Forty years ago, Horslips brought groupies, a famous truck, some curtains and a few tricks to a Tipperary country house – and recorded an album that would have a seismic impact on Irish rock, writes KEVIN COURTNEY
IN THE SUMMER of 1972, there were strange happenings at Longfield House in Co Tipperary. The rambling mansion – once the home of Bianconi, the father of horse-drawn transport in Ireland – was said to be haunted, but this particular summer the most noteworthy residents were a troupe of beardy, long-haired types sporting spangly threads and wielding fiddles, uileann pipes, mandolins, electric guitars, Hammond organs and what-have-you.
Outside the house was parked a large, camouflaged truck, from which cables ran mysteriously into the bowels of the mansion. This was a mobile studio belonging to the Rolling Stones, fresh from its previous engagement in a French chateau to record Exile on Main Street, with a stopover in Montreux for Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. Now, it was being deployed for the recording of a landmark album in Irish rock history – Horslips’s debut album, Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part.
What the locals thought of all this rock star shenanigans going on is anybody’s guess. Five young Irish fellas getting it together in the country, accompanied by an entourage of fans, friends and local scenesters. The band ate, slept, drank and recorded at the house, venturing out only for fags, milk and the occasional late-night cavort in the grounds of Longfield House.
The album, which was released in the winter of that year on the band’s own Oats label, had a seismic impact on the home front, dancing merrily from traditional Irish jigs to all-out prog-rock noodling, with a bit of sunny American rock thrown in. And that sleeve . . . it came in an elaborate concertina shape, complete with clasps and Celtic adornment, designed by the band’s singer/fiddler Charles O’Connor. For a certain type of Irish rock fan, the album was exactly what they were crying out for, but didn’t know it yet. It was prog with a proud Irish identity – a homegrown counterpoint to the very English prog of Genesis, Jethro Tull et al.
Forty years later, Jim Lockhart and Barry Devlin, older and less hairy, are sitting in a Dublin hotel, proudly displaying a special edition CD of Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part. It’s taken the band the best part of 20 years to get back to this starting point. Having lost control of their back catalogue soon after their breakup in 1980, they were dismayed to see their albums re-released with inferior packaging and below-standard sound. After a lengthy legal battle, the band won back their rights, and set about restoring their tarnished treasures, remastering them in Abbey Road Studios and re-releasing them on CD between 2000 and 2001. In the past year, the band have released their back catalogue on “special edition” CDs, with bonus tracks and live material. Happy to Meet . . . is the final piece in the jigsaw, says Lockhart.
“If I had a penny for all the people who told me they had a copy of this in the attic . . .” laughs Lockhart.
“That Christmas, 1972, there was nothing else around that looked or sounded like that,” says Barry Devlin. “It was DIY, it wasn’t coming out on any big label. And nobody knew it was coming out, because a record company would normally say in advance what was emerging, but when this thing appeared on the shelves . . . it just sold like hot cakes. And each copy had to be put together by hand. You know these days they say bread is made by hand, well, this was handmade by the patients of St Ita’s in Portrane.”
Such was the demand for copies, the band took it upon themselves to drop into Outlet Records, where the album was being packaged, to stir up the troops.
“We had a champagne party and everybody got pissed, which completely slowed down production. It was a real own goal,” says Devlin.
With the album’s instant success at home came the question, were Horslips a bunch of céili musicians jumping on the rock’n’roll bandwagon, or a bunch of rockers who had hit on trad music as a money-spinning gimmick? “We saw ourselves as a prog-rock band, whose prog bit came from what we knew, which was traditional music,” says Devlin. “We’d already seen someone do something like this, and that was Seán Ó Riada. And we were huge fans of him, and what he had done on Saoirse, and Mise Éire was a huge inspiration to us, because we could see how you can take tunes that were normally played on the penny whistle and make extraordinary symphonic soundscapes from them. We were a rock band that was using traditional music to push the boundaries.”
