RETURN OF A MASTER

He will undoubtedly be remembered as the guitarist/vocalist with the legendary Horslips: soon to reform for a pair of mega-gigs in Dublin and Belfast.

But Johnny Fean has spent less than a quarter of his 40+ plus career with the Celtic Rock gods. In fact, he’d been playing for almost a decade around his native Limerick before being headhunted by the ‘Lips, when Declan Sinnott left the initial line-up.
“Yeah, I’ve been in various bands from about ‘65 onwards,” he recalls, chatting between intensive rehearsals for the forthcoming Horslips reunion.
“One of them was Jeremiah Henry, where we were doing a lot of covers by The Byrds, The Lovin’ Spoonful and The Band, that sort of stuff. We got a lot of gigs locally and around Cork and we occasionally did some college dates in Dublin.”
Fean always seemed destined to be a musician of one kind or another, having started playing in his native Limerick at the tender age of ten.
He says: “My dad came home with an acoustic guitar one day and I can remember it was a pretty decent one too. That would have been about ‘57 or ‘58 and I learned to play by listening to Little Richard and Elvis on Radio Luxembourg.”
Shannon, Co Clare, where the Fean family moved to in 1961 was, he recalls, a melting pot with an international influx of people who’d arrived in the area in the early ’60s to set up companies in the Free Trade zone.
He says: “There were English, German and US companies there. The workers and their families brought records and guitars and I was exposed to a lot of that. I would have heard the Beach Boys and The Supremes long before most people. Then the Beatles exploded with ‘Love Me Do’ and everything changed. There was an English guy called Frank who lived nearby and I remember him showing me some of the Beatles chords and I was knocked out.”
Back then he unsure which direction he would take musically. The ballad boom of the ‘60s led him towards traditional music; he was equally drawn to the burgeoning rock scene.
“I went to the CBS in Limerick and there was a teacher there who had a huge interest in the Clancy Brothers,” he recalls. “I liked the idea of them – they were huge at the time but then I started leaning more towards R&B and rock and blues.”
By then he was aiming to get hold of an electric guitar but the choices locally were limited. “You could only dream about something like a Gibson Les Paul,” he laughs.
“The very first electric I got, at 13, was an Egmond semi-solid. It had the pickup built into the pick guard and one black control knob on it. I didn’t even have an amp – I had to plug it into an old Pye radio which was quite dangerous. Later I got a Japanese solid that was a bit like a Fender Strat, and I managed to get amp. Around about ‘67, I got interested in the banjo and bought one. I’d seen Barney McKenna with The Dubliners and I liked the jigs and reels and all that stuff.”
Clearly, this unique combination of traditional, rock and blues influences prepared him well for his future role with the Lipsos. It was at a festival in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare in summer of 1972 that he first encountered the band.
“It was the last great hippy fest of the summer and Jeremiah Henry were on the bill,” he remembers. “There was also Skid Row, Granny’s Intentions and Horslips, who’d had a big hit with ‘Johnny’s Wedding’. They saw me perform and decided that I was the man to replace Declan, who was about to leave.
“A few months later Charles (O’Connor) came down to Shannon to look me up and the following week I went up to Dublin and joined the band. It was a big eye-opener. They were the biggest rock band around – they were pulling huge crowds. The lads all had the Marshall stacks, so I got one along with my first Gibson Les Paul, which I’ve more or less stuck to ever since apart from the acoustic and tenor banjo.”
Though Fean is responsible for many memorable Horslips moments, the iconic guitar lick from one of the band’s biggest hits, ‘Dearg Doom’ is a stand-out.
“I remember how that came about,” he says. “We were touring around the country after Happy To Meet Sorry To Part came out and I was playing around with a couple of riffs, taking them from jigs and reels. I think I’d been playing it on the banjo for a while and it came together before I did it on the guitar. I remember playing it for Eamon (Carr) and he jumped off the stool and asked me to do it again and the song was built around that.”
Touring abroad, particularly the US was, he says, a revelation.
“To see guitar players that were my heroes was fantastic. I saw the J Geils Band – they had fantastic guitar player and I was a huge fan of Lowell George in Little Feat and Steely Dan. They had a guy called Denny Dias who I loved. I managed to see a lot of jazz players and country pickers. But my hero was and still is Jimmy Hendrix – he was unbelievable. I got to know Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell from the Hendrix Experience later on. But yeah, going to America was fantastic.”
After Horslips’ demise in 1980 he joined forces with drummer Eamon Carr to form The Zen Alligators, who enjoyed some popularity on the pub scene.
“That was really about Eamon and I going back to our roots with a more straight R&B sound,” he says “Later I joined The Host with Charles O’Connor and at the end of 1985 I moved to London where I played solo and with various bands on the London circuit.”
Returning to Ireland in 2001 he has continued playing with bass player Stephen Travers in what is now known as the Johnny Fean Band. With the hugely anticipated Horslips re-union getting ever closer, he is obviously focusing on what is sure to be one of the highlight of 2009.
“The excitement is building up very nicely, he says “We’ve been in a couple of rehearsals and it’s going really well so far. It really is fantastic to be doing it again after all these years. And to be playing in venues like the O2 in Dublin and the Odyssey in Belfast is incredible. I’m really looking forward to it. It should be magic on the night.”