01	Daybreak						03:19
	02	March Into Trouble						00:51
	03	Trouble ( With A Capital T )						03:24
	04	The Power And The Glory						03:57
	05	The Rocks Remain						02:49
	06	Dusk						00:38
	07	Sword Of Light						04:57
	08	Dark						02:01
	09	Warm Sweet Breath Of Love						03:27
	10	Fantasia ( My Lagan Love )						03:18
	11	King Of Morning, Queen Of Day						04:13
	12	Sideways To The Sun						04:48
	13	Drive The Cold Winter Away						00:51
	14	Ride To Hell						03:54

A Celtic Symphony
In the old Ireland there were three principal categories of song, called geantrai, goltrai and suantrai - the joyous strain, the lamenting strain and the sleep strain. When Lug was proving himself expert in every art before the Tuatha hierarchy his musical contribution was an immaculate performance of the three strains. Later, after the Second Battle of Moytura, Lug and The Dagda (The Good God) pursue the Formorians who have stolen The Mighty One's harp. When the instrument is located The Dagda bids it come to him. As it flies to his hands it kills those enemies standing in its path. Then The Dagda plays the three strains and when the opposing host are sleeping, from the magic of the suantrai, he departs safely, taking his harp with him. The Book Of Invasions (Leabhar Gabhala Eireann) The Book of Invasions is a twelfth century chronicle of the various pre-Christian colonisations of Ireland. The race who occupied the country before our Gaelic ancestors were the Tuatha De Danann - the Peoples of the Goddess Danann. While their origins are unclear we do know that the Tuatha were a mystical race, handsome and learned, elegantly dressed, expert in every art and science and supreme masters of wizardry. In the Mythological Cycle their place is among the traditions of Immortals. In fact the Tuatha were so magnificent their existence embarrassed scholars who, when transcribing the legends centuries later, did not know whether to regard them as men, demons or fallen angels. Bravest of all peoples, their leaders were wizards first and warriors second whose victories were gained more by superior knowledge and magic than by warfare. The Tuatha De Danann occupied the country and lived in relative peace from 3303 Age of the World until the coming of the Milesian warriors in 3500 Age of the World. After their defeat at the Battle of Tailteann the Tuatha simply vanished from these islands. Tradition and popular belief has it that the Tuatha, through their esoteric powers, became the Sluagh Sidhe (The Fairy Host) and, taking their secrets and mysterious arts with them, entered an occult realm where they remain till this day. "In this way they came, in dark clouds over the air, by might of druidry, and they landed on a mountain in Connaught. Thereafter the Tuatha De Danann brought a darkness over the sun and moon, for a space of three days and three nights. They demanded battle or Kingship of the Fir Bolg". The Book of Invasions. The Fir Bolg, a race very much like the Picts, were then defeated in battle by the Tuatha at the Plain of the Pillars (Moytura, Co. Sligo). De Danann King Nuada lost an arm in the battle but afterwards he had an artificial limb fitted by Tuatha craftsmen and became known as Nuada of the Silver Hand. Nuada also possessed one of four magic talismans brought to Ireland by the Tuatha. These were The Stone of Fal which would cry out under a lawful King; The Spear of Lug - to wield it meant victory; The Sword of Nuada from which no enemy could escape and The Cauldron of Dagda from which no one ever went hungry. Many of the Tuatha's major personalities are identifiable with Celtic Gods known to scholars from other sources. Nuada is probably the Nodens who was worshiped at the Romano - British temple at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Lug gave his name to various continental towns - Lyons, Leyden, and Lausanne among them. You also find the entire Tuatha cast in the Welsh Mabinogion - Lug as Lleu and Nuada as Nudd. It wasn't until after the Second Battle of Moytura, and a victory over the loathsome Fomhoire, ancient enemies of the cosmic order, that the Tuatha were able to live in peace.



