The Horslips, Ireland's most important rock band, ended their grand experiment in fusion back in 1980. They were 10 years old to the day and thought it the right moment to end it all in some style. In a dramatic gesture, Charles O'Connor threw his fiddle high into the air and everyone watched, stunned, as it arced and spiralled into the arms of the Belfast crowd. And that was it. The next time Horslips came together they were back in Belfast again and, legally speaking, they wanted their fiddle back.
The reunion happened in a Chichester Street courtroom where Horslips were battling successfully to recover the rights to their back catalogue. It was a move prompted by the CD release of their recordings by another party who himself believed he had the rights. And what particularly annoyed the band was that those CD releases didn't sound very good, and they desperately wanted them reissued on their own terms. Now, as a result of those meetings in the courthouse coffee-room and a celebratory meal afterwards, there have been the remastered CDs and even some brand new recordings - all of it leading to much wishful thinking on the part of old Horslips' fans.
For drummer Eamon Carr, that court victory has changed everything. "I was in denial for 18 years," he says, "and I genuinely couldn't listen to what was out there. People would sometimes ask me if I was the fella from Horslips and I would say no. They would think, I think, that I was a terrible curmudgeon, but I genuinely didn't want to get into a debate about how someone had bought our CDs and how they sounded shite. Where do you go from there? But then the thrill of recovering your rights in what could loosely be termed `an artistic venture' was seriously good."
Horslips emerged at a time when rock music worldwide was taken with idea of fusion. Elaborate bands such as Blood, Sweat and Tears and, in particular, The Flock (who had an electric fiddler) indicated some alternative to the Beat scene still lingering in Dublin. Younger musicians with a more "arty" bent had little interest in jamming the blues all night, and so when they first got together, they brought with them these new and experimental enthusiasms. "Fusion is what people were at," says vocalist and shamrock-bassist Barry Devlin. "All the elements of rock and pop that exist side by side now were then in a kind of flux, and we were genuinely intrigued by what was happening. And anyway, none of us except Eamon had any background in rock n'roll. None of us except for Eamon had spent hours up on a stage doing Dimples, so, let's say, we had no commitment to the blues. Having said that, we didn't get together and decide to be a fusion band. We just thought it would be great to get up on stage and play guitars. I think that's the way almost every band, with the possible exception of Genesis and Yes, started off. There is that notion that being up there and making music is a brilliant thing. And it is a brilliant thing."
The fusion which Horslips arrived at was largely due to available instruments and, technically, what they were able to play. Charles O'Connor had a spectacular arsenal of folk instruments; Jim Lockhart played whistle, flute, pipes and organ, and Johnny Fean had been playing banjo with Ted Furey. In such eclectic circumstances of both chance and design, a marriage developed between Irish music and rock 'n' roll - a genre later dubbed Celtic Rock. The slightly planned part of it came from the fact that they were all genuinely interested in traditional music, and how to set about presenting it in a new way.
"There is still a misconception," says Jim Lockhart, "that what we were doing was either making a mockery of it, or doing it very badly; but what we were doing was something else entirely. We were using traditional music as an influence to develop a new idiom of rock 'n' roll that would have some relevance to us and our own experience. We were listening to 208 under the blankets like everybody else, but at the same time we were getting Ciaran MacMathuna and Proinsias O Conluain, who were collecting and then presenting the music with a passion that drew you in. That was there as well as the rock 'n' roll - two idioms that we could slot into. We certainly didn't have any ideas of overturning the tradition or taking the stuffiness out of it - we just thought that it was great stuff!" Eamon Carr had been a member of Tara Telephone - another experimental experience which Barry Devlin remembers as a "poetry and bongos group".
Along with Peter Fallon, Carr had been writing, performing and publishing poetry, often marrying it with music in live performance. For Carr, who considered himself "a latter-day Beatnik", Horslips was yet another open-ended, broad-minded experiment driven entirely by the desire to try things out; as Jim Lockhart puts it "everyone had their half-pound of sausage meat that they threw into the machine". Appropriately enough, these early sessions, as Carr recalls, took place in Lockhart's front room over the butcher's shop in James's Street. "It really was an experiment and that's why everything, especially on the first album, was so different. The line that was bandied around when punk started in London in the mid-1970s was that people were bored. Well, you couldn't be more bored than you were in Dublin in 1970/71! Luckily we just happened to fall into each other's arms. We had an oddball assortment of instruments - O'Connor had things like a 16-string Polish mandolin - and it just started off with a lot of messing.
"As we became slightly more adept as a unit, songs were then written and structured and rearranged and put in different shapes and later tried out in ballrooms. The younger audiences would sit on the ground because they had seen a movie called Wood- stock! The older ones who wanted to dance around in a circular motion would get a bit annoyed. It was all very bizarre."
Soon those ballrooms were jammed night after night, and Horslips began to assume a unique position on the scene. Their string of albums, commencing in 1972 with Happy to Meet, Sorry To Part, were all essential listening and brought them to a wider audience, particularly in the States, where they signed to Atlantic Records. The band's real importance, however, was in an Irish context, and as the first successful Irish band not to take the boat to London, they made a very clear statement about their independent approach. To their thousands of fans, they were an Irish rock band playing Irish music and, most importantly of all, they were accessible.
`I think it was very important too," says Devlin, "that we were fellas who, by and large, came from the country ourselves. Even the Dub we had - Jim Lockhart - his mother was from Leitrim and his father was from Belfast. And I think all of this was far more evident north of Dublin, and the place where people really went bat shit was the North. I'm not sure how we felt about that uniqueness of our position, but we did spend an awful lot of time in tea bars with young fellas from Clonmel exhorting them to do their Leaving! There was something about Horslips that Irish kids recognised as being theirs. We get lambasted regularly for loads of stuff - and rightly so for much of it - but the one thing that is undeniable is that it really did change forever how people felt about their own culture."
The long-running debate on culture, experimentation and traditional music has become a bit of an intellectual mosh-pit, but, oddly enough, Horslips seem to have been rather excluded from it. It's as if they aren't strictly relevant and that their particular musical crimes were so great that they figure only in some other orbit of diminished responsibility. But to leave Horslips outside that debate is to seriously misjudge their cultural impact on young Irish people, particularly outside Dublin. That's a whole thesis in itself, but on one basic level there is certainly no doubt that they opened the door to traditional music to people who would otherwise never have heard of Johnny Doherty or Mrs Crotty. In that sense, they were a gateway drug.
"For us it was Barney McKenna," says Lockhart, "playing traditional music on the banjo in the context of a ballad group. That was a gateway into the music for us. It meant that you suddenly heard the tunes in a way that you hadn't before. Because it really had got to the stage that you'd heard so many pretty mediocre ceili bands churning it out with the old plinka-plonk piano, and that wasn't any more traditional than what we did."
Devlin jokes that Horslips were in this regard "an elegant cul-de-sac". He also adds that even though they have been recording in Charles O'Connor's studio in the Yorkshire town of Whitby, they are unlikely to play again because there isn't a stage strong enough to support their combined weights. In the meantime, however, there are those first six albums re-mastered and re-packaged on CD and, for the fan, the tantalising sight of them . together in a room at the same time. There's a huge excitement in that and, despite the jokes from Devlin, there's a certain amount of excitement in the Horslips camp too. And Eamon Carr is now more than happy to admit who he is.
"The re-mastering in Abbey Road has now presented legitimately what I heard back then. I was surprised by it. It made me realise that I wasn't wrong about the music. I realised that I wasn't deluding myself and there was actually something going on then that made me squander the best years of my life acting the maggot. To be honest it was quite shocking to hear what we were at."