Passing years just add to the greatness of Horslips

The band who did much to save the souls of a generation simply get better and better, writes Declan Lynch

HORSLIPS seem to be getting better. Even without doing anything, they’re getting better.

And when they actually do something, such as their recent performance at the Philip Chevron testimonial at the Olympia, we realise that they will probably continue to get better for the foreseeable future.

Even for those of us who have always known how good they were, it can be strange to observe these developments. And with a biography of the band to be published next week, we expect this trend to continue.

Two things in particular should be noted about that performance towards the end of the Chevron night. One was the guitar-playing of Johnny Fean, which was so unnaturally brilliant, it confirmed the view long held by Barry Devlin that if Horslips had become horrendously huge in America and everywhere else, Fean would now be regarded as a guitar virtuoso on the scale of Rory Gallagher or Jimmy Page — and that even without that level of extraterrestrial fame, he can still be regarded as a true Hero of Rock.

The other thing to note was something that some of us have noted on many occasions, the enormous influence that these guys have had on the cultural life of this country, in this case, on the work of Phil Chevron, who insisted that they play Nighttown Boy segueing into his own Kitty Ricketts, because it was only after hearing Nighttown Boy that the young Chevron realised that such a thing could even be attempted.

And yet I’m beginning to wonder if the acknowledgement of all that influence has in some way detracted from a recognition of the quality of the work itself.

We know now that Horslips did much to save the souls of a generation of youths condemned to be growing up in Ireland in the Seventies.

We realise the extravagance of their independently produced first album Happy To Meet Sorry To Part, how the notion of an album sleeve consisting of a booklet in the shape of a concertina was itself a major statement on the road to Irish freedom.

We are aware of these other vignettes such as Barry Devlin producing the first official U2 demo, and of stories less widely known, such as the fact that Eamon Carr encouraged the shy young Philip Lynott to read his poems in public with Tara Telephone.

But listening to them taking it home at the Olympia, at the end of a night which had come to resemble The Last Waltz, the coming together of a whole culture, it seemed that this band had become The Band.

There was no sense that this Horslips material had been written decades ago, it might have been done at any time in Irish rock history, yet it is also a foundation stone.

And to understand why it is getting better all the time, we can call on this rough form of logic ... Horslips were a very fine band at a time, the Seventies, which can now be seen by any person of taste to be one of the richest periods in Western culture probably since the Renaissance.

A list of the best 20 albums or 20 singles made at any time during that Golden Age would contain astonishing riches.

Horslips would be competing with, to name a completely random sample, Marvin Gaye, Led Zeppelin, Little Feat, Van Morrison, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, T Rex, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Sly and the Family Stone.

They would be touring with Roxy Music and the Blue Oyster Cult, and with the J Geils Band. And even in this esoteric company, Horslips would be influential without even trying.

Barry Devlin tells the story of how members of the J Geils Band including singer Peter Wolf, who was then married to Faye Dunaway, would hang out with the Horslips, sincerely interested in them and in their music.

And in the course of this hanging out, there would

usually come a time when Wolf would ask Charles O’Connor to play this particular piece on the concertina that Wolf liked, a piece called The Kerry

Polka.

For those who would not recognise it by that title, it is probably better known as the riff of Centrefold, a massive hit for the J Geils Band in the Eighties.

Devlin was thrilled by it, not just as a rare tale of the good guys rewarded, but because it proved that such a thing could be done. That you could turn a bit of Irish music into a record that anyone would want to hear.

On a tour of England, Horslips were supported by Ace, a superior pub rock band who had just released a single called How Long. Devlin describes how, in the middle of the night, suddenly Ace weren't supporting them any more. Instead Ace were being flown by executive jet to the United States where How Long was unexpectedly roaring up the charts and about to become Number One.

Shouldn't that be us, Barry thought. And of course it should have been, but then it is entirely wrong to look at Horslips as a story of what shoulda been and what coulda been.

It is not even right to look at them in the past tense. The question is, given their constant state of improvement, how good are they going to be in 10 years’ time? ‘ Tall Tales’, the official biography of Horslips, by Mark Cunningham, is published by O'Brien Press.