Horslips

At one point in the mid-1970s, Horslips bidded to be Ireland's answer to Steeleye Span. But they also had a shot at being the next Jethro Tull (only a better hard rock outfit), or maybe Genesis, or even Yes in its folkier moments. Those events never quite happened, but Horslips released a half dozen superb albums along the way, becoming Ireland's most acclaimed folk-rock and progressive band. Horslips was founded in Dublin during 1970 as a quintet playing a brand of folk-based rock music whose only parallel could be found in the early work of Fairport Convention, who themselves had only been together for two or three years. Where Fairport freely mixed British and American folk and folk-rock traditions, however, Horslips drew on their distinctly Irish roots, and were capable of playing straight folk material when the moment called for it, but weren't afraid to turn up loud and hard, in the best art-rock style, on the right songs. Barry Devlin (bass, vocals), Sean Fean (lead guitar, vocals) Eamonn Carr (drums, vocals), Charles O'Connor (violin, mandolin, vocals), and Jim Lockhart (flute, tin whistle, keyboards, vocals) sounded a bit at different moments like either Genesis or Jethro Tull, depending on the moment, and actually had stronger original material to draw from than Tull did. Fean, in particular, was equally good at playing soft folk-like passages and loud, ringing electric runs on his instrument, and could easily have held his own in a guitar duel with Martin Barre or Steve Howe, among others. But where Tull (after their first album) became exclusively a vehicle for Ian Anderson's wild-man flute antics and his complex, pretentious, satiric and scatological lyrical conceits, Horslips, until their final years, had ample room for each player to show what he did...