The First Of The Celtic Tigers

And yet, although two decades have passed since those final fateful Belfast gigs, it s only in the last 18 months that the various members Jim Lockhart, Charles O Connor, Barry Devlin, Eamon Carr and Johnny Fean have been afforded the luxury of reappraising their own legacy.
Recent legal manoeuvers have put an end to the shoddy repackaging of the original albums, resulting in a slew of those chestnuts currently being reissued on Universal, remastered and sounding pretty much as God intended. This process, plus the added impetus of several studio sessions featuring the original line-up revisiting old tunes, have shone a more kindly light on the past.
Sitting in the Clarence Hotel, bassist/vocalist and now filmmaker Barry Devlin and drummer-turned-journalist Eamon Carr are mulling over Horslips place on the pantheon.
We ve been proved to be right! declares Devlin, tongue in cheek. Sorry, Paddy Maloney s been proved to be right we ve been proved to be wrong! Joking aside, one of the things that people often say to us these days is, Jesus, lads, you were way in front of your time , but I m not absolutely sure that we were. They say this in the sense of that if we were alive today we d be The Corrs and we d be selling zillions of records.
But I think what we did was really unexportable, I think it was very, very Irish. We were at our best always when we did things arse-backwards. We discovered to our horror that we were a niche band, condemned to be poor.
Poor or not, epic works such as The Tain and The Book Of Invasions proved that if that if the band s prog-rock contemporaries in the UK could make concept albums about hobbits and elves, then Irish musicians had a mythological tradition to compare with the Greeks and the Scandinavians. But the twist in the tale was that Eamon Carr s lyrics were as much influenced by Stan Lee and Marvel comics as tales of Cu Chulainn and The Fianna. Consequently, Horslips made Irish rock go day-glo.
Eamon: When you look back now, it was an era of black and white television virtually, it seemed like that. The 60s hadn t quite happened in Ireland and the whole thing seemed very, very dull. And our thing was basically a bunch of fellas trying to amuse themselves with a selection of odd instruments. The references for us would have been the San Francisco bands, especially the Grateful Dead, cos they had a lot of country, blues, folk and all that sort of stuff going on, and they made it work.
Or as Barry puts it: We had a violinist with long hair and we didn t know what to do with him! The material that we were incorporating into what we did was associated with stifling Sunday afternoons and Fainnes and serge suits. And so the two things coincided, our own interest in fusion and Eamon s kinda mythic thing which was always tempered strongly with a sense of humour as well, we weren t proto Michael Flatley. We knew what the stuff was about, or at least he did, and we had a kind of genuinely ironic viewpoint. A lot of kids actually saw that here were people who looked a bit like the people they saw on Top Of The Pops, but they were playing stuff that they recognized.
So did they meet as much resistance as, say, The Pogues did from the trad old boys club? The idea that somehow, Horslips weren t 4-Reel?
Of course we did, Carr asserts. In fact, actually it was great, because you knew you were driving people mad. So you d wind them up even more.
Jayzus fellas with flares! There was always a coterie of men who were angry and annoyed that we were tampering with traditional music. And the answer to that was, Fuck off! And it s still Fuck off! Because my grandfather had a ceili band, I fuckin knew all these tunes. Men came around to our house and played the bodhran with the rosary beads wrapped around their hands to get a big sound out of it. I had all of that.
I don t want to name all these names because they re all dead, or intellectually dead. But the weird thing was, we met other people around the country who were traditional musicians who weren t caught up in this aspect of collectors club or whatever, and they were delighted.
I remember a pipes player, we met him at Ennis I think an astonishing musician and he was saying, I d love to have a go at Moog synthesizers . He wasn t taking the piss, he was very serious. Somehow, in his mind s eye, he could hear uileann pipes and a Moog synthesizer playing Amazing Grace . The likes of The Fureys and The Dubliners had no problems; it was another type of individual who did. And it always galvanized us. What new outrage can we perpetrate to annoy them?
Somewhat amused by his former bandmate s anti-purist vitriol, Barry Devlin takes up the thread.
Years ago we were rehearsing in Ballyvaughan, he recalls. We d rent a cottage and in the evenings we d go down to the local pub and we d join in a little session, very proud of ourselves, playing acoustic instruments, so thrilled: This is so very authentic lads . And there was a big fat sweaty fella with a bald head there, and he looked at us for a long time and then he went: D yez always play the kips?!!

