The First Of The Celtic Tigers
SEAMUS HEANEY once described Ireland as a country that went from the medieval to the post-modern in a generation. More than any other native band, Horslips embody that idea. Over their ten-year career, the band lurched back and forth from neo-classical Irish chamber music to progressive rock to acoustic folk to psychedelic pop to glam rock; here was one combo capable of going from Carolan to Caravan in a single bound.
Peter Murphy, 31 Aug 2000
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.
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