Horslips [Ireland]
Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part (72), The Tain (73), Dancehall Sweethearts (74), The Unfortunate Cup Of Tea (75), Horslips Live (75), Drive The Cold Winter Away (76), The Book Of Invasions (76), Aliens (77), Tracks From The Vaults (77), The Man Who Built America (78), Short Stories Tall Tales (79), The Belfast Gigs (80), Straight From The Horse's Mouth: The Horslips Story (89, compilation)

Horslips was an excellent folk-rock progressive rock band from Ireland that produced a long string of albums throughout the 70's. They sometimes sounded a little like Jethro Tull of the same period without the blues influences, and less dominated by flute and more by a shared lead role for violin/flute/ mandolin, and vocal harmonies. The vocals were shared by several band members, and the dominant force in their sound was clearly Irish traditional folk music, which slowly grew to include more and more rock on their later albums, until the final studio album which seems pretty much void of any folk influences. The best starting point is no doubt their classic Book of Invasions, which encompasses all of the best elements of their sound in an outstanding concept album, at a point when the band was equally balanced between folk and rock. The Tain is another good one, a concept album but with more traditional elements in the forefront. Drive The Cold Winter Away is an all acoustic christmas album. Man Who Built America is probably the best album in their rock period, although even here traditional folk themes abound just under the surface. Dancehall and Unfortunate Cup are a couple of the weaker albums, but even these have a few good tracks apiece. Belfast Gigs is by far the better of the two live albums. Finally, Horslips Story is a good album if you want a compilation of their most popular cuts, but not neccesarily their most interesting or progressive ones, and many of the songs on it have their intros cut off and it lacks the cohesion you'd get on the original concept albums.







Horslips
Formed 1970
Disbanded 1980
Group Members Eamonn Carr Barry Devlin John Fean Gus Guest Jim Lockhart Charles O'Connor Declan Sinnott

Styles British Folk-Rock, Folk-Rock, Prog-Rock/Art Rock, Hard Rock, Celtic

by Bruce Eder

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 best, and no single member dominated the group. They spent three years gigging constantly in Dublin, tightening and honing their sound to a fine point, and formed their own record company, OATS, to produce and release their debut album, Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part, in 1973.

That first album, with its mixture of traditional Irish folk instruments and a hard art-rock sound recalling the sounds of Genesis from Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, outsold the work of many established acts in Ireland, and led to a distribution deal with RCA and tours of England and continental Europe. With the release of their second album, The Tain - a concept album built on Irish mythological sources - in 1973, Horslips began finding an audience on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Their third album, Dancehall Sweethearts (1974), brought them to the United States and Canada on tour, and they followed this up with The Unfortunate Cup of Tea (1975). Neither of these albums was quite as strong as the first two, and both revealed more of a modern rock sound in their music and songwriting. The group returned to Ireland to take stock of who and what they were and what kind of music they would do.

Horslips returned to their roots with a Christmas album entitled To Drive the Cold Winter Away, released in 1976, which was recorded entirely on acoustic instruments. This record put them back in the center of the folk-rock boom of the 1970s, compared favorably with such English electric folk acts as Steeleye Span (with whom they toured) and Fairport Convention. Additionally, as an Irish electric folk-rock band, even though they weren't overtly political, Horslips hooked into the audience of younger Irish-Americans during a period of wide new ethnic consciousness-raising brought about by the renewed strife in Northern Ireland. They were no more than a cult phenomenon in the U.S.A., never remotely as popular as the Chieftains (who had a decade's head start and a ton of soundtrack appearances to promote their work), even with Atlantic Records releasing their mid-1970s albums, but it was a bigger cult than they would have had in the late 1960s.

In England and Ireland, however, Horslips was a highly successful act, sufficiently popular to justify cutting a double live album that perfectly captured their repertory of this period, if not their sound. The group's next studio record, The Book of Invasions (1977), subtitled "A Celtic Symphony," was, like The Tain, inspired by Irish mythology, this time the story of Tuatha De Danann's conquest of ancient pre-Christian Ireland. Released by Dick James's DJM label (which also picked up their earlier albums in England, as Atlantic had in America), this album marked their only entry on the British charts, at number 39, and also found a dedicated audience in progressive and folk-rock circles in America.