Each band member brought his own set of influences to the table, says Lockhart. Bassist Devlin knew a bunch of folk songs from around Lough Neagh. Charles O’Connor had picked up lots of Scottish and north of England tunes in his native Northumbria. Drummer Eamon Carr’s grandad had a céili band in Kells, Co Meath. Guitarist Johnny Fean could duel banjos and mandolins with the best of them. All were into pop, rock, soul and blues, but, surprisingly, Lockhart reveals they weren’t all that enamoured with English prog rock; they preferred the highway-bound sounds of American bands such as Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane.
When the band rolled up to Longfield House to weave all those disparate musical strands into one album, little did the locals realise that they were about to become, as Lockhart puts it, “part of the rural eclectification process”.
“One of the surprises listening to it again, for me at any rate, was how fearless it all sounded,” says Lockhart. “It was like, holy God, did we not have any boundaries at all? We did things that if we’d stopped to think about it, we probably wouldn’t have done.”
One of the first seemingly impossible feats the band performed was to hire the Rolling Stones’s mobile studio without a record company advance, and bring it to Co Tipperary. How did they manage to pony up the cash for that?
“We’d been working quite hard around Ireland, gigging intensively, and it was a significant factor that we broke into the ballrooms,” says Lockhart. “Anyone who wasn’t a showband was confined to very small clubs, but when we broke into the ballroom circuit, we suddenly had crowds of 2,000 coming to see us, so we’d built up a war chest which we could put towards making the album.”
“What we had to do was clear out the old audience – which we did pretty quickly after our first number,” adds Devlin.
It wasn’t just bragging rights that spurred the band to bring in the mobile studio – in terms of recording facilities, Ireland at the time was a backwater.
“There wasn’t an equivalently equipped studio here at the time. The mobile was 16-track and there was no 16-track studio in Ireland. Our manager Michael Deeny worked out that we could rent this big house in Tipperary, bring the mobile in, and that would work out cheaper than going to London to record – and there was a good chance we’d get a decent product out of it.”
And so, in the great tradition of Traffic and Led Zeppelin, Horslips got it together in the country, rehearsing in another old house in Donegal, then repairing to Longfield House for the recording proper.
To help dampen the echo in the library, where they did most of the recording, Paul McGuinness, who was then with Trinity Players, brought some stage curtains to Longfield House, and ended up staying for most of the recording. The sessions, admits Devlin, were “the most fun I had in my life . . . It was one big party, but we worked hard too. When you weren’t playing, there was a 24-hour party going on. We had a bunch of schoolgirls who came down from Derry to watch the sessions, and they’d end up joining in.”
Both quickly point out that “it was fantastic fun, but it wasn’t a debauch”.
“I sometimes wish it was, but it was much more innocent than that,” insists Devlin. “Barry’s pants, I might point out, are on fire at this point,” interjects Lockhart.
The more lurid recollections may have faded, but the band are hoping that the special-edition release of their debut album will keep the memory of the music alive for a long time to come. They went on to make better albums – The Táin and The Book of Invasions are generally considered their best works – but the psychedelic céili that was Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part will remain their own amazing Technicolor calling-card.
Happy To Meet, Sorry to Part is out now
'I was unable to hear properly for sometime'
The Irish Times reviews the Horslips in concert at the National Stadium, 1974
[The Horslips] seemed much more professional than before. There was a lot of heavy stuff of course, and when this volume thing ceases to be regarded as a sales necessity a whole lot of people will be pleased, including many who’ve only been pretending to go along with it; the last encore, real heavy rock, actually sent me out to the South Circular unable to hear anything properly for some time.
I like Horslips best when they’re in what I might term the Irish Alan Stivell sector; there, they do most acceptable and even delicate things – such as the flute obbligatos, especially double ones.
And the drum work in Irish dance numbers got both beaty and complex without appearing to get too far from origins, which is the point of the Stivell-type exercise. Audience reaction was what one might correctly call a rave.
