Rory Gallagher E-Book

Julian Vignoles

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Rory Gallagher is regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He was a dazzling showman, an accomplished songwriter and a champion of blues music. He began his career in an Irish showband at age fifteen, before forming Taste, one of the great Irish bands. He went on to even greater success as a solo artist in the 1970s. After his success peaked, Gallagher's later life was troubled, ending in disillusion and early death. He remains a legend, with musicians such as the Edge, Johnny Marr and Joe Bonamassa among the legions of fans who still revere him. Drawing on extensive interviews, Julian Vignoles casts new light on the familial, musical and other influences that inspired Gallagher, and on the complex personality that drove his career. Crucially, Vignoles shows how many of Gallagher's songs speak eloquently – and poignantly – about the person who penned them. Meticulously researched, this portrait is the insightful biography that Rory Gallagher deserves.

Leseprobe

RORY GALLAGHER

THE MAN BEHIND THE GUITAR

Julian Vignoles

Gill Books

For my family, Carol, Eoghan and Rory,and for Rory Gallagher fans everywhere

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Timeline

Introduction

1. Northern Roots

2. To the Lee Delta

3. Enter Fender Guitar No. 64351

4. A Showband Apprentice

5. Next Move: Taste

6. From Belfast to the World: Taste Mark 2

7. It’s the Rory Gallagher Band

8. The Therapy of Touring

9. A Gentle Gaffer

10. The Chrysalis Years

11. The 1980s: Uncertainty and Resurgence

12. The Other Rory Gallagher

13. ‘This Shadow Play ...’

14. The Rory Gallagher Legacy

15. Eternity Beckons

Coda

Appendix: The Tribute Bands

Rory Gallagher Discography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

Photo Section

RORY GALLAGHER TIMELINE

1948

Born 2 March, in Ballyshannon, County Donegal.

1949

Moves to Derry (Londonderry) with his parents; his brother, Dónal, born.

1958

Moves to Cork with his mother and brother, enrolled in the North Monastery primary school, Cork.

1963

Joins the Fontana Showband, buys his famous Fender Stratocaster.

1965

Completes his Leaving Certificate at St Kieran’s School; Fontana becomes Impact and travels to Spain for six-week residency.

1966

Impact disbands; Gallagher plays gigs with The Axills; in August, forms Taste (The Taste), with Eric Kitteringham (bass) and Norman Damery (drums).

1967

January–March: Taste play in UK and Germany. The band moves base to Belfast.

1968

Re-forms Taste (known as Taste Mark 2), with John Wilson (drums) and Richard McCracken (bass). November: the band plays support at Cream’s farewell concert.

1969

Taste

released.

1970

August: Taste play the Isle of Wight Festival.

On the

Boards

released. December: the band plays its last gig.

1971

January: the first Rory Gallagher Band line-up, with Gerry McAvoy on bass and Wilgar Campbell on drums; his brother, Dónal, becomes his manager; first solo album,

Rory Gallagher

, released.

Deuce

follws later in the year. The Rory Gallagher Band begins twenty years of prolific touring.

1972

Wilgar Campbell is replaced by Rod de’Ath, Lou Martin (keyboards) joins the band.

Live in Europe

released. Gallagher voted best guitarist by

Melody Maker

readers; contributes to

London Muddy Waters Sessions.

1973

Releases two studio albums,

Blueprint

and

Tattoo.

His touring schedule peaks with 160 gigs.

1974

Completes Polydor contract with double album

Irish Tour ’74.

1975

Signs with Chrysalis Records and releases

Against the Grain

.

1977

Headlines the Macroom Mountain Dew Festival (the first of two years).

1978

Abandons an album recorded in San Francisco, reverts to a three-piece band, replacing Rod de’Ath with Ted McKenna, and later releases

Photo-Finish.

1981

Ted McKenna is replaced by Brendan O’Neill.

1982

Chrysalis contract ends with

Jinx.

1985

Starts his own record label, Capo.

1987

After a gap of five years,

Defender

is released.

1990

Releases his last album,

Fresh Evidence

.

1992

August: his final Dublin performance, at the Temple Bar Music Festival. Forms the last Rory Gallagher Band line-up, the first without Gerry McAvoy.

