The Goo 1
Interview Words: Desmond Traynor HORSLIPS London
label Madfish have just released a new five disc set Horslips – At The BBC, consisting of four CDs + DVD, with live performances, BBC TV footage, and rare archival material. Presented in a deluxe hardback book package with extensive liner notes by band biographer Mark Cunningham, BBC producer Jeff Griffin and curator Colin Harper, At The BBC is a celebration of a band whose influence echoes through five decades. They more or less invented Celtic Rock – much to the chagrin of certain Trad purists at the time. I chatted recently with their affable and talkative keyboardist and flautist Jim Lockhart. So, Live at the BBC, where does it fit into the legacy? After all, 2023’s 33 CD, 2 DVD boxset seemed definitive. Barry (Devlin, Jim’s bassist bandmate) says that More Than You Can Chew wasn’t so much a coffee table set as an actual coffee table, because you wouldn’t want to be carrying it on to a flight as hand luggage. You’d be thrown right off. This is more manageable. We thought that was as much as there was, at the time. But then we remembered that there was some stuff in the 32 BBC archive, enough to merit a standalone job. There’s two full In Concerts, one from ’73 and one from ’79, so they’re two quite different versions of the band. There’s a couple of Peel sessions. There’s a couple of Sounds of the 70s and there was an Old Grey Whistle Test appearance. There’s some more recent stuff from 2010 from after we got back together after our 29-yearbreak, and then we did the Ulster Orchestra gig in Belfast. We had come across a whole set of monitor mixes of our last studio album, Short Stories, Tall Tales. They were just the kind of mixes to stick onto a cassette and take home and have a listen to and see what you think. Following that, we went back in and did a more considered mix. But the monitor mixes that were just done on the hoof have a kind of rough edge, and in a couple of cases I think they actually beat the final mixes, because it’s quite hard to replicate the feel of a demo when you get around to do the final track. Sometimes people just go back and stick with the demo, even though there are imperfections. People have stuff out where there’s the wrong vocal on the harmony or whatever, but when they try and do it correctly you can lose a bit of the magic. So that’s what was interesting about this version of Short Stories, Tall Tales. It’s rawer. Do you have a sense of how far ahead of your time you were, and did you feel neglected or underappreciated for a while? There was a period after we broke up in 1980 – which is an incredibly long time ago, it’s between the Flight of the Earls and the dinosaurs cooling – where we weren’t in control of our copyrights, and so for that period we felt pretty down. We vanished off the musical landscape. A lot of people grew up not having heard of us. Then we got our stuff back in 2000 and it gradually began to shift again. I don’t think we particularly went about things with an eye to our place in the cultural Pantheon. We were, basically, like Geldof’s ‘get rich and get laid’. At the same time, we did take the music seriously. We never did pastiche. We always used real tunes. We messed around with them unmercifully. We took inspiration from Seán Ó Riada, because he really broke the mould of traditional music and remade it. In the ’40s and ’50s, the Irish cultural situation was so worn out, in a really postcolonial, self-hating kind of a place. And we, Irish people, tended to look down