Happy to Meet Sorry to Part

Horslips | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 13, 2008)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Wounded Bird Records
• ASIN: B0013KCCO8
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,006 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #96 in Music > Folk > British & Celtic Folk > Irish Folk

Editorial Reviews

UK reissue of the 1972 debut from Ireland's most acclaimedfolk-rock and progressive band. Remastered from the original tapes with packaging & annotation by the group themselves.13 tracks including 'Happy To Meet' and 'Hall Of Mirrors'. 2000 release. Standard jewelcase. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Horslips Debut Lays the Foundation for Celtic Folk-Rock, July 5, 2000

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A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Happy to Meet Sorry to Part (Audio CD)

Horslips was a group way ahead of its time. In the 1970s they took traditional Irish folk tunes and, while employing a bewildering array of traditional instruments, added a splattering of electric guitars and hard driving bass lines, injecting an intensity until then unseen in the realm of folkdom. It was a marriage made in heaven - hard rock tends to lack melody and traditional folk music tends to lack energy. By combining the two, we have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, other than a single FM hit "King of Morning, Queen of Day", the Horslips sound never really caught on with the masses. Perhaps sensing impending doom and in a futile attempt to reach a wider audience, they eventually dropped the Irish folk melodies altogether, switched to dull, nondescript hard rock, and quickly faded from the scene. By 1980 Horslips was a complete bust. "Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part" is their debut album (1973) and although it is essentially a traditional folk album and lacks the polish of later works, it is interesting in the surprising number of influences it employs. While there is an overall gentle, jazzy, laid-back feel to the album, certain songs such as "The High Reel" (omitted on CD), "The Musical Priest", and "Bim Istigh Ag ol" lay the foundation for their more high energy sound which was further refined and developed on subsequent albums. "Ah Bratach Ban" has a bluegrass feel; "Ace & Duece" sounds like something straight out of the Middle Ages; "Bim Istig Ag ol" would fit quite nicely on Jethro Tull's "Stand Up" album; and "Dance to Yer Daddy" beckons the three-part harmonies of church choirs. Throughout various instrumental passages even early psychedelic Pink Floyd comes to mind! In these days of droning two-chord sludge permeating the airwaves, it is not surprising that this "old" music, with its intoxicating melodies and skillful playing, sounds so refreshing. This style is finally starting to catch on, as the cult popularity of Tempest, Wolfstone, the Glengarry Bhoys and the like will attest. These imitators all owe a huge debt to Horslips, the true originators of "Celtic Rock."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Irish folk marries rock: their first offspring, July 8, 2005

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Happy to Meet Sorry to Part (Audio CD)

When I first heard this, in the wonderful l.p. version that was die cut like a concertina, it made me proud. In the era of Tull and Fairport and Steeleye Span, an Irish group finally opened up rock listeners like myself to traditional music, which for my young self had been poisoned by my parents' generation of showband crooners and unctuous Bing Crosby covers. With Horslips, I could drink from the well, so to speak, and my erstwhile (pre)punk cred might have been a bit tainted, but the energy and intelligence of this debut made its own claim for attention confidently yet sensitively.

Hearing this album decades after I first did, some of the arrangements have honestly not worn well, but the same can be said for all three English bands in the previous paragraph. What distinguishes Horslips from their peers may be that they the five Irishman could tap into a still living musical and linguistic tradition, and went to learn from musicians rather than, as Ashley Hutchings did, from the manuscripts--themselves collected by such as Lloyd and way back by Child, of course. Not to by any means denigrating the English example, but I'd hazard that the connection with the "living tradition" for Horslips, I sense, was somewhat closer than for the late 60s London bands that preceded them into folk & rock. Perhaps Sweeney's Men predated Horslips into merging some outside influences into an Irish trad foundation, but that late-60s trio sought inspiration more from Californian folk-rock and its L.A. singer-songwriters.

Also, Horslips thrived just as Planxty and then the Bothy Band were jump-starting the home-grown trad scene, playing the old tunes touched by veins of rock rather than as fossilized artifacts.

Back to "Happy," the most enduring sounds in retrospect seem to lie among, a bit surprisingly to me, some of the less amped-up songs. (I find the same now when returning to many Tull, Fairport, and Steeleye efforts contemporaneous with this 1972 l.p.). "Flower" and "Clergy" gain from their delicacy, while the phasings on "Musical Priest," and "Hall of Mirrors" make these sound today like imitation prog. The band's eagerness to plug in may be understandable, but their stance to hold back, as in their version with Johnny Fean's lamenting slide guitar, of "Shamrock Shore," makes what to my younger ears sounded cloying now more gentle, to this fine song's improvement.

"Ace & Deuce" has never left my memory since I first heard it, an excellent duel, as this piper tune's title predicts, that shows off all of the band at its finest. Johnny Fean's guitar work has often been praised, but don't forget the band. Eamonn Carr (later a writer for Hot Press magazine) controls the bodhran especially well, and the whistles, fiddles, and mandolins from Charles O'Connor & Jim Lockhart, and Barry Devlin's bass--perhaps a pioneer in his contribution to Irish folk-influenced arrangements--all propel the music sensibly.

While, as many first efforts, a harbinger of better work to come, this album, rounded up if I could to 4.33 stars for effort, prepares for the band's best two records, "Tain" and "Book of Invasions." It ranks, however, # 3. A recovery from hamfisted sham-rock (sorry), their disparate, back-to-roots Christmas collection, pre-"Tain" "Drive the Cold Winter Away," is often ignored but can stand its own against Horslips' "all-trad" purist peers.

Their two albums after "Happy," "Dancehall" and "Unfortunate Cup," take the band too far into muddled rawk, competing with, say the electrified Steeleye that was also emerging; these have not worn well. A irreversible decline followed "Book," as their rockier, Tull-like, anthemic sound eclipsed and eliminated the traditionally-hued, dappled shadings on their finest four albums.

P.S. Make sure you buy the band-approved remasters of Horslips CDs out on Edsel in 2000, not the 1990s Outlet issues. I have both for HTMSTP, and having played them side-by-side to compare, the sonic clarity is substantially enhanced, noticably in the bass-drums foundation for the skirling whistle-guitar-fiddle sound that characterizes this giddy, memorable LP.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Groundbreaking album, November 2, 2002

By 

A. Curran "a_curran" (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Happy to Meet Sorry to Part (Audio CD)

This, their first album, is one of Horslips' best and most innovative. They create some very unique, interesting and immensely enjoyable music by blending traditional Irish music with hard/progressive/psychedelic rock. It is more folk orientated than most of their later efforts but it is also incredibly diverse with each song approaching the blending of trad and rock from different angles. A truly amazing groundbreaking album.