1993

November: plays for the last time in Cork.

1995

January: plays at Nighttown, Rotterdam, and collapses.

March: admitted to hospital.

April: receives a liver transplant at King’s College Hospital, London.

14 June: dies from an infection.

19 June: funeral and burial in Cork.

MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND, 18 JULY 1979

They’ve been playing it for eight minutes, but Gallagher and the band keep pounding out the ‘Shadow Play’ riff. It is nearly time to end it. But instead, this time he spurs on the band and increases the pace. He pulls down two drum microphone stands. With the guitar at fever pitch and feeding back, he whips it off and places it on the stage. He begins a kind of primitive ritual as the instrument howls and the band keeps playing. Gallagher is paying homage to his guitar. He skips across the stage, gestures to the crowd, animatedly pointing back at the stricken instrument, appearing to accuse it of something, perhaps of dominating his life? He walks towards it in mock military step, and talks to it, this thing that he had mastered, and which had brought him so much fame. He grabs a white towel and fans the air around the Fender, adding to the electronics’ distress, before waving the fabric at Gerry McAvoy and Ted McKenna – the bass and drums men – as if to cool them down from the fever pitch he has just engineered. Bouncing out front again, he drags his precious Stratocaster across the stage, by its cable. The strings screech, as if in protest. Ten minutes have passed, and the ritual is complete. He picks it up deftly and returns to the riff with an air of triumph, before the trademark, multi-crescendo ending, and the words, ‘Thank you, thank you. Goodnight!’

INTRODUCTION

‘There are certain nights that we all have, where you think, “God, these hands will do anything tonight!” You know, and you take yourself right to the edge, the limit.’

– RORY GALLAGHER1

He bounded across countless stages in a red check shirt. His compulsion was to entertain. The tones he could conjure from six strings made him a revered virtuoso. He was an unassuming star, courteous and polite. He was Rory Gallagher.

Blues, boogie, folk and rock ’n’ roll fuelled the songs. In each, the guitar took its anticipated excursion – the famous Gallagher solo. For his fans, this is where he could make it talk – both to them, and to him, it seemed. ‘Night after night, gig after gig, he’s still thrilled by the sounds he can coax from it’, a reviewer, Mick Rock, wrote in Rolling Stone in 1972.

Gallagher modestly described the power that flowed from head and heart to his fingers: ‘What I try to do is split the difference between having enough technique to go into tight corners musically and having enough primal madness to keep it gritty. I’d like to be known for playing somewhere in between, as a guy who can keep primitive and physical at the guitar, but by the same token, not be just an aggressive player from the start.’2

Passion, both his and his fans’, was never in short supply. It’s what marked him out most, perhaps.

Rory Gallagher was just 47 years old when he died, and during his short life he experienced stardom, jubilation and loneliness. Unlike most of his rock peers, there were no wild parties, no expensive entertaining, no marriages or divorces. He was dedicated almost exclusively to music, particularly to the guitar and its possibilities. It was his life’s purpose. His brother, Dónal, once described it as a ‘vocation’.3 The rock ’n’ roll lifestyle wasn’t for him. He disliked the mansions and cars associated with rock music fame, further endearing him to many, of course. When he eventually bought his own home in London, it was a modest apartment.

Gallagher’s personal life, or his life outside music, is a puzzle. He avoided discussion of the subject and, though he gave many interviews, most of these were promoting tours or records, and give only occasional insights into Rory Gallagher. This guarded aspect of his persona makes the rare occasions when he was revealing more noteworthy. And there’s another feature of Gallagher, one that is perhaps unique in the rock world: it is difficult to find a negative word written about him anywhere. Yet Gerry McAvoy, Gallagher’s bass player for twenty years, spoke from experience in the introduction to his book, Riding Shotgun, published in 2005, describing his friend as ‘a mystery wrapped up in an enigma’. He says there were people that would place Rory on a pedestal with some of the most venerable Irish saints, but, ‘I’m here to tell you that he could be one of the most exasperating, frustrating and infuriating people you could ever meet. But also, without doubt, one of the nicest.’

