Horslips - Deconstructing Ireland In The Seventies

The incendiary, unrelenting and ribald nature of Irish folk wit and banter at its level best is an awesome beast to behold. Some years ago I was walking around the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast and across Writer's Square facing The John Hewitt Bar on Donegall Street. Amongst the literary wordage enshrined on the ground there is Joseph Tomelty's scathing observation on life, fate and drudgery -  What a bloody awful place for a man of imagination.

Tomelty was a Northern Irish actor born in Portaferry on County Down's Strangford Lough shore who starred in the movies Moby Dick and A Kid For Two Farthings. He was also the author of many works including the novel Red Is The Port Light, the prototype folk horror play All Soul's Night and the classic Ulster radio comedy The McCooeys which provided the comic actor James Young with his commercial breakthrough. He was also the former father-in-law of Sting.

I was reading about Tomelty this weekend with regard to Carol Reed's classic Odd Man Out film of 1947 in which he had a minor role. This feature starred James Mason as an IRA man on the run in Belfast after a robbery at a linen mill and included location shots from the Crumlin Road and the Ligoniel district in the north of the city. It garnered attention from contemporary censors because of the violent content but was certainly a brave attempt at that time to analyse the complex dynamics of bloody political conflict in Ireland.

Another example of wonderfully surreal Hibernian word association that stopped me in my tracks in the past were the comments of writer Declan Lynch in the 2014 Return of the Dancehall Sweethearts documentary about Irish folk rock legends Horslips. Lynch noting how the five-piece group "took the constituent parts of what it meant to be Irish and they put them back together in a way that wasn't crap".

Everything you ever want to know about Horslips can be found in the 2013 official biography Tall Tales by Mark Cunningham (and also Mark J Prendergast's long out-of-print Irish Rock: Roots, Personalities, Directions) but it is worth reiterating here the truly unique role they played within the cultural life of Seventies Ireland. This not only in regard to their native Irish Republic as a national musical act that had the capacity and talent to have been one of the biggest commercial draws on the globe but as one of the few major rock artists to continue to play in Ulster during the Troubles. In fact Horslips' last ever live performance was at the Whitla Hall at Queens University Belfast in May 1980.

Of the nine studio albums released between 1972 and 1979 the two most well-recalled after their groundbreaking Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part debut would be the fusion of hard rock, traditional folk and Celtic mythological narrative on The Tain (1973) and The Book of Invasions (1976) - these based respectively on Ulster's tenth century Cattle Raid of Cooley legend and a twelfth century chronicle of pre-Christian colonisations of Ireland. 

Dancehall Sweethearts (1975) and The Unfortunate Cup of Tea (1976) have some leanings towards more prog and poppier material alike but the former in particular has dated very well. Two later albums based on Ireland's experience of emigration to the New World - Aliens (1977) and The Man Who Built America (1978) - successfully pulled off a harder American rock approach which (like Big Country's The Buffalo Skinners) really warranted a much bigger and appreciative audience. However in light of the distance this took them from the folk base, the final album Short Stories, Tall Tales was to be the weakest of the studio albums though does contain the utterly sublime Rescue Me.

The Seventies discography is rounded off by the massively underrated Drive The Cold Winter Away acoustic folk collection from 1975, two live albums and an early compilation of rarities including two quirky Beatles tributes from "Lipstick"and the brilliant Motorway Madness. Horslips reformed for an unplugged live recording Roll Back in 2004 and in 2010 and 2011 further live albums were lifted from concerts at the O2 Arena Dublin and the Ulster Hall in Belfast.

The five individual members of the group were born in Dublin, Limerick, Kells County Meath, Ardboe by Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland and Middlesborough on Tyne and Wear. All their original albums were released in Ireland on their own Oats label with artwork designed by the group themselves - they also remained domestically resident in Ireland throughout the Seventies.

Horslips' commercial success may have been overshadowed by Thin Lizzy on an international scale but it is important to remember that the first LP release was the fastest selling album in Ireland in eight years, Dearg Doom from The Tain was a German number one single and The Book of Invasions reached number 39 on the UK album charts in the middle of a mainland IRA bombing campaign which may have possibly muddied some very clever people's marketing strategies. The passion and fire of their live performances in the British Isles, mainland Europe and North America are still talked about today with awe, respect and deep appreciation.

The King of the Fairies, Dearg Doom (as performed on the BBC Old Grey Whistle Test) and Trouble With a Capital T remain fairly well known to informed fans of classic rock music today but do take time to forge around Horslips back catalogue if you can. Go beyond the generic Celtic rock categorising and the draining bloody Jethro Tull comparisons to their fantastic second single Green Gravel, the wonderful instrumentals Ace and Deuce and We Bring the Summer With Us, to the great lost Seventies rock classic Sunburst, Self Defence from The Unfortunate Cup of Tea, the b-sides The High Reel and When The Night Comes, to New York Wakes off Aliens, The Man Who Built America's title track and particularly the entirety of the winter folk collection.

Without exaggeration Horslips stand alongside George Best in modern Irish social history as utterly unique creative talents who embodied so much of the soul and pride of the country during days of grim political turmoil, economic stagnation and shameful cultural division.

