Podunkian Music Club

The Horslips-King of the Fairies

We continue our Music Club infatuation with the sounds of Ireland this month, with a look at a band that first put Ireland on the rock and roll map.

Long before U2 ruled the musical world and even before Thin Lizzy and the Boomtown Rats became fixtures in the lexicon of Irish music, there were The Horslips.

The providers of hard driving Celtic rock were the house band for a nation in the seventies, the icons of their generation and the inspiration for many of those that were to follow them down the road.

With a very unique sound and reflections of their times in a country with more than enough material for a rock band, they ruled their own land and found success in the UK but never managed to find great success as they brought their sound across the ocean to the waiting hordes of ex-patriots and second and third generation wannabes.

They would find a small measure of success on our shores in the mid seventies, they never seemed to rise beyond the status of a band that offered a tease of something different from what mainstream North American rock had to offer.

Thin Lizzy another Irish rock band of the era would find more commercial success in North America as the hard driving Jailbreak and the Boys are back in town fixtures on the radio, while the Horslips stayed true to their blend of rock and celt and homeland.

Perhaps they were just a decade or so ahead of their time, since the Horslips first blazed the trail in North America in the mid seventies, the likes of the Boomtown Rats, Pogues, Hothouse Flowers,The Cranberries and of course the all dominating U2 caught the fancy of the world, let alone North America.

The Horslips would wander through the musical universe playig to their cults in North America and to the devoted in their homeland through the eighties, eventually breaking up as all bands seem to do when creative differences and issues reach a boiling point.

They recently reformed a few years back and have found a mesaure of acceptance, though to be fair most likely more in the remembrance of the retro movement of those bands that once were.

Of late news on the band, their recordings and their performances are a rather hit and miss affair.

While they never achieved the status of their more famous countrymen that would follow, they were in a way the test tube for Irish rock, taking the songs of the traditional jigs and reels and ballads of troubled times and bringing them to a contemporary beat.

They were the pioneers of a sound and a movement that brought many great talents out of the Dublin bar scene to higher profiles, bands which should raise a glass of ale in tribute to those that helped to create a musical base.

Artist-The Horslips
Recording-Dancehall Sweethearts