There were two very different, distinct sides to Rory Gallagher. He was the artist, the extrovert, the musician who gave his all and more when on a stage, but offstage, there was the shy, polite and gentle individual. And even his confident onstage swagger was tempered with vulnerability; he would often introduce a song with the self-deprecating line, ‘This is one from a few years back – I hope you like it.’ In a life of both success and struggle, Gallagher experienced the paradox of adulation and solitude side by side. Perilously for his personal life, he admitted living for the time he spent onstage. Performance was almost an addiction, and maybe even an escape. Avril MacRory, a TV producer who got to know him, says. ‘There were always people there for him – if he wanted them. But one of the reasons he was such a great musician was because that’s where it all came out. That’s where he expressed everything.’ His songs are key to understanding Gallagher. Often seen as vehicles for his guitar playing, much of his lyric writing reveals the mind and soul of its author. He was 21 when he wrote lines for Taste’s album On the Boards that contained a plea, one that in many ways amounted to an imperative for his life: ‘Well if I can’t sing, I’ll cry / If I can’t sing, I’ll die.’

Many will be surprised that the great showman and rocker was a devout Catholic all his life. He also had a steely determination from childhood to become a guitar-playing performer. Contrary to belief, he was more a willing than reluctant member of an Irish showband. Most significantly – and ironically – Gallagher’s gifts as a guitar player have tended to overshadow the subtlety and grace in much of his songwriting. Some of this writing is confessional, even revelatory. Gallagher, despite his gentle demeanour, had a tough side too, and could hire and fire to realise his musical vision. That vision was both principled and uncompromising. Though fans revere his memory, Rory Gallagher was strong-willed and focused on success. But the fame he achieved brought challenges for him. After his career peaked, he was a troubled person for much of his later life. He became increasingly subject to superstitious beliefs, and more and more drawn in his songwriting to the world conjured up in crime-fiction novels. His relatively short life ended in disillusion. When interviewed for a Dutch newspaper five months before he died, Gallagher was living alone in a London hotel. Weary and unwell, he had more than a hint of resignation about how things had unfolded for him. Yet there was still fire in his soul as he looked back on his early days with a Biblical image: ‘As soon as I got one [a guitar] in my hands, I was raising Cain. I was already touring before I knew what it was. Ireland is so small that you can always end up sleeping in your own bed, no matter where you played. That’s if you wanted to, of course. And I did not want to. I still don’t. Rock-and-roll was my religion, call and conviction.’4

His followers knew this well. They pounded their feet for him. They played air guitar. They chanted themselves hoarse.

Nice one, Rory,Nice one, son,Nice one, Rory,Let’s have another one!

Gallagher was a musical giant. For those who knew him, he was also a great human being. Christy Moore, Ireland’s great folksinger and songwriter, is a huge admirer: ‘We still love his sound, his rock ’n’ roll, his folk ’n’ trad, his blues roots, shapes, chords, licks, shirts, hands in pockets, collar turned up, his shy smile. He was a beautiful man who, I think, died real lonely.’ His performances have become mythic for some: ‘A Rory Gallagher gig was an amazing thing, celebratory, visceral, heart-stopping, brilliant – he brought to everyone’s home town the blues, electric and magnificent and shot through with a wild Irish sensibility.’5

It was that brilliance and sensibility, along with his deep love of music, that brought Rory Gallagher both his great triumphs – and his trials. This is his story.

Chapter 1

NORTHERN ROOTS

‘I remember hearing “Rock Around the Clock”, and I was only five or six years of age, honestly. I think it’s due to my relations and their musical souls. They sort of stuffed music down my throat. They let me listen; they liked it as well, and it worked out.’

– RORY GALLAGHER1

Twenty years after his death, the Shandon Bells of Cork paid their tribute, in June 2015. Notes from his song ‘Tattoo’d Lady’ rang out across the city. A song of fairground life, restlessness is one of its themes. The child narrator ‘roams from town to town’. In some ways, it’s Gallagher’s life story.

He effectively became a Cork person by the age of ten. He forged his art on the banks of the River Lee. He never lost his city accent. But his roots were at the other end of Ireland. County Donegal was his birthplace; he spent his early childhood in Derry and influential teenage years in Belfast. His adult life was spent in exile in London. Through lifestyle choice, he was a resident of countless hotel rooms around the world.

