Horslips

Horslips: arguably the greatest band in Irish rock music history. This five-piece band produced truly special, unique music in the 1970s. By joining literary craft and their cultural heritage with a fusion of traditionally inspired music with rock instrumentation, they created a genre of music which became known as ‘Celtic Rock’. Horslips also pioneered an ‘in-house’ approach to the rock music business, controlling their stage presentation, graphic design, record pressing and concert promotion. Their finest albums – The Tain, and The Book Of Invasions – adapted legendary and historic texts with compelling music. Elsewhere the life and times of Turlough O’Carolan, the famine and emigration provided a conceptual backdrop to Dancehall Sweethearts, Aliens, and The Man Who Built America. But the band broke up in 1980. Reconvening in the next century, after the ‘longest tea break in history’, they produced a new ‘acoustic covers’ album, played stadium-filling gigs and television performances, and recorded two live albums. This book celebrates (and sometimes criticises) the creative waves that Eamon Carr, Barry Devlin, Johnny Fean, Jim Lockhart, and Charles O’Connor gave us.