normal retail price £14.99.
Dancehall Sweethearts - Horslips
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Price £12.99 + post and packaging
to buy from this website,
normal retail price £14.99.
DANCEHALL SWEETHEARTS.
The songs that made up Dancehall Sweethearts (recorded and released the following year, '74) were, as author Mark J Prendergast stated in his book Irish Rock - Roots, Personalities, Directions (The O'Brien Press), "...loosely based on the travels of Turlough Carolan, the late seventeenth-early eighteenth century blind Irish harper."
Written while on tour, recorded during the World Cup finals of '74 in Rockfield Studios in Wales and mixed in Kingsway Recorders in London, Dancehall Sweethearts is credited to a different producer than Alan O'Duffy who supervised the earlier albums. Fritz Fryer had been a member of '60s English hit group The Four Pennies.
It's said the album title and cover photo were a double digit salute to a record company marketing department which had voiced its nervousness at the prospect of having to sell a concept album about a deceased blind Irish harper to a public who craved Elton, Mud, Wings and Leo Sayer.
In her book Bringing It All Back Home, The Influence of Irish Music (BBC Books), Nuala O'Connor captures something of the flavour of this period. "At home in Ireland the purists were horrified, the critics dismissive, and young audiences wildly approving. Horslips had set out to provide an indigenous rock idiom and for a while they achieved this. Philip Chevron, now a member of The Pogues, remembers growing up in Dublin in the sixties hating ballads and Irish music generally and then being struck by the Horslips' thunderbolt: "Irish music as officially presented didn't speak for me or thousands upon thousands like me. But Horslips did and some Horslips fans then went away and listened to Sean O'Riada records." Chevron himself was one of those drawn by the tradition that inspired the band."