The story begins, symbolically, with a large engineering project in the 1940s to supply much needed electric power in Ireland. Rory Gallagher was in his mother’s womb as his father, Danny, worked on the Erne Hydroelectric Scheme in Ballyshannon, County Donegal. His brother, Dónal, would say later about their father: ‘It’s ironic that he was part of what delivered electricity to Ireland, as his son ended up playing electric guitar. If my father hadn’t done that, there would have been no electricity for Rory’s amps.’2

Danny Gallagher was born in Derry on 17 April 1919. At 21, he enlisted in the Irish Army in Raphoe, County Donegal, and served in the intelligence section of the 20th Infantry Battalion. The Irish Army, despite Ireland’s policy of neutrality, was expanded during the Second World War, the period referred to by the Irish government as ‘The Emergency’. Gallagher’s battalion had its headquarters in Athlone, but he was moved to various posts in Western Command, including Finner Camp, close to Ballyshannon, a town he later became familiar with. In 1944, he was commissioned as a temporary officer, at the rank of 2nd lieutenant, in Southern Command in Cork. He trained recruits in Collins Barracks and the Maritime Inscription. While in Cork, he met Margaret Monica (Mona) Roche, a native of the city. They were married in St Patrick’s Church on 5 August 1947. After being discharged from the army, though he remained in the reserve, Danny took up employment with the Erne Hydroelectric Scheme, so the young couple moved north to base themselves in Ballyshannon, County Donegal.

Danny Gallagher’s ancestors can be traced to a small townland, Ballyholey, near Raphoe, in east Donegal. The family later moved to Derry (or Londonderry as it is also known), and is recorded as living in Donegal Place on the 1901 census. Danny’s father, William, worked as a messenger boy, and later as a docker on Derry Quay. On 25 December 1916, he married Mary (known as Minnie) Feeney in the Long Tower Catholic Church. William and Minnie lived at 31 Orchard Row, close to the banks of the Foyle. A son, Charles, was born on 25 November 1917, and two years later on 17 April, Daniel, known as Danny.

The political backdrop of this time was the Irish independence movement, the upheaval that began with the campaign for Home Rule, and the opposition to it in the northern part of Ireland, followed by the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the partition of the island. The city of Derry is close to what became the border, so during this time of change, the city was separated from its County Donegal hinterland to the west. Its population was, of course, mainly nationalist, pro Free State, but political destiny had it remain in the United Kingdom as part of Northern Ireland.3

Danny Gallagher played the piano accordion and became well known in Ulster music circles. He was a member of Charlie Kelly’s Céilí Band, a well-known Derry group in the 1940s.4 Rory Gallagher made a reference to the traditional music in his background in a BBC radio interview in 1987. ‘It affects me with my chords and certain ideas for songs, but generally I start with blues roots and work from there. You can’t keep a strong tradition like Irish music out of what you’re doing.’5

Ballyshannon, County Donegal, became home for Danny and Monica Gallagher in 1947. This is how William Allingham, the poet born in Ballyshannon in 1824, described his town in The Winding Banks of Erne:

Adieu to Ballyshanny!Where I was bred and born;Go where I may, I’ll think of you,As sure as night and morn …

The mother of former British prime minister Tony Blair, Hazel (née Corscadden) was born in Ballyshannon in 1923.6 By coincidence, Rory Gallagher’s nephews attended the same secondary school, the London Oratory, as the Blair children. There’s a folk legend in this part of Donegal that might have interested Rory Gallagher, given the fondness he developed for mystery stories. A local woman gave an account of a happening at Wardtown Castle near the estuary of the River Erne, west of the town: ‘One night three girls who were attending a party in the castle went outside for a “breath of air”, as the story goes. They were never seen again and it was believed that they fell into a small lough nearby and were drowned. Locals in the past claimed to have frequently seen three ladies in the bottom of the lough, combing their hair. The water is since called Loch na mBan Fionn – the lake of the fair women.’7

