Horslips legend talks boxing, music and the night he played drums for The Pogues and ended up in A&E
It’s Tuesday morning in Dublin and Carr is lost in story, recreating a bar-room confrontation with a lumberjack sometime in the 1970s.READ MORE:Katie Taylor issues blunt one word response to retirement question
His father Joe coached at the local club in Kells and Carr followed him to tournaments around the country until he was hospitalised with chronic bronchiectasis — a condition which left him bed-bound for months. Boxing was his lifeline. After Horslips split in 1980, Carr worked with bands like Zen Alligators, before becoming a journalist and resuming his love affair with the sweet science. His career in print coincided with a golden era for Irish professional boxing and he’s pulled together stories from that time for a book that’s part-memoir, part-reportage.
Promoters, hype, success, failure and the art of the deal are all very familiar. There are plenty of broken dreams too. And for the fighters, it’s often the same dream — to win a world title and defend it at Croke Park. “Nearly every time,” he says, smiling. “There were threads, recurring characters, almost like scenes in a movie or stage play. Characters would appear and disappear and reappear again. That made it all the more fascinating.
With Horslips, he played in every corner of the country and saw trouble with capital T. They were pelted off stage in Moneymore one night and the crew were stopped by masked men after another show in Ardboe — the hometown of singer and bass player Barry Devlin. On another occasion the band were followed by a car trying to flag them down with a red torch after a gig in Banbridge.
He also recalls being frisked by the RUC in Belfast while wearing a red leather suit made by Jackie McNeill, whose husband Jim was boxing correspondent for the Irish Press. “They were asking me to empty my pockets. But I didn’t have any pockets,” he says, laughing. They couldn’t believe it.” As a journalist he got to know many of the country’s best fighters and shared in their highs and lows, while keeping a professional distance. He admits the story of Darren Sutherland’s life and death wasn’t easy to revisit for the book.
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