John Luke And The Eternal Now

The artist John Luke was born in East Belfast in 1906 and died in spartan circumstances in the city at the age of 69 in 1975. Luke worked at York Street Flax Spinning Company and the Workman Clark shipyard before winning a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He returned to Northern Ireland in the early Thirties and lived both in Belfast and County Armagh.

Although some of Luke's better known paintings such as The Road To The West, Landscape With Figures and The Three Dancers are suffused with a deeply mystical and Celtic otherness certain other works such as The Old Callan Bridge and The Lock at Edenderry are said to capture "the eternal now". According to Rory Fitzpatrick's God's Frontiersmen which accompanied the Channel Four series of the same name on Scots-Irish history "it is always Sunday in Luke's work, families walking their dogs through the green, drumlin country in the warm afternoon, or evening after work as a father comes home to a white Ulster farmhouse set in formal idyllic landscape."

Similar themes regarding the timelessness of the Ulster countryside were captured in the 1972 BBC Northern Ireland documentary Loughsiders with the poet Seamus Heaney exploring the County Fermanagh waterways and visiting the strange Janus figure on Boa Island - the first god of the first people. Likewise several Van Morrison songs touch upon contemplative elements of the urban and rural landscape such as And It Stoned Me, Got to Go Back, On Hyndford Street, Take Me Back and in particular Country Fair from the 1974 Veedon Fleece album.

Several weeks ago I was reading some moving recollections of old Belfast on the main internet forum from various expats around the world and what they missed from a long lost time and place:

I miss the smell of freshly baked bread when I walk past the sites of the old Kennedy's and Hughes' bakeries. I miss the days when neighbours could leave their front doors open without the fear of being robbed. I miss the sound of the horn at Mackies that you could set your clocks or watches by. I miss the old Smithfield and Variety markets that could have a child's senses buzzing. I miss the lovely inexpensive fresh fish sold from handcarts. But most of all I miss members of my family and my friends who have passed on who walked the streets of Belfast with me...

In the 60s when we were kids we used to go into town on a Friday night and stare endlessly into S S Moores sport shop window in Arthur street, dreaming of one day being able to afford a new football strip. Walking around town on a Friday night there was always the sound of music coming from the `Boom Boom Rooms` or some other dance venue. We would then go round to the Queens bridge and watch the cross channel steamers sailing from Belfast. The Glasgow boat left at 8-30pm, the Liverpool boat at 9-30pm and the Heysham boat at 9-40pm, then it was time to go home. On a Saturday morning it was the Stadium picture house for the kids morning matinee and then in the afternoon it was a dander down the Shankill to Smithfield market. Smithfield was fascinating for a young lad as it contained almost everything you could ever dream of. Unfortunately Smithfield has gone and so have the boats, but I guess nothings for ever. If only one could turn the clock back and relive those days...

I miss the old department stores with the grand stair cases and lots of nooks and crannys for different departments. I miss watching the birds gathering on the electric wires in the winter in donegal place when you were waiting for the bus. I miss the old double deckers with the big silver knobs on the end of the seats. I miss the brilliant santa experience in robbs going on a trip on santas sleigh before you ever saw him, it actually felt like you were moving. I miss the old buildings that are daily disappearing. I miss knowing who your next door neighbor is, the milkman coming and waking you up in the morning, the bread van coming round the streets. I miss so much sometimes it feels like it never really existed...

The last sentiment is something so many British and Irish people can relate to in light of the uncharted waters we now find ourselves in as societies - the shock of the new encompassing
the Ponzi property scam, the cultural denigration of the Old Labour working class communities, seismic demographic shifts, imbecilic celebrity worship, selective historical amnesia buried within the Northern Ireland peace process, the deconstruction of London as a national capital city, the deep placement of political dogma into advertising and mainstream broadcast media content and the obliteration of all pathways for social progression through permanent austerity.

The island of Ireland in particular has weathered the most extraordinarily grim raft of geopolitical circumstances imaginable which would copperfasten the partition of the land and the people alike - twin state building failures in the Twenties and Thirties,  opposed neutrality and belligerence during World War Two and a sectarian explosion in Seventies Ulster which ran in parallel to grotesque political miscalculations by all engaged parties and actors across the British Archipelago.

Yet the warmth and wit engrained in daily social interaction and a genuine welcome to strangers never faltered on both sides of the Irish border. And despite the existing peace today being fractured and imperfect - what with the complex interplay of Stormont's governmental and legacy logjams with the reverberations of Brexit - profound change for the better is unimpeachable. This could be seen even in the past few weeks with outreach in working class South Belfast between the Orange and GAA communities or the support given to the Fountain enclave on Derry's West Bank from the Bogside residents after sustained hooligan disorder.

So although the physical and ethical world of Fifties Ireland captured in Luke's restful works are inconceivably and indeed painfully distant today, "the eternal now" can still be felt as a tangible presence in Ireland with little effort. Indeed only last month during a walk along the sunny Lagan banks from Shaw's Bridge with my partner we watched a heron on a log in the middle of the river near a weir for ten minutes - when I returned home I realised it was exactly at the location of Luke's painting at Edenderry.

In Northern Ireland itself, the staggering beauty of the landscape mixed with a buoyant folk culture overlies desperate social, political and economic vulnerabilities and insecurities. Only by honoring the lives lost to conflict with true reflective contrition can society keep defying the fiendish political geometry of whoever's dam creation that kept the working people at each other's throats for so long.