing a live gig, y'know.
"There's been a few times... I don't think we've ever really badly bombed - there's places where we've had things thrown at us, but where we haven't actually bombed, which is strange. There's one classic example - we played somewhere in Northern Ireland, where we, it's just going back a few years now, where we actually had pennies and things thrown at us. There was somewhere in the West, it was a very strange fuckin' place - they threw pennies at us and that was awful because we were actually getting hit, but then the mistake we made in Chicago, was, we played with the Tubes and Pat Travers, and the first five rows were like Pat Travers' fanatics, and they were like very upfront about it, and they pelted the fuckin' shit out of us with beer cans. So we gave it back to them, and got some sort of grudging respect... but when the Tubes came on, they got fuckin' everything thrown at them. They actually did worse than we did. At least they knew they were going to get Pat Travers after us, but with the Tubes there was no hope. It went quiet when the girls came out and wobbled around, but after that it went back again."
And in Dallas...
"The only thing that saved us that night was the fact that we wore leather jackets. A very unsuccessful gig, but I mean we could have been killed.
"... one wall of the dressing room was in bits, and the reason was that some guy had climbed in the window and tried to rob the bread and the owner had just grabbed a shotgun and let it off just as the guy was getting his arse out the window. He just blew the wall out. That was before we arrived. Another guy had driven his motorcycle through the door one night."
It's not all plain sailing, of course. The boys have played bummers, have released bummers (the new single is an obvious start), but the impression is that something is being chased and, perhaps, being caught. Whether or not they achieve much is up to individual tastes, but it must be held in mind that they have effectively breached the divide between traditional and modern music. This was entirely due to plagiarism, but nevertheless it worked (though Carolan's solicitor is reportedly on the case). They frequently play in Ireland, and for all too many years were the only glimpse of light. Theirs was a proud, uni-directional music that had a strange attraction: they brought rock'n'roll to me and thousands of others for the first time; a version not debasing popular idioms, but instead moving on a different motorway. This all came to grief over the last couple of LPs, certain tunes excepted, but appears to have returned. 'Rock' music is dead, let the geologists in to examine the fossils. All that matters is your music, if it's the Prats or Horslips, it must be personal. The necessary focus and tension has returned alive at least. No condescending, get down.

Do you believe in rock'n'roll?
"Yeah. Look what Jerry Lee Lewis is doing. I mean, there is a man out there, who will fill himself up with bennies, drink a big crate of whiskey, destroy a piano and then go and shoot off a fuckin' shotgun at Elvis' house. That's greet. That's fabulous. If anything the new wave is tame. It's like Captain Sensibles' great, but he still goes home to be in the mother's house, y'know and he has to get up for his breakfast and things like that. It's still there, all it is is fuckin' badness, just acting bad. You don't have to stop. They all have the wildman tendency, all the great ones anyway. I mean, John Denver has no saving graces."
For a band on the run as long as Horslips, sitting back is the obvious thing to do. "No, because we've seen them. They have enough cop to know when a gig's a bad one. You play Bundoran or Ballybofey, and if you don't play a good gig, you know it. You go away and you think, Jesus. You talk to enough of them and they tell you.
"You always liked the looners and the wild men. I've always liked them because they're the ones who made rock'n'roll really exciting. I thought Rotten was great, and Strummer was great, and Pere Ubu - we saw them and we didn't know who they were, and we walked into a club in Philadelphia and there were about 10 people there and they really freaked us, the whole band freaked, it was incredible. It's the X-factor that makes it rock'n'roll apart from bland pop."

Are you proud of what you've done?
"In the light of what you wanted to achieve, not really, and yet isolated, as opposed to working in the airport or something like that, then yes. But you have your dreams and you've only scratched the surface."
Do you worry about getting old?
"Em, yeah. I mean, Gene Crouser kept it going, but his back gave in. I mean, there's a thing called drummer's back, and last year, it got really terrible. I was sitting on the floor and couldn't get up. I sought medical advice and they said it was a slipped disc, so I sought the advice of a witch, and it was literally better in six hours."
Do you know many witches?
"Millions of witches. A lot."

Now do you know who said what?
Lipsos Service, the tuna meat sandwich seems to have been filled again and Charles is peering in the small ads. The goods are being delivered on time, slightly bashed, so that the sheen doesn't blind. Motorway Madness. And on to the next gig. What better way to end than by stopping.