Caught part of an old Horslips show on TG4 from the 70s recently. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of their folky-Irish rock since my teens and even managed to catch a couple of their shows back in the 70s, but I found this particular gig to be a bit of a eye-opener.
I’d always found their LPs to have some good songs let down by poor production. This was the 70s, after all, and the production houses in Ireland must have had well dodgy equipment. But, then again, so did the ones in the UK, which, incidentally, around the same time, would have been recording the early output of Judas Priest and Black Sabbath.
What struck me about this particular live performance was how close the band was in sound and attitude to the likes of Sabbath and Priest back in the day. There was the same ridiculous haircuts and leftover apparel from the 60s (Horslips managed to go one better by incorporating some of Bowie’s ‘hand-me-downs’ that could only have been found in a skip on a weekend piss-up in London).
There were the same extended overdriven blues scale solos and a low overdriven sound that wavered around the midpoint between the hippy 60s and the early metal of the late 70s. All in all, very little to separate them from Priest and Sabbath, apart from the obvious nod to traditional Irish music.
Of course, both Priest and Sabbath went on to much greater things and their sound evolved much more taking in the full-on metal assault of the 80s, 90s and beyond. Horslips foundered due to record label, copyright issues and personnel problems, but what would have happened if they hadn’t thrown the fiddle in, as Charles O’Connor quite literally did at their last gig in the Ulster Hall in 1980? Would they just this year have released a searing metal concept album with a Celtic twist telling the life story of the great prophet St Patrick with a bonus track thrown in about the legendary monster of Lough Neagh?
I’d love to think that they would.
In the last couple of singles before the break-up, Loneliness and Guests of the Nation, you could hear the music becoming more contemporary and distorted guitar coming to the fore. Their final live outing, The Belfast Gigs, rivals Priest’s ‘Unleashed in the East’ (released around the same time) for sheer energy and power.
They’re back now, copyright issues finally resolved, cashing in on a few big shows around the country and, by all accounts, it’s a great show to see for pure nostalgia. But, I just wonder if it all could have been so much more.
Nowadays, combining trad Irish with rock/metal is old hat. Even the best of the scene like Celtic Legacy, whose stunning Resurrection album was, in my opinion, the best rock record to come out of Ireland since Lizzy, can’t break through the legacy of the past.
Instead, bands leaning towards the heavier end of the spectrum like Waylander, Runecaster and, to a lesser extent, Cruachan, ply their not-so-commercial wares to an underground market.
The boat was missed by Horslips, through no fault of their own. They worked hard, took the initiative and released their own albums like many bands do today - something that was very rare back then. They had to, because, like today, the mainstream Irish music industry largely ignores anything that doesn’t conform to the norm, or isn’t commercially accepted elsewhere. The Irish music industry doesn’t take chances. Which is why nothing ground breaking or innovative comes out of Ireland and why the only really big musical phenomena to come out of Ireland in the last 30 years has been U2 and Daniel O’Donnell.
All the real talent has been wasted.
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