*   *   *

The Erne Hydroelectric Scheme, where Danny Gallagher worked as a ‘schemer’, as the workers were known, was one of the new Irish state’s bold engineering projects. The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) had decided to harness the Erne River’s 40-metre drop in level between Belleek and its estuary at Ballyshannon. As well as the engineering challenges, there was a geopolitical complication to overcome: since 1922, 1,900 of the 4,000 square kilometres of the river’s catchment were in Northern Ireland. To proceed, the ESB had to get permission to undertake extensive dredging and civil engineering works across the border. The plan involved building two power stations, the second at Cathleen’s Fall, just east of the town. A 6km channel had to be excavated, involving the removal of 600,000 cubic metres of earth and rock from the riverbed. The bulk of the work involved hard and dangerous manual labour. There were casualties, with twelve fatalities.8 Danny Gallagher was employed between 1947 and 1949 in a clerical/technical position with the main contractor, a British firm called Cementation, doing quality checks on the concrete used to build the dam. Tom Gallagher (not a relative), who also worked on the scheme and played music with Danny Gallagher, and who still lives in the town, recalls that such were the work shifts that ‘the beds in the lodging houses never cooled’. The cross-border cooperative nature of the project has an echo in Rory Gallagher’s career, because even at the height of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, he was – and is still – admired for always returning to play in the city, and for appreciating his cross-community support base.

At that time, Ballyshannon had a local hospital in the area south of the town known as the Rock. The building, beside the old workhouse, now has a plaque recording the fact that in a room on the second floor, on Tuesday 2 March 1948, Monica Gallagher gave birth to her first son. He was baptised in St Joseph’s Church nearby. In accordance with the long-standing Gallagher family tradition of naming the eldest son after his grandfather, he was registered as William Rory Gallagher. Just a month previously, Ireland’s first coalition government had been formed. In autumn that year, that government, in a historic step, declared the country the Republic of Ireland. As for entertainment, the Abbey cinema was running a show from Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, called ‘Funzapoppin’, starring Danny Cummins. The Rock Hall near the hospital had its weekly dance, with music by the eponymous ‘Rock’ orchestra, a decade before the global musical use of that word arrived. In New York in June, Columbia Records unveiled what became an enduring piece of technology, the long-playing record.

After Rory’s birth, the family moved from their rented house on the Bundoran Road, to another at East Port in the town. Their landlord was a publican, Frank O’Neill, whose licensed premises was just down the street. His son Owen Roe, now proprietor of the bar Owen Roe’s, remembers locals who knew Danny and Monica Gallagher. P.J. Drummond, a drinking companion of Danny’s, also performed babysitting duties on occasions: ‘He always maintained that his great claim to fame was that Rory Gallagher pissed on his knee.’

Danny Gallagher was a member of a local dance band, the Modernaires. Tom Gallagher was, too, and is now the last link with that musical era in the town. He remembers a day in the spring of 1948 when he called to pick up Danny Gallagher at the house the family was renting, to be greeted by Monica with a baby in her arms – the infant Rory Gallagher. Danny Gallagher also played with Joe McBride, who ran the Marine Ballroom in Bundoran, the seaside resort nearby. Danny was something of a local star. An advertisement appeared in the Donegal Democrat during 1948 for a Friday and Sunday night dance, with Joe McBride’s Ballroom Orchestra, ‘featuring Danny Gallagher, the Wizard Accordeonist’. Danny Gallagher wrote at least one song, ‘Harty’s Ragtime Band’, which P.J. Drummond was known to recite on occasions down through the years. Monica Gallagher was also drawn to performance, and was involved with the Premier Players, an amateur drama group in the town. They made local headlines in 1948 when they came third in the Bundoran Drama Festival with The Righteous Are Bold by the playwright Frank Carney, in which a young woman is possessed by evil spirits until an exorcism by an elderly priest. Danny Gallagher’s conviviality had another, problematic side, an overfondness for drinking. Mick Butler, whose father, Bert, worked as a ‘schemer’ with Danny Gallagher, says that both men would head for a pub, given any opportunity.

The Gallagher family left Ballyshannon in 1949 and went to live in Derry, at 31 Orchard Row, with Danny’s mother, Minnie, widowed since 1942. A new addition to the family came when Danny and Monica’s second son, Dónal, was born in August 1949. (Dónal was later to become Rory’s manager, and guardian of his estate after his death). The street was a two-up two-down terrace, with basic facilities, and has since been completely redeveloped. Myra Doherty, who lived nearby on Foyle Road, remembers being given the job as a ten-year-old of bringing Rory out in his pram. ‘He was a lovely wee baby. I can still see his face,’ she says.

