Yes, that enormo box set was expensive, an indulegence beyond average pocket depth. Everything they’d ever issued and a great deal they hadn’t which left some of us scooping up the bonus discs if they appeared individually, still some elude. The good news is that ‘At The BBC,’ is far more affordable. You won’t have to sell the family silver or your Granny to obtain a copy. And since Horslips did indeed often collude with Auntie there is a body of work that should be heard.
The process of putting together anything supposedly held by the BBC is never plain sailing, sometimes material has been wiped, lost or totally forgotten, thus social media requests for fans to scour their collections for useful survivals were posted. Between official sources and eager contributors this box set presents Horslips from different phases, 1973 fresh from recording ‘The Tain’ to 2019 and what may well turn out to be their final hurrah, a collaboration with trad band Uliad on ‘Sideways To The Sun.’ This latter track is especially poigniant given that it features heavily their late guitarist Johnny Fean in a sensitive/dignified performance.
Those who toiled to recover, repair, preserve and polish these archive items deserve a hefty pat on the back, whilst not everything is pristine it’s not far off and thoroughly enjoyable. The accompanying booklet at the heart of the box set tells not only the story of Horslips BBC sessions but also the history of Beeb live assemblies by engineer Jeff Griffin. Horslips scribes Colin Harper and Mark Cunningham are as usual forensic in giving context to the box’s content. No stone unturned.
According to Ken Garner’s splendid BBC radio session history ‘In Session Tonight,’ Horslips recorded six sessions for Radio 1, some of those songs and tunes are here and CD 1 has the lion’s share, the majority of them focus on 1974 and their second album which chronicles the legends of Cu Chulainn/Ferdia and the Cattle Raid Of Cooley, including three versions of their anthem ‘Derag Doom,’ all Shaft like percussion and churning rhythm until that keening guitar solo playing a hyped/muscled up ‘O’ Neill’s Cavalry March.’ It remains glorious no matter how many times you hear it.
Pleasingly though tracks rescued from earlier 1973 sessions contrast the sophistication of their second LP with gentle instrumentals and Gaelic samples from ‘Happy To Meet Sorry To Part,’ the band’s debut. Later sessions from 1974 and 1977 appear sadly to still be buried or vanished. CD 2 therefore opens with 1979 Horslips just returned from a trip over The Big Pond where they’d been touring ‘The Man Who Built America,’ perhaps with the benefit of hindsight their smoothest and certainly most FM rock radio friendly production. Tracks like ‘Loneliness,’ the single lifted from that album, jostle with selections from ‘The Book Of Invasions,’ with added heft and vitality. And indeed another version of ‘Derag Doom.’ An acoustic rendition of ‘Green Star Liner,’ shows its backbone of old tune ‘The Eagle’s Whistle’ to splendid effect and sneaks in from 2010 showing the band reunited still had craft and guile thirty five years on.
CD 3 is a different mix of ‘Live At The Waterfront Belfast,’ of course with the BBC Ulster Orchestra, and you wondered why it was left out of the ‘More Than You Can Chew,’ box set. Recorded on St. Patrick’s Day in 2011, the sound of an orchestra nifty and nimble behind selections from ‘The Tain,’ and ‘The Book Of Invasions,’ as well as class creations like ‘Rescue Me,’ or ‘Ghosts,’ from later albums, is enticing and works fantastically, especially when the strings echo and expand the Irish motifs embedded in the tracks. Rumour has it that the band themselves consider it one of the highlights of their career. Presented in a previously unheard Radio mix, it comes complete with announcements and intros and finale ‘I’ll Be Waiting,’ in which Johnny Fean and his guitar elasticate and play around with folk tune ‘Dingle Bay,’ superbly with a wrap around orchestral bouyancy.
CD 4 is the odd one out – nothing to do with the BBC whatsoever. Found on a dusty shelf by their former roadie and now archivist Steve Iredale a tape of working mixes from the final studio album of their first run ‘Short Stories, Tall Tales.’ This is an album which has seen its share of criticism down the years, by 1979 Horslips were tired and run ragged. Road weary the last thing they really needed to do was record another studio album, but they’d inked a deal with Mercury Records and the label wanted product. A vague notion of producing a themed album based on famous Irish writers – hence the title – got shunted aside, leading to a fractured record which demarcated sharply the differences within the group. As Barry Devlin has attested more than once, Horslips were always a rock band, it’s just that their way of creating a recognisable Irish rock was to take old folk tunes and weave them into the fabric of their writing. “Taking jigs, reels and airs and dragging them screaming into the back beat,” expanded The Guinness Who’s Who Of Folk Music. Devlin again swears they never deviated from that modus operandi, even on ‘Short Stories,’ the principle was still there. Listen hard: these mixes throw new light on proceedings.
Noting the struggle to write Charles O’Connor, then under the spell of new wave acts, came up with five numbers which sounded nothing like Horslips had done before. They were brisk, sharp and clipped back, not a folk instrument in any of them. Here they are pretty close to the released versions. Yet, if you take care you can hear where a fiddle or mandolin run or a burst of jiggery could have been cannily placed, ‘Ricochet Man,’ f’r instance has a bouncy back rhythm which is just crying out to be given an Celtic flourish. ‘Soap Opera,’ the original album’s finale could so easily have benfitted from a screaming fiddle line running a juiced up jig that would have added pace and gravity to match the agression of the piece. Likewise ‘Law On The Run.’ These tracks would then still have been new wave focussed but would have at least nodded to past achievement and have that Irish something.
Three numbers do actually follow previous form, Barry Devlin and Jim Lockhart stick to the tried and tested. ‘Rescue Me,’ which is the album’s masterpiece is longer than the official version. Minus O’Connor’s concertina, Lockhart’s flute runs the counter melody, trad tune ‘The Downfall Of Paris,’ through several times, lyrical differences too stretch the length. It remains a fantatsic creation. ‘Back In My Arms’ Devlin’s ballad of longing and regret reveals a traditional air cleverly adapted to give flight to the chorus and refrain, absent are Johnny Fean’s guitar over dubs of ‘Tab Har Dom Do Lauh’ here played instead on a snaking keyboard higher in the mix, the bass and drums using the same groove as the old harp melody. The words are not yet fixed either. ‘ The Life You Save,’ on the released album had ‘Roisin Dubh,’ secreted about the chorus, played by Fean’s lead guitar runs, however here they’ve not yet been added, though there are faint hints of it in the arrangement of this ‘working mix.’ This tape was run off to originally give the band an idea of how things were progressing and to let them make final additions to the tracks, in places you’ll hear them ask if things sound okay, ask for opinions or to repeat certain sections, it gives a glimpse into their care and craft in the studio. Fascinating.
Okay I’ve rambled on and we’ve yet to deal with the DVD, stacked with TV clips – revealing dubious 70s fashion choices: see TOGWT samples from 1974 and the quaintness of Ireland without main roads, reference 2nd House from BBC 2 in the same year. The real joy though is to be found in a totally absorbing interview with Barry Devlin and Jim Lockhart covering the whole band career in some detail, with lots of unknowns “The truth is that the album with most Irish tunes concealed about its person is actually ‘The Man Who Built America.’” Devlin. Now there’s the germ of a feature, the undiscovered trad tunes in Horslips tracks… hmmmn! I love the admission,”we didn’t know enough to know what we couldn’t do, so we tried anything.” Fortunately most of it worked brilliantly.
A box of treasure for the faithful or a place to delve deeper for the curious new kids on the block. Horslips unique approach to creating a relevant form of distinctly Irish rock endures over fifty years on and probably will remain a touchstone for another half century at least. They endure.
Simon Jones.
www.burningshed.com
