Horslips was made up of a group of like-minded musicians, who happened to work in advertising in Dublin. The success of their single Johnny’s Wedding led to their 1972 album Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part and Celtic rock had found its feet. Along with Planxty and the Bothy Band, they changed how a generation felt about their culture.

With a successful fusion of traditional music, lyrics founded on Celtic mythology and contemporary electric rock, they came into being at just the right time. They were Barry Devlin (vocals and bass), Johnny Fean (electric and acoustic guitar) Eamon Carr (drums), Charles O’Connor (vocals, violin and mandolin) and Jim Lockhart (vocals, flute, tin whistle, keyboards). While most had a background in traditional music, they also shared the wider eclectic taste of their contempories (just as the younger Phil Lynnott frequented the Irish music scene).

Eamon Carr had been involved in the beat/poetry/folk group Tara Telephone and was interested in experimentation. Johnny Fean had played for a while with Ted Furey. Charles O’Connor played concertina, mandolin and fiddle. Jim Lockhart was a accomplished tin whistle player. Barry Devlin’s interest lay in songwriting and bass guitar.

The Irish showbands commanded the largest audiences at the time, but with the success of Johnny’s Wedding and Happy to Meet, Horslips found themselves playing to packed ballrooms the length and breadth of Ireland. “There was something about Horslips that Irish kids recognised as being theirs,” recalled Jim Lockhart. “Horslips opened, for a whole generation, an Aladdin’s cave of traditional music and song,” according to Fintan O’Toole.

.”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,” Jim Lockhart told John Kelly in the Irish Times in 2000. “We certainly didn’t have any ideas of overturning the tradition or taking the stuffiness out of it.”

They were, wrote John Kelly “the first successful Irish band not to take the boat to London” (a reference to Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher). To their thousands of fans, they were an Irish rock band playing Irish music and, most importantly of all they were accessible.”

With the release of their follow-up album in 1974, The Táin, based on the Gaelic mythology of the Táin Bó Cúailgne, their music found a wider audience in America. Six more albums followed, during which time Horslips experienced further success in America, spending three years touring from coast to coast. At home, much of the appetite for Irish music whetted by Horslips was syphoned into the rise and success of more traditional groups like Planxty and the Bothy Band. By the time they released their 1980 live album, The Belfast Gigs, the group decided to call it a day.

“It was fantastic”, recalled Johnny Fean in 2009. “Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part came out before Christmas in 1972 and it got a great reaction from the young in Ireland. It was very new. We started touring for the first time in the UK and the following year we had the Táin album. That had Dearg Doom on it and from there, it really took off.”
A lot of work went into breaking the American market and according to Johnny, they almost entered the stratosphere there. “We got close enough to it. We had three albums that entered the Billboard charts but it just didn’t quite happen.”

Similar bands to Horslips emerged in the form of Spud, Mushroom and the Woods Band. But the real legacy of Celtic rock, according to Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times, was among the Irish diaspora. “It morphed in London into The Pogues and in Boston into the Dropkick Murphys. Somehow, in the re-inventions of exile, hybrids that withered at home could blossom.”

Horslips are reuniting – minus Carr – for two concerts, in Belfast and Dublin, in December 2009.

Discography

Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part, 1972 (Oats)

The Tain, 1973 (Oats)

Drive the Cold Winter Away, 1975 (Oats)

The Book of Invasions – A Celtic Symphony, 1976 (DJM)

Aliens, 1977 (Oats)

The Man Who Built America, 1978 (Oats)

Short Stories, Tall Tales, 1979 (Oats)

The Belfast Gigs, 1980 (Oats).

Treasury: The Best of Horslips (HorslipsRecords) 2009