Derry has always claimed to be a particularly musical city and America was a significant influence. As the North was part of the United Kingdom, US soldiers began arriving in the city in 1942. Famous entertainers followed. Bob Hope and Al Jolson were among those who made appearances during the war years. The toddler Rory apparently first heard blues music from an American army source. American Forces Network (AFN) began broadcasting in the UK on 4 July 1943, with the network including several transmitters in Northern Ireland. Though intended for US military personnel, AFN had unintended consequences and became an inspiration to many famous non-American musicians. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin was one: ‘We could turn our dial and get an absolutely amazing kaleidoscope of music.’9 The Belfast-born singer and songwriter Van Morrison, one of rock music’s greats, recalled this formative period of his life in a song co-written with the poet Paul Durcan, ‘In the Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll’.10 The journalist and political activist Eamonn McCann, several years older than Gallagher, described an encounter with the station: ‘Eventually, my father and Jim Sharkey [father of Feargal of The Undertones] from across the street, rigged me up a contraption from a gramophone speaker and a roll of wire so I could listen to the music in the attic, even though the radio downstairs in the kitchen was turned off. This was amazing. I was wired up to a secret world, the sound snaking its way silently up the stairs bringing the voices of black people roaring out about sex and announcing it was OK to feel free.’11

We can speculate on other intangible stirrings in the young Rory’s imagination, perhaps prompted by sounds in his environment. A train on the rail line that passed close by, running along the banks of the Foyle, possibly. Referring to that period of his life, Gallagher said later: ‘When you’re that age you like songs about trains, motion.’12 The poet Seamus Heaney, who grew up in rural County Derry, found a metaphor in a steam train that used to rumble by, just a field away, behind his family’s farmhouse. ‘We were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of the water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.’13

Music began making an impression on the young Gallagher, his brother told Mark McAvoy for his 2009 book Cork Rock: From Rory Gallagher to the Sultans of Ping. ‘Rory had managed to get the family radio and would surf it. He knew the schedule, like the night Chris Barber had a programme.’14 Gallagher himself recalled: ‘I suppose I had the slight benefit of hearing it before I knew what it was. By the grace of God, because I didn’t have a record player, I heard primal blues radio recordings of Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy. AFN was playing them on jazz programmes and, also, BBC.’15

But firstly, there was formal education. Rory attended the Christian Brothers primary school, known locally as the Brow of the Hill, not far from Orchard Row. Dermott Gallagher (no relation) has a clear memory of something from that time. He was attending the nearby school, St Columba’s, known as the ‘Wee Nuns’ School’. As was the custom, the kids would walk home for their lunch. He’d often meet Rory and Dónal Gallagher. Corporal punishment for learning issues was then commonplace and Dermott had got a beating that morning from one of the teachers, Sister Agatha. He had accepted his fate, till Rory asked him what the mark on the side of his face was. This brought everything into the open. Dermott’s elder brother, Peter, who also attended the Brow of the Hill, got involved and the upshot was that Sister Agatha never laid a hand on him again, apparently. He credits this to the vigilance of Rory, then only nine years old.

The writer Nell McCafferty, who grew up in Derry about this time, paints a picture of faith and frugality in the city. As teenagers, she and her friends would go to a local café to share a plate of chips just so they could play the jukebox. As for religious observance, she recalled: ‘the Church gave you loads of paintings, stained-glass windows and statues to look at. And, through confession, it gave you a clean start and a sense of purpose every Saturday morning: three Hail Marys and your soul was pure again; one round of the Stations of the Cross and you had saved hundreds of dead people from hell.’16 However, another world was breaking through. Dónal Gallagher remembered a regular stroll with his brother around 6 p.m. to the Diamond area of the city during the mid 1950s, to a shop with a demo version of an incredible new invention: television. They’d stare through the window at the BBC’s very first pop show, Six-Five Special, he said. ‘The fact that we couldn’t hear the sound didn’t matter to the young Rory,’ he said. ‘He already knew the lyrics to loads of the songs, so he’d unconsciously sing out loud as the bands were playing on screen, and provide great entertainment for the other people gathered there.’17

*   *   *

In these Derry years, Rory developed what seems like a fixation with the guitar, his brother recalled:

