Clear the Decks - on Horslips, hairdressers, and painful memories

On Wednesday afternoon I attended an event at which Horslips, to mark their 50th anniversary (gulp), announced the release of a career-retrospective box set, comprising 35 CDs (gulp again). The news that they had so much archive material, and the obvious familiarity with it of many hardcore fans present, made my own attachment to the band feel somewhat inadequate. Their break-up in 1980 had come a bit early for me. On the other hand, I did see them live once in their prime. And the footage that accompanied Wednesday’s event brought the memories flooding back.

It was about 1979, in the Embassy Ballroom, Castleblayney (long since demolished). The occasion was doubly-memorable because I had bought new shoes that day, the existing pair having reached the stage where my mother wouldn’t let me out in them, except to find replacements.

Dispatched to the shops on a tight budget – £15 – I was faced with a stark choice between a sensible brogue my mother would have approved of and a sort of deck shoe, with brown canvas uppers and white soles.

The deck shoes were not cool, exactly. But they resided somewhere in the outer suburbs of coolness, at least. So I bought them, ignoring their major design weakness, an absence of waterproofing, something I hid from my mother later as, on a wet night, I set out with friends to thumb a lift to Blayney.

Snakes Alive – the ominous associations of St Patrick’s Day

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La Vie en Rosa - the convention-defying artist Rosa Bonheur, born 200 years ago

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Sergei and the Wolf – Frank McNally on the tragic timing of Sergei Prokofiev

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Orwell Appointed – Frank McNally on the raths, rats, and ratlines of a salubrious suburb

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For a teenage Horslips fan in Carrickmacross, Blayney was enemy territory in every sense. It was called the “Nashville of Ireland”, thanks to all the big country acts that recorded there, in a studio opposite the ballroom.

It was also home to Big Tom, whose concerts I wouldn’t have been seen dead at. (Many years later, I had to cover his funeral, a strangely moving event marked by dancing in the graveyard. But by then I had learned to appreciate him for the cultural giant he had been.)

Anyway, back in 1979, my deck shoes were letting in water, as was my self-image, even before we left Carrick. By the time we reached Blayney, they were audibly squelching. Not that this was a problem at the actual concert. Among their other qualities, thank God, Horslips were loud.

They were also great. More used to jiving, the Embassy hopped – literally – that night. During the likes of Dearg Doom, I noticed that the bouncing of the audience was accompanied by the opening and closing of a slight gap between the dancefloor and the bottom of the walls. Two hours later, the band sent us home sweating. Only my socks were dry by then.

Hair cut

I had to leave Wednesday's event early for a haircut booked nearby at 4pm. My hairdresser turned out to be Romanian, from Transylvania, to be exact. So we talked about Dracula, of course. I also mentioned I would be visiting Cluj next year or in 2024 when it hosts a conference on Flann O'Brien. She assured me I would enjoy the city: "It's the Galway of Romania. "

But this was not my first Transylvanian hairdresser, as I recalled painfully. The last one was about 20 years ago and is forever seared into my memory because of a tragic cultural misunderstanding that accompanied it. Back then, after I had established where that hairdresser was from, she reciprocated. When I said “Monaghan”, perhaps mumbling the word because it would mean nothing to her, I was astonished by her excited reaction.

“I knew it!” she said. “I don’t normally recognise accents in English, but I recognised yours straight away!”

This extraordinary turn of events was explained a moment later when she asked what my life in “Monaco” was like. After that, there followed a very short period when I could and should have corrected her. But she had been so delighted at identifying me as French, it seemed heartless to tell the truth. So I played along and tried to change the subject back to her homeland. Alas, she had no interest in talking about Romania – she’d just fled it, for God’s sake. No, she wanted to hear all about my glamorous lifestyle in Monte Carlo.

The second-worst thing about this was that I had to keep my voice down in case the other staff overheard as I was a regular there. The worst thing was that I had to pose as a Monégasque while staring at my pasty face in a giant mirror.

I tipped, over-generously, at the end, to preserve cover. She probably thought I had a yacht. On the way out, even though I wasn’t wearing them, my old deck shoes started squeaking again.’