Culture That Made Me: Barry Devlin of Horslips picks his touchstones
Barry Devlin is in discussion with Jan Carson at the Dalkey Book Festival on Saturday, June 20. Picture: Steve Humphreys
Born in 1946, Barry Devlin grew up in Ardboe, Co Tyrone. In 1970, he co-founded Horslips, performing as the band’s lead singer and bass player. He directed several U2 music videos in the 1980s.
His screenwriting credits include , and the film . He will be in discussion with Jan Carson at the Dalkey Book Festival, Heritage Centre, 3.30pm, Saturday, June 20. See: dalkeybookfestival.org.
Seán Ó Riada — Johnny Reidy — was huge for Horslips. When we came to Dublin, we were country boys. We didn't know anybody in Dublin. No one knew us and the musicians didn't like us. “Who are these geezers?”
We brought with us a love for traditional music and huge admiration for what Seán Ó Riada had done for what was essentially music played with an instrument — whether it was the fiddle, the pipes or the whistle. He managed to make it symphonic without making it sound kitsch. We couldn't believe you could do this. We incorporated his thinking and traditional airs into what we felt we were, which was a rock band.
I'm a Bach fiend. I know that sounds pretentious, but he's accessible. He came from a period in history, where Newton and himself both felt that God's universe was this piece of wonderful clockwork. Bach's music is cerebral, but you can see in a way it's mimicking how he saw the world function. I love the Bach cantatas, the sonatas for violin and the partitas.
It's funny – if you follow that line going through Western progression, you find the Beatles are in that tradition. Although they liked blues music and Motown, their music has the same chord structures, the same expectations of how a song begins, middles and ends as musicians like Bach had.
My favourite movie is Armando Iannucci’s It’s about … the death of Stalin. It's brilliant, incredibly well written, beautifully acted, and screamingly funny. It's the blackest film. Talk about morbid. Everybody keeps shooting everybody else.
Alan Bennett is the only writer who makes me want to stop writing. His film is about hunger. It's set in immediate post-war Britain. In a small town, a pig is reared that they're going to slaughter to eat at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. The local chiropodist is prevailed upon by his wife to steal the pig and keep it in their house. It's deadly good.
I was a fan of Alex Chilton, lead singer of The Box Tops, a brilliant musician. The Box Tops had a hit with “Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane / I ain’t got time to take a fast train” when I was young. He then formed a band called Big Star, which had a couple of brilliant albums. He was an eccentric guy.
After Big Star broke up, I went to a gig of his in Memphis. He was in his bare feet, playing a trumpet, although he didn’t play trumpet. He had a huge spotlight facing out into the audience. We were all standing there with our hands in front of our eyes, squinting at this silhouette with a trumpet.
Also, he omitted to bring a PA, so he was wandering down into the audience and singing very loudly into the ears of anyone who cared to listen. We might have caught the last live appearance of Alex Chilton.
If you wanted dangerous eccentricity, you would go to someone Horslips loved – Warren Zevon. He was a brilliant songwriter, great songs like and . The lyrics of one of his songs were co-written by Paul Muldoon. Horslips did a tour where Warren Zevon played one night in a venue; we played there the next night.
We tried to get there early so we could catch his sets, but there was a distinct possibility a gun might be fired during the gig — by Warren if he didn't feel the audience were up enough for it. He didn't ask them to clap their hands; he fired his pistol. We didn't accept too many dinner invitations from places. There was no guarantee you'd get out of there alive — and it wouldn't be from food poisoning!
The nicest geezers we toured with were The J Geils Band. Magic Dick in their band played harmonica. They loved that Charles [O’Connor] played concertina and Jimmy [Lockhart] played flute. They came into our dressing room before gigs, saying, “Charles, play that tune on the concertina you played last night for us.”
Charles would play a well-known Irish polka. We ended the tour and went back to Ireland. Shortly afterwards, we were surprised to hear the well-known Irish polka incorporated into a song called and it was Number 1 in America! We were thinking, hey, that’s what we're supposed to do — write hits with traditional tunes in there. These guys walked in and did just that. We loved it. We were thrilled for them.
There’s a band called Biird orchestrated by Lisa Canny. Lisa is an extraordinary person. She's about 6 feet of Mayo redhead. She's a banjo player and harpist. She’s put her two bands on hold.
Now she’s performing with Biird, this wonderful, world-conquering ensemble of 11 girls, all superb musicians, which she’s egging on to madness. They played Vicar Street recently. They turned the venue into a huge céilí. She was calling it: “Back to the start. Twirl.” The third time around, people hadn’t been twirling enough. She said: “Now back to the start. Twirl to feck!”
My other female hero is CMAT. Her album is incredible. She's a very good songwriter, a fantastic performer. She tells it like it is.
At the Ivor Novello Awards, which is the bastion of polite English song-making, she name-checked Farage and all the racists. She went for it. She's a girl of high intelligence. Very funny, mostly about herself. She's the real deal.
is a science fiction film about government agents – played by Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones – who deal with aliens. The aliens are eccentric. As part of my past, I taught classes of poor, sad people as much as I knew about film. I used which is lightweight in a way, as a template for how to write a film because it is very smart. There are two themes. One is about the loss of love; the other – which is prescient and relevant now – is that nothing you read in the news is true anymore. In the only place they look for the truth is in the ! It's a wonderful film.
Evelyn Waugh’s books I relish, particularly the trilogy. He followed up with a series of funny novels, in which the hero’s girlfriend is eaten by cannibals. He says: “Where is the white woman?” The chief goes, “Why, she's in here,” padding his stomach. Waugh then joined the army and fought in Crete in one of the great debacles of the British series of defeats that led up to El Alamein when they started to win again. He was very courageous. He wasn't very skillful, but he got fired at a lot. His novels are extremely funny.