‘My earliest memories of it was Rory trying to describe to his parents the instrument that he had in his head that he wanted. Rory started making it up with a round cheese box with a ruler and some elastic and saying – “it’s like that but bigger”. I remember then my father had a pal, a musician, Charlie McGee, and he had a guitar. I recall my father bringing him down to the house and saying to Rory – “is that what you’re talking about?”18’

Rory’s parents decided to source an instrument by mail order. It was William Doherty from Foyle Road, Myra Doherty’s father, who was the agent for several catalogues. According to her brother, Ivor, Rory’s parents paid for it in instalments with what was called a club card, at the rate of one shilling and threepence each week, the last payment being made in February 1958. This fairly basic instrument, a four-string ukulele type, was, arguably, where Rory Gallagher’s career began. ‘It was always a piece of family history that our Da sold Rory Gallagher his first guitar.’

They were a ‘lovely family’, Myra Doherty says, ‘Monica was a stunning-looking woman.’ However, by then, Danny had developed a serious alcohol problem, and the Gallagher marriage ended in separation. In 1958, apparently, or maybe earlier, Monica took her sons and moved back to her family in Cork. Though there were attempts at reconciliation, Danny Gallagher remained living in Derry until his death in June 1975, at the height of Rory’s fame. Cathal Póirtéir, who grew up in Derry, says many people his age would remember Danny Gallagher: ‘He was one of a group of middle-aged men who hung around the bottom of William Street, tapping passers-by for a few pence to help towards the next drink. He was the most likeable and well mannered of the men.’ Póirtéir recalls another legend in the city; after Gallagher’s gig in the Guildhall in 1971, the by now famous rock star took the time to seek out his father and help him financially. Danny Gallagher, or Dan as he was also known, used to frequent O’Hara’s Bar on Bishop Street, close to his home. Antoin O’Hara’s parents ran the pub. ‘My father and mother had great time for him.’ The view locally was that it was his drinking that caused the marriage break-up, O’Hara confirms. ‘He was heartbroken and would talk about the boys a lot.’

Danny Gallagher must surely have felt joy, particularly as a musician himself, when his son became world-famous. According to Antoin O’Hara, ‘he was aware of Rory’s music, and very proud of him.’ Rory rarely spoke about his father, and never referred to the marriage break-up, but his brother, Dónal, chose to continue the family naming tradition by christening one of his sons Daniel. Danny Gallagher may or may not have known that his elder son, in a gentle, indirect way, wrote about him. Few would have guessed that ‘Sinner Boy’, written during the Taste period, was personal. In its stomping blues rhythm, the song asks the listener to take pity on someone who has become an outcast, a street person, with ‘hands on the bottle’. ‘Take that sinner boy home / Wrap him up, keep him warm / He won’t do you no harm.’

The Derry connection remained during Gallagher’s later childhood. He and his brother were sent there on several occasions for holidays with their grandmother Minnie. Gerry McCartney’s family lived in number 37 Orchard Row. He remembers music being a passion for young Rory. ‘He tried to get a wee skiffle band going on the street.’ Another childhood flashback comes from Dermott Gallagher, whose family’s back yard was a great meeting place. ‘It was all new to me, to see a large box with a broom handle stuck in the middle with a string tied from the top of the pole to the outside of the box.’

Gerry McCartney remembers Gallagher coming back many years later to give his former neighbours tickets for his gigs, both when he played at the Embassy venue in the city in 1968 (with Taste), and the Guildhall in 1971. Many years later, Gallagher became a Derry local again when he was asked about the city’s band, The Undertones: ‘I don’t dare say anything bad because they’re from Derry. I think they have charm and naivety.’19 Proclaiming Gallagher’s Derry roots, the Bogside Artists, well known for their work on gables in nationalist areas of that city, painted a Gallagher mural for the part of Ballyshannon named Rory Gallagher Place.

Acknowledging the town of his birth, Gallagher revisited it several times, accompanied by his mother at least once in the 1980s. The town’s memory also includes a story that, on one occasion, while his mother went to meet Patsy Croal, an old friend and a central figure on the Ballyshannon drama scene in the 1940s, Rory went into one of the town’s many pubs, Maggie’s Bar. He then overheard some men playing darts say, ‘that fella looks the image of Rory Gallagher’. The famous man couldn’t resist turning to the men to say, ‘I am Rory Gallagher.’

