Madfish 2025
Hibernian heroes’ harmonious labors for the Beeb – and their venturing beyond the waves – get taken from the vaults for historic scrutiny and unbridled hilarity.
At The BBC
This ensemble could easily pack stadiums back home in Éire in the ’70s, and they’ve been revered there since, yet outside of the Emerald Isle, when it comes to listing champions of Irish rock, HORSLIPS are seldom mentioned in the same breath as, say, THIN LIZZY who also incorporated Celtic elements in their fare. It’s not that the former collective projected an unimpressive image, although they didn’t deliver a visual spectacle on par with shows the latter used to stage; it’s that the Dublin quintet, having no issues with their cultural allegiance, experienced problems with stylistic identity. The group’s most popular single, a slice of disco based on “O’Neill’s March” and decked out in a hard rock chainmail, effectively brought Cú Chulainn’s boasting under a glitterball, so no wonder the public – at least, the listeners not able to witness them in person – was no wiser as to what to expect from this lot. And no wonder it took HORSLIPS some years and a tour with NAZARETH to realize – as the elder statesmen themselves admit in a 2010 radio documentary, which is attached to one of the discs on the “At The BBC” box set – that they were a rock band.
Still, once they grasped the gist of the genre, there’d be no holds barred for these five guys, because they knew their strength, having three singers and two multi-instrumentalists in the ranks – Charles O’Connor belonging to both categories – and an astounding arsenal in which bagpipes and concertina got deployed alongside regular weapons of mass distraction. Going in for a radio session or getting filmed for a broadcast, the combo turned modestly unselfconscious and image-savvy, first in their homeland and then in England, where the Beeb latched onto the lads’ allure – unfortunately, preserving them for posterity largely to be heard rather than watched. The artifacts stored on DVD in this mediabook are transfixing, complementing the footage stored on the massive roundup of the Irishmen’s feats with mostly crisp material, but the CD portion of it all has a great quality, too, as recordings sourced from fans’ caches, taped off their receivers, don’t contrast very much with tapes dug out of the corporation’s archives, and the riches on offer can’t stop to astonish.
If many of their contemporaries, especially those whose oeuvre was rooted in traditional motifs, seemed reluctant to move with the times, these musicians excelled in constant development of their craft, thus aligning their conceptual output with progressive rock as well, and in a short span of spins round the sun from the start, they would scrub up nicely, visually and sonically. It’s almost staggering to see them rid of medieval garb and excessive facial hair, which place the troupe’s appearance on “Old Grey Whistle Test” – where O’Connor demonstrated the fist he’d put on the cover of “The Táin” and then ran his ring-adorned fingers across the strings of electric mandolin – squarely in 1974, and then to admire the team’s black-and-silver uniform in the promo for “The Man Who Built America” – where bassist Barry Devlin led the charge – from 1978. What’s just as important in hindsight was the ensemble’s ability to update their arrangements. Here’s why nobody will object to hearing five versions of the aforementioned smash “Dearg Doom” from the group’s classic era: the slight, albeit conspicuous, changes in the song’s aural picture, principally in Jim Lockhart’s handling of keyboards and woodwinds, feel extremely fascinating.
As the quintet’s inaugural live album hit the shelves only in 1976, their Beeb documents provide unique insights into the band’s beginnings. Of course, if the road report from 1974 perfectly captures how sincere they always were and how endearing, when telling, in a lilting accent, the tales behind “The Táin” or explaining the collective’s name, it’s the musical performances that are the focus of the BBC comp. From 1973’s innocently tremulous, yet muscular, “Furniture” and the exquisitely embroidered “The Clergy’s Lamentation” – the earliest snippets of history on display – to 2019’s nigh on chamber “Sideways To The Sun” which finds HORSLIPS in the company of ULAID, there’s nary a less than riveting moment. However, while the largely acoustic, and raw, “An Bratach Bán” – delivered on “John Peel Show” three weeks after their BBC debut – is unreservedly merry, and “Knockeen-Free” – which would soon become “Maeve’s Court” – is immensely sentimental, “I’ll Be Waiting” – laid down with the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast in 2011, the entire event, with favorites and deep cuts, presented in an alternative variant now, but not properly filmed and caught in a couple of amateur footage – is magnificently solemn. The then-youngsters’ gracing of the “In Concert” in 1974 – where they unveiled the furiously infectious, flute-flaunting “Charolais” and brought a huge part of their latest platter, sequenced as it was on record, to remote punters – may crackle with energy, driven by Eamon Carr’s belligerent drums and John Fean’s fiery guitar, but the veterans’ latter-day outing will emphasize the grandeur of their legacy and stress the increased role of the late Fean’s voice.
These players carried the pop edge of the irresistibly catchy “Trouble (With A Capital ‘T’)” – no matter whether well-plugged or completely unplugged, sang in a pub, together with a delicate “Green Star Liner” – and “More Than You Can Chew” through decades, but gradually abandoned the artsy audacity that “Ferdia’s Song” concealed in its fiddle-lined folds. Returning to the Alan Black-hosted programme in 1979, to give their audience the sleek “Loneliness” and “The Man Who Built America” – next to such heavy pieces from “The Book Of Invasions” as the burnished “The Power And The Glory” and the blisteringly extended “Sword Of Light” and to even older numbers – the band signaled their tuning into the period’s pomp tendencies yet retained erstwhile folk sensibilities. Fast-forwards to the future, and tracks like the rarely aired ballads “Drive The Cold Winter Away” and “Ghosts” or the resurrected “Setanta” and “Rescue Me” – drenched in strings and brass – flow seamlessly one into another, via conceptual links, and get elevated to celestial heights for all to appreciate the symphonic core which had been there from day one. So yes, the three live discs are precious.
And then there’s a bonus disc that has nothing to do with the Beeb and that fills the gap in the comprehensive “More Than You Can Chew” collection by exposing in-progress mixes of the group’s last album – but there’s so much more to the initial state of “Short Stories, Tall Tales” than simple divergences in sound balance between these and the finished product. The discrepancies are obvious: a fierce guitar solo is frontal on “Law On The Run” – known as “Hotel Inexpensive” then, when the barely updated “Amazing Offer” was called “Mail Order” – and a powerful backbeat on “Unapproved Road” is better augmenting its rock ‘n’ roll edge which would be lost later, with the roughness of refrains. Yet though handclaps would become a nice enhancement for “Guests Of The Nation” in the end, originally ivories shimmered in a more pronounced manner on “Summer’s Most Wanted Girl” whose twang had to be toned down to polish the overall instrumental perspective; and though the baroque-style fleshing out of the reeds on “Rescue Me” robbed this melody of fragility, the addition of vocal polyphony and new lyrics rendered the results majestic, and the levelling of dynamics made “Soap Opera” jovially cosmic. A revelatory trip back in time.
“By bringing stuff that was our own and that belonged to the kids we were playing to in little dancehalls around the country and giving it back to them we made a difference to a lot of people’s life,” say HORSLIPS in an epic video interview that closes this fantastic collection. Indeed, overestimating their contribution to music and arts in general after delving into “At The BBC” is genuinely impossible.
*****
