Your sweet lips

Altogether now: if you see me coming you had better run, run, run.

No, it’s not an extract from Bono’s, um, singular tribute to my old mucker Sam Beckett. Nor is it Bob Geldof graciously accepting a lifetime achievement award from somebody called Wilma.
Nope, fuck awards and centenaries: as far as this column is concerned Bono, Bob, Sam and even Christy Hennessy must all go under the thunder of Ireland’s one true artistic giant of the 20th century. I refer to none other than that mighty collective known as Horslips.
Those fierce moustachioed men reconvened out in Donnybrook last week for a live tv special for TG4, and it will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that Sam was one of a select few to be invited to attend this exclusive and truly historic affair.
And why not? After all, it was Sam who first proposed the idea of a Heritage Park for traditional music, back when such things were neither profitable nor popular. In my ambitious plans, all sean nos singers and box players were to be rounded up and placed in a reservation somewhere in the midlands where, in order to protect the purity of their work from modern contamination, they would be surrounded by watch-towers, machine gun nests and electric fences.
Sadly, the musicians themselves failed to acknowledge the noble vision involved, with the result that there were some ugly scenes when my people tried to entice 80-year-old spoons players called Junior out of their local hooch parlours for relocation to a better world. The ensuing publicity was not good, and it didn’t get any better when what my field archivists first took to be some spirited sean nos singing in the newly opened camp itself, actually turned out to be the painful screeching of an auld lad from the Blaskets whose braces had gotten tangled up with the electric fence.
Nevertheless, this was probably the first recorded instance of the tradition actually coming into contact with 50 megawatts of juice, so in a sense you could say that Sam invented Celtic Rock, which remains probably the single greatest influence on popular culture up to and including hip-hop and even Enya.

Off The Rails

And Celtic Rock’s greatest ever exponents were, of course, Horslips, as they reminded us all out in RTE last week. Many of my old muckers and theirs were on hand to mark the occasion, including John Waters, formerly of this parish, who pointed out that, without Horslips, there would have been no U2.
Then again, as I in turn pointed out, without Horslips there would have been no Mushroom or Spud either, so we need to be careful about driving that particular logic train right off the rails.
Anyway, I may well have misunderstood, since John was speaking in Irish, as were all the participants on the night, which was the only downside of an otherwise entirely uplifting affair.
Sam never quite got that Irish thing. He recalls having it beaten into him in school but since Nick Kent only rarely used it in the NME and Bob Dylan seemed to avoid it completely, it quickly dawned on your correspondent that the old tongue was going to be of fuck-all use to a man whose manifest destiny lay in international drug trafficking, advanced brain chemistry and the business they call show.
Fortunately, Horslips had no problem giving it a bit of the old bi-lingual groove, so that there could be no confusion possible over the clear meaning of something like, eh, ‘The Unfortunate Cup Of Tea’. Or that other one about arable land.
Actually, now that I think of all those great Horslips classics, I’m reminded that I have one other small quibble about last week’s fantastic show. As everyone knows, the keystone ‘Lipso classic is ‘Furniture’, an epic narrative about, well, furniture. And arrows. And some other stuff.
Anyway, the bit that all the headbangers always loved was when the great Johnny Fean used to rock out on a riff based on an old Irish tune called, if memory serves. ‘Oh Row Shay Da Va A Wall Yeah’.
But shockingly, they left that bit out of the performance in Donnybrook, which is rather like ‘Stairway To Heaven’ stopping short of the pearly gates. Frankly, I think there should be a tribunal of inquiry.
Still, I don’t want to be churlish. The boys were generally in cracking form, giving the Artic Monkeys and all those young pretenders a right run for their money on such stone classics as ‘Mad Pat’, ‘Shakin’ All Over’ and the deathless ‘Dearg Doom’.
By the end, the faithful were so maddened with lust for the music that they were throwing their zimmer frames around with abandon and getting their intravenous drips all tangled up.A fabulous scene.

Satin Loon Pants

In the thick of it all, one couldn’t help but be reminded of the famous story of Horslips playing a gig in the back of beyond way back in the day. When they finally climaxed with an incendiary ‘Doom’, there was a blinding flash as the smoke bombs went off. Then, as the dry ice drifted across the stage, engulfing Charlie’s satin loon pants and Barry’s shamrock-shaped bass, one of two old mountainy man who’d snuck in at the back of the venue was heard to remark to his equally ancient buddy: “That’ll be the dhrugs so.”
Aye. Before the Late Late Show there was no sex in Ireland. And before Horslips there was no drugs or rock ‘n’ roll.
And people think Sam Beckett was influential? I can’t go on. So I won’t.