SPOTLIGHT: Festival strikes a chord Johnny Fean fans
Rock fans gather to celebrate life and music of great Limerick guitarist
The music and legacy of late Horslips guitarist Johnny Fean will be celebrated over the October Bank Holiday weekend with a festival spanning Limerick and Shannon from Friday, October 23 to Sunday, October 26. The Johnny Fean Rhythm & Blues Festival opens at Dolan’s Warehouse in Limerick on the Friday night, where The Pat McManus Band will be joined by Horslips members Jim Lockhart and Barry Devlin, with The Lost Steps also on the bill and Johnny’s brother, drummer Ray Fean, presiding.
On Saturday, the festival crosses the Shannon, with an afternoon programme at Source Café followed by an evening of live music at Shannon Springs Hotel. The line-up across the weekend also includes Bloodguards from Houston, Texas, Dave Sanders & Friends, Sinéad & The Bugs, Bang, Blessed Amongst Women and Darragh O’Loughlin. The celebrations conclude at Shannon Springs Hotel on Sunday afternoon with an open music session, inviting musicians and listeners alike to gather in the informal spirit that was always central to Fean’s musical world.
Celtic rock
There are guitarists who play songs and there are guitarists whose sound becomes part of the musical memory of a country. Johnny Fean belonged firmly in the latter camp. Strike up the opening riff of ‘Dearg Doom’ almost anywhere in Ireland and recognition is instantaneous. It is more than a riff now. It has become a kind of musical shorthand for an era when Irish musicians discovered that they did not have to choose between the music they inherited and the rock music that was shaking the world.
That spirit will return over the October Bank Holiday weekend when the Johnny Fean Rhythm & Blues Festival celebrates the late Horslips guitarist with several days of live music in Limerick and Shannon. Rather than being confined to a single stage, the festival moves through places closely associated with the musical territory Fean inhabited.
From Limerick to Horslips
Born in 1951, Fean spent his childhood in Limerick, including Henry Street and Garryowen, before the family moved to Shannon. His musical education was wonderfully Catholic. His father’s jazz records were part of the household soundtrack, but the young Johnny was electrified by Elvis Presley and, particularly, guitarist Scotty Moore. Later came the British blues players – Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor – alongside traditional Irish music.
By his teens Fean was playing around Limerick and Clare, working with groups including Sweet Street and Jeremiah Henry while also absorbing traditional music and learning tenor banjo. He was therefore carrying two musical languages around in his head: the bends, attack and swagger of electric blues guitar and the ornamentation and melodic movement of Irish traditional music. Horslips gave him somewhere to bring them together.
Fean joined the band in 1972 after being heard playing at a festival in Ballyvaughan. He arrived in time for the recording of the debut album Happy to Meet – Sorry to Part, made using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio at Longfield House in Tipperary.
When Irish music plugged in
Horslips did not merely add electric guitars to traditional tunes. Plenty of people could have done that. Their achievement was to create music in which neither element sounded decorative. Jim Lockhart, Charles O’Connor, Eamon Carr, Barry Devlin and Johnny Fean developed a muscular, imaginative collision of rock, traditional music, mythology and contemporary Ireland. They became central to what would be called Celtic rock and Fean’s guitar was essential to it.
His great gift was not simply technical ability. It was phrasing. He understood instinctively that a reel played on an electric guitar should not suddenly cease to be a reel. Jim Lockhart later recalled that Fean could bring his instinctive understanding of jigs, reels and hornpipes directly into his rock playing. Then there was ‘Dearg Doom’. Built around the traditional air ‘O’Neill’s Cavalry March’, Fean’s guitar line on the track from The Táin became one of the defining riffs of Irish rock. The Edge would later describe ‘Dearg Doom’ as “one of the great rock songs of all time”. You could make a persuasive case that those few notes contain the Horslips project in miniature: something ancient coming through an amplifier.
The music comes home
The festival begins at Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick, on Friday, October 23, with doors at 8pm. The Pat McManus Band headlines, with special guests Jim Lockhart and Barry Devlin of Horslips, alongside The Lost Steps and Ray Fean presiding. That pairing of Lockhart and Devlin with musicians carrying the blues-rock tradition forward should make the opening night considerably more than a conventional tribute concert. It reconnects Fean’s music with the living tradition from which it emerged.
The following afternoon, Saturday, October 24, the festival moves to Source Café in Shannon from 2pm, where Sinéad & The Bugs, Bang, Blessed Amongst Women and Darragh O’Loughlin are scheduled to perform.
Later that evening the action shifts to Shannon Springs Hotel. Dave Sanders & Friends play the Wings Music Lounge from 7.30pm before the festival moves up another gear with Bloodguards, from Houston, Texas, on the Johnny Fean Stage at 10pm.
The international presence is significant. Fean’s musical world was never parochial. Blues came to Ireland from America, was transformed by British players, encountered Irish traditional music and emerged again through musicians such as Fean with an accent unmistakably their own.
The weekend concludes at Shannon Springs Hotel on Sunday, October 26, with an open music session in the Wings Music Lounge from 1pm until 5pm.
More than ‘Dearg Doom’
It would be easy to reduce Johnny Fean’s legacy to one monumental guitar riff, but his career was much richer than that. Horslips recorded a remarkable body of work during the 1970s, including Dancehall Sweethearts, The Táin and The Book of Invasions. They toured relentlessly and demonstrated that an Irish rock band could build its own musical identity rather than imitate London or America. The band changed the landscape of Irish rock, with Fean’s arrival providing a crucial part of its harder musical backbone.
After Horslips initially broke up in 1980, Fean continued playing, including with the Zen Alligators and Host. In later years he performed extensively with former Miami Showband bassist Stephen Travers, while the Horslips story itself eventually came full circle with reunion performances.
Keeping the amplifier switched on
That is why the Johnny Fean Rhythm & Blues Festival matters. The danger with memorial events is that reverence can overwhelm the very thing being celebrated. Johnny Fean does not need musical embalming. A better tribute is an amplifier humming in a crowded room, a guitarist taking a chance, musicians who have never played together finding a groove, an old Horslips number suddenly catching fire again. No doubt, somewhere during the weekend somebody will hit those unmistakable opening notes of ‘Dearg Doom’ and heads will turn instinctively towards the stage. For a few seconds, Johnny Fean will be back where he always belonged: inside the music.