It was an enviable string of releases, but one that the group couldn't sustain. Their next album, Aliens, dealing with the lot of the Irish immigrants to America, was less inventive and exciting, and elicited far less enthusiasm from fans and critics. The odds-and-sods collection Tracks from the Vaults, released in Ireland, was a matter of marking time.

The Man Who Built America marked a major change in Horslips, which was now pretty much in the control of Barry Devlin and Jim Lockhart - Carr and Fean, with their more folk-oriented approach to music, took a back seat to a more mainstream rock sound. Two additional guitarists, Gus Guest and Declan Sinnott, turned up on the album, which sounded more American and less like Irish folk-based material than any of their prior works - the title track sounds more like John Cougar Mellencamp, or perhaps even Bruce Springsteen (with Lockhart's flute replacing Clarence's sax, and some gratuitous swirling keyboards) than the work of the group responsible for "The High Reel."

By this time, they were trying to compete in a wholly different idiom and arena, and there wasn't much left of the original Horslips. Short Stories - Tall Tales (1980) was the last of Horslips' original albums, and was followed by one more concert record culled from their final days, the hard-rocking Belfast Gigs.

Carr and Fean later worked together in an R&B-based band called Zen Alligator before reuniting with Charles O'Connor in a folk outfit called Host, and Fean has recorded with Nikki Sudden and Simon Carmody. Meanwhile, Horslips was the object of two retrospective collections released in Ireland and England. Fortunately for the group, they retained ownership of their music through the OATS label, and this helped facilitate their reissue on compact disc.



1973 Happy to Meet, Sorry To Part Edsel
1974 The Tain Edsel
1974 Dance Hall Sweethearts Edsel
1975 Unfortunate Cup of Tea Edsel
1976 Drive the Cold Winter Away Edsel
1977 Aliens Edsel
1977 Book of Invasions: A Celtic Symphony Edsel
1977 Live Horslips
1978 Tracks from the Vaults Edsel
1979 The Man Who Built America Edsel
1980 Short Stories/Tall Tales Edsel
1980 The Belfast Gigs Edsel
2000 Invasions Edsel








Book of Invasions: A Celtic Symphony
Date of Release 1977

AMG REVIEW: "That which does not kill me will make me stronger" might well have been the motto that Horslips adopted after the release of The Unfortunate Cup of Tea, their 1975 release. That album, generally regarded as their weakest, somehow gave rise to this, perhaps their strongest. Returning to their original formula of rock & roll, folk, and prog rock, Book of Invasions rivals 1973's The Tain as their most consistent and creative and established the band as that decade's preeminent purveyor of those three entwined genres. Neither Fairport Convention nor Steeleye Span rocked as convincingly or consistently as they did and Jethro Tull's fleeting folk fancies didn't qualify them as a folk-rock outfit. Often compared to Ian Anderson's group, Horslips furthered that notion with the opening chord progression of "The Power and the Glory," which is quite reminiscent of Tull's "Locomotive Breath." John Fean's electric guitar playing (especially when in tandem with Barry Devlin's bass) frequently conjures up Martin Barre comparisons. But it would be unfair to infer that this album is anything less than an original. Along with the group's first two albums (Happy to Meet Sorry to Part and The Tain) Book of Invasions: A Celtic Symphony set the standard for how next generation Celtic rock albums would be judged. The degree to which they incorporated fiddles, concertinas, accordions, mandolin, tin whistles, and uilleann pipes into a rock & roll band was unprecedented in the '70s. This record was and is their crowing achievement. - Dave Sleger

1. Daybreak
2. March into Trouble
3. Trouble (With a Capital T) (Carr/Devlin/Fean/Lockhart/O'Connor)
4. Power and the Glory
5. Rocks Remain
6. Dusk
7. Sword of Light
8. Dark
9. Warm Sweet Breath of Love (Devlin)
10. Fantasia (My Lagan Love)
11. King of Morning, Queen of Day
12. Sideways to the Sun
13. Drive the Cold Winter Away
14. Ride to Hell