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CULTURE SHOCK:IN MAY 1970, in his regular High Pop column in The Irish Times, the playwright Stewart Parker concluded some thoughts on the “stylistic intermarriages going on everywhere in rock” with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the most absurd of possibilities: “I hope no Irish group is contemplating experiments in ceilidh rock”.

Within a year, Horslips, extravagantly coiffed and dressed up like peacocks at a wedding, were tuning up their electric mandolins. Within another year, they were the biggest rock band yet seen in Ireland, topping the charts and filling ballrooms from Bundoran to Ballybunion. If, like me, you were in the full flush of adolescence, it seemed not just that Horslips were the most exciting thing that had happened in Ireland, ever, but that Irish popular music would never be the same again. As Parker noted in February 1973, his “idle jest” about an “outlandish possibility” had materialised into a bona fide phenomenon.