Barry Devlin may spin this yarn in order to take the rise out of his own band s back-to-the-country pretensions, but in a way, Horslips always did play the kips . When this lot toured the loony boonies, there was a sense of the circus coming to town; the freak flag being plunged, Jolly Roger-like, into the country s heartlands.
There were places around about Cahir and Clonmel, you d find fellas who would ve been reading Marvel comics and possibly bits of literature, Barry recalls. Y know, strange, silent fellas who d come up to you afterwards and talk to you about Camus if you weren t careful. They d quiz you about stuff. We got very strange insights into the condition of the country at the time and it was a strange condition between the years of 1972 to about 1980!
Y know that oul Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carr says, getting into character. Y know when he says, I saw Homer s ghost barking at the surf what s that about?!!
And if this routine sounds like something from Pat McCabe s Emerald Germs, then the Cavan man s love of the Lips has long been a matter of public record: tunes like Mad Pat (apt title) and Furniture were the perfect seedbed for McCabe s surruralism. More than Lizzy, Rory, The Rats or The Rads, Horslips were the patron saints of muck savages with a sweet tooth for acid rock, of which this reporter was but one.
Not that I ever saw the band live. However, I did witness their works performed in a school play at the Enniscorthy Christian Brothers School circa 1980, an event that had repercussions my shrink is still trying to iron out. Thanks to one of the trendier teachers, the pagan sound of electric guitar and moog synth wafted through those dorms of doom, as a mob of fourth class lads goose-stepped their way through a choreographed portion of The Tain. Malachy Dudgeon the dissolute primary school teacher from The Dead School might ve approved.
But now, 20 years after that school play, not to mention Horslips final gig and the release of U2 s Boy, two events which signified a changing of the Irish rock guard, we ve become so immune to the commodification of Keltic culture, we can almost forget there was ever such a thing as being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to Carr, when Horslips toured Britain in the mid 70s, they got as much attention from the police as the promoters.
What I m amazed about was how tolerant the British were to us, Barry Devlin avers. It should be put on record we used to follow atrocities around the country. You d be playing Guildford four months after, and nobody came up and went, Ya bastards! We weren t like Lizzy; we weren t a rock band who might be an English rock band, although we were Irish. We were like, Here we are, we re buckleppin Paddies in leprechaun uniforms love us! We ve just blown up your city, aren t we great . . . ey-de-diddley-diddley! Not a big marketing ploy. We were very, very aware of it. You couldn t not be aware of it.
Eamon: And yet, audiences turned up. They weren t all directly descended from Irish people. And they weren t just tolerant, but supportive it was astonishing. But allied to that, there s was an element of, not harassment, it wasn t a regular thing, but yes we were rousted out of our beds, out of our cars, all that sort of stuff. If it wasn t because we were Irish it was because we had long hair and we were dubious looking. The police who actually busted the Guildford Four visited us and got us out of bed. The morning that they did it, they were all in on top of us and it was: Prove who you are. What are you? Oh, you re a band? Ooops! You d think they would ve checked that out before they came in, but . . .
Barry: Maybe they d listened to us play!
But I remember getting the diary, Eamon continues, and when they d say, Where were you on the night of the 4th? or whatever it was, I d say, Oh, we were in Portlaoise. Actually, St. Mary s Hall in Portlaoise. In our case, they fucked off. In the Guildford Four s case it was different, obviously. But we attracted a lot of attention like that. It was slightly uncomfortable. It may well have been because Lemmy had been there the night before or whatever, there was that aspect to it as well.
It was also, for what it s worth, scary playing the North in 72, 73 and 74, Barry interjects. We got the shite scared out of us consistently. You never knew who was behind you. It was scary and we wouldn t be deterred. We just went, Fuck this, we re gonna play . That was genuine. I wouldn t have thought we were particularly brave, any of us, but we weren t gonna be knocked off that, we played the North no matter what happened. We didn t have to, and indeed quite often we d go, Oh Jayzus, but that was what we did.
Bear in mind that, at this point, Barry Devlin was apt to be playing a shamrock shaped bass on stage. Some might express the opinion that he d have been better off wearing a bull s-eye.
But it was a freak flag, protests Eamon. It was a strange . . . I mean, there were people of both persuasions in the audience. In fact, at the Belfast gigs, it became apparent that there were young men in the audience, (and) the last time they would have seen each other would have been both sides of the wire in the Kesh. For whatever reasons. One set of lads weren t there because it was traditional Irish (music) from the Republic, they were there for the amphetamine rush or whatever. But it was a kind of a truce.
However, it was a most uneasy one, as was borne out by the wide berth given Ulster by most international touring acts until relatively recently.
There was a kind of a rule that was abruptly shattered with the Miami, Barry explains, which was don t shoot the entertainer, don t shoot the piano player. After the Miami all that changed and it was a very, very bad time, it was the worst time. You sublimated it, I mean, we were playing universities, and these were kids who to some extent were trying to be above it and be out of it.
Funnily enough, what we were playing wasn t the Wolfe Tones, he expands, it wasn t sectarian; it was the exact opposite. We were . . . Bringing a rock consciousness to traditional music sounds so pretentious it s not true, but we were doing something funny that was and wasn t Irish, and I think a lot of kids took comfort that this was Irish music which hadn t been appropriated by a narrow nationalist consciousness. That s the stuff that I truly hate, when the language, the game and the ballad get appropriated by any narrow section, because I think it s lies, whoever it is. And I mean, the musical things that we did with the tunes, it sounds pretentious again, but at their best they were kind of an ironic overview, a song like Dearg Doom or Trouble With A Capital T or Power And The Glory or New York Wakes .

Which seems like an apt note on which to close the Horslips casebook. Except, before we conclude the session, I m duty bound to check that Messrs Devlin and Carr have heard the folk tale about the RTE broadcaster, the Horslips instrumental and the newsflash.
The story is a simple one. The aforementioned disc jockey s programme is interrupted by the sad news of the death of DeValera, former president, founder of the state and freedom fighter. After the news bulletin, the DJ cues a piece of instrumental music kept on standby for such occasions. The track is by Horslips. The title? The Snake s Farewell To The Emerald Isle .
Barry Devlin dissolves into convulsions of mirth upon hearing this.
This isn t true, is it? he manages through the tears.
I heard it from someone in RTE, testifies Carr.
Oh, if it was only for that it would ve been worth it! he concludes. You ve made an old man very happy!

Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part, The Tain, Dancehall Sweethearts, The Unfortunate Cup Of Tea, The Book Of Invasions and Aliens are all out now on Universal, remastered and repackaged.