Obituary
Horslips guitarist Johnny Fean at age 71. Others will be better placed to write about his career and influence. Dancehall Sweethearts was the first proper album I owned and loved – still do. He lived a few miles up the road from me in Shannon but kept a very low profile apparently. My cousin is a professional musician and fell into the Horslips orbit regularly. He has nothing but nice things to say about Johnny and his bandmates.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/2023/04/28/horslips-guitarist-johnny-fean-dies-aged-71/
By all accounts he was a very nice guy.
I enjoy the music of Horslips. A lot. Johnny Fean was essential to what they were, a very good band.
R.I.P. Johnny.
Very sad news
Afterworders are probably expecting me to comment, having been heavily involved in the ‘More Than You Can Chew’ Horslips box set released a couple of months back. I can only really do so as a fan, though, because Johnny – always a fairly private, quiet man in recent years (though always friendly with fans at gigs) – tended to communicate in group email discussions during the box set process over the past two or three years via Maggie, his wife and childhood sweetheart and a well-loved character herself in the Horslips community. My thoughts go out to her.
It’s no secret that Johnny developed health issues during lockdown. Maggie represented him at the public/press launch of the box set (announcing it and opening pre-orders, with a band Q&A: Eamon, Barry, Jim, Charles + Maggie, plus Ray Fean, Johnny’s brother and the reunion-era band’s drummer) at a gathering in Dublin on 16 March 2022.
Johnny did, though, contribute meaningfully to the content of the box set – and I know from Barry that he loved the finished product – especially the disc of unreleased mid-80s Eamon Carr/Johnny Fean collaborations. Eamon and Johnny communicated directly about that and it went through several iterations on paper and in draft audio form until both agreed on what the best selection from a larger pool of material was. Johnny was quite self-critical about his own performances – but Eamon rightly, I think, believes that some of his best recorded singing can be found among these tracks. That disc is a highlight of the set for me – revealing a sublime, rich ‘crooning’ quality to his vocal range (with predominantly acoustic music) that was not really tapped into during the Horslips era, with the emphasis on (Celtic-) rock. But he was, of course, a fabulous, distinctive singer in the rock idiom. He was one of four singers in Horslips – in the first half of the 70s, Barry, Charles and Jim tended to take most of the lead vocals (all of them vocalists of real character); in the later 70s, Jim stepped back and Johnny became much more prominent as a vocalist – his sound, I think, being a major part of what made 1976’s ‘Book of Invasions’ such a classic album – the high watermark in the Horslips story, packed full of memorable songs and exquisite arrangements but also to a large extent ‘Johnny’s album’ in terms of his prominence on vocals (let alone guitar).
Funnily enough, while in the past 20+ years I’ve become friendly with first Eamon then Jim and more recently Barry and Charles, Johnny was the first Horslip I encountered – and in a way, the focus of my very first foray into ‘archive projects’. The first record label reissue/archive trawl stuff I did was in 1992 (an activity that continues today, in ever grander box sets) but in 1990, having left Queen’s University Belfast the previous year, I came back with three hired cameras and a vision mixing console and shot a film – just because I thought it might be preserving some embers of old magic – of Johnny’s brief ‘Spirit of Horslips’ band: a tribute to the band that had collapsed in 1980 and that was still at that point 19 years away from reuniting as a performing entity. It was, in retrospect, the first bit of curating/documenting I did. I found a washed out VHS of that film last year (the original Umatic masters had degraded beyond repair) and put it on YouTube – Johnny had momentarily lost his voice that week (not a permanent thing, just a virus) so it’s hardly gold dust, but it’s a little bit of history. It’s funny the way things work it -30 years later, curating a box set and celebrating the legacy in a definitive way.
Horslips had several gigs in the diary postponed/rescheduled during lockdown, but Johnny’s health obliged the band to cancel these and announce their conclusion as a performing unit in early 2022. There was no ‘last gig’ – just whatever the last one had happened to be prior to lockdown. That said, Barry and Jim did perform short sets as Horslips, with Ray Fean and other musicians assisting, including guitarist Fiach Moriarty, at a handful of multi-artist events later in 2022 – a few things curated by poet Paul Muldoon, a birthday bash for a longstanding Horslips roadie and finally a last hurrah at the Ulster Hall in October to mark Barry getting the ‘Legend’ award at the annual NI Music Awards.
It’s sad that Johnny didn’t get to enjoy that victory lap, but it’s great that he got to see the box set project completed and got to feel the wave of affection around that from loyal fans.
This may be a tangent too far, but yesterday – before the news broke – I was proofreading a PhD concerned with the concept of ‘trouble’ in policing. ‘Trouble’ was Johnny’s signature number with ‘Lips.
A couple of months after the three-camera film I mentioned in early 1990, I hired a basic camcorder and shot three gigs by Johnny’s Spirit of Horslips in a weekend – this rough and ready clip from the University of Ulster (Coleraine campus) has real ‘spirit’ about it. The fire alarm goes off at the end, someone rolls around onstage… rock ‘n’ roll. Johnny was good.
Only 18 years earlier, he was caught by chance (pre-Horslips) busking in Limerick in an RTÉ news vox pop about country music:
I’m really sorry to hear this news. Horslips were my first ever gig and seeing Johnny Fean playing a driving Johnny B Goode as the bands final encore remains a glorious memory. Lovely to read Colin’s comments about him as well. RIP.
Bloody hell – I’ve only just watched the clip Colin has posted above, and there Johnny is, still doing Johnny B Goode 16 or so years after I saw him do it, with all the energy I recall. I had no idea.
He never performed it, afaik, with Horslips during the reunion era (2009-2020) but there’s a good quality clip on YouTube of him performing it with Eamon, Jim and other musicians (including the band,s solicitor, Paddy Goodwin) at a charity event during the 2010s.
Very nice tribute Colin.
Today is the 50th anniversary of this being released – Horslips’ most enduring number, Johnny’s signature riff. From their 2009 comeback concert at the O2 arena in Dublin – after the ‘longest tea break in history’ (29 years):
Really sad news. I’ve been listening to Horslips a lot recently and so this has struck home. He seems to have been a genuinely nice man as well as a talented musician. A combination is that is rarer than we here might like.
I watched the Dancehall Sweethearts DVD this weekend. Quite a few lump in the throat moments.