But with the move south in 1958, Rory Gallagher’s close relationship with the city of Cork was about to begin.

Chapter 2

TO THE LEE DELTA

‘It’s the kind of place where everybody nearly knows everybody else. If you want to meet someone, you know where to find them. If you don’t want to meet them, you can more or less go where you won’t meet them, which is kind of nice.’

– RORY GALLAGHER ON HIS ADOPTED CITY, IN 1974.1

County Cork is known as the rebel county, a designation dating back to the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century, when the city took the Yorkist side in the English civil war. Cork people also refer to their city – and not always tongue-in-cheek – as ‘the real capital’. This is partly a throwback to the city’s role as the centre of the anti-Treaty forces during the 1922–1923 Irish Civil War, an insurgency by those opposed to the limited independence that the Treaty provided. The Cork person’s traditional antipathy for Dublin is part of the city’s pride – and its charm.

According to tradition, Saint Finbar founded the city in the seventh century. The name derives from the Irish, ‘Corcach Mór Mumhan’, the ‘great marsh of Munster’, because the city is built on islands on the River Lee, which were marshy and prone to flooding. The waterways between the islands were built over to form some of the main streets of present-day Cork. The channels re-converge at the eastern end before the Lee flows on to Lough Mahon and Cork Harbour. This estuary has imaginatively been referred to as the ‘Lee Delta’, the topography and the romance of the musical connotations inspiring at least one band name, the Lee Delta Blues Band.

Monica Gallagher returned to her native city to live with her sons at her parents’ public house, The Modern Bar (later known as Roche’s Bar) at 27 MacCurtain Street. She had two sisters, Noreen and Kathleen, and two brothers, John, who ran the pub, and James (Jim), who became a favourite uncle to Rory and also a musical influence. Dónal Gallagher later recalled his role in their lives: ‘Jim was an inspirational figure for Rory. He was a terrific man. In ’68 and ’69, he’d come over and take courses in computers at IBM in Sandhurst. I’d take the Taste van and drop him off. I’d pick him up a week later, he’d come and crash on the floor at our bedsit.’2

Monica Gallagher’s family had a passing connection with one of the great musical figures of the twentieth century in Ireland, Seán Ó Riada. Her family was de Róiste (the Irish-language version of Roche) from Cúil Aodha in the West Cork Gaeltacht. Monica was born after the family moved to Cork city. Dónal Gallagher told Mark McAvoy that Ó Riada frequented the family bar on MacCurtain Street. Rory, in later life, must surely have been fascinated by Ó Riada’s metamorphosis from jazz and pop musician John Reidy to Irish-speaking traditional ensemble leader and innovator, as well as authority on musical heritage, Seán Ó Riada. And, coincidentally or not, Rory would later develop a strong attachment to Ó Riada’s setting of the Mass. When Ó Riada moved to Cúil Aodha with his family in 1963, the de Róistes were neighbours. A first cousin of Monica’s, Johnny de Róiste, and his wife Siobhán, who live and work in the area as farmers, are aware of the family’s connection with the rock music legend: ‘We were never into the rock music’, says Siobhán, ‘but we have two granddaughters in Kenmare with lovely voices and we often wonder did they get this from Rory.’

MacCurtain Street has several well-known landmarks: the Everyman Theatre and the Metropole Hotel. The tower of St Anne’s Anglican Church on the hilly neighbourhood of Shandon can be seen from this elevation, and the sound of its famous bells heard. The young Rory would surely have looked down from this height on the River Lee’s two channels below, and might have thought of the Mississippi Delta and its sounds – the rich music he had become aware of and would later deeply explore. Close by is the steep rise of Saint Patrick’s Hill, an elegant nineteenth-century street, where he was often photographed strolling confidently.

Looking south towards the city, St Patrick’s Street is below. On it a statue looks north over the river towards St Patrick’s Hill. It is a representation of Father Mathew, the nineteenth-century clergyman, known as the temperance priest because of his campaigning against the abuse of alcohol. Coincidentally, in 1993, Gallagher was asked by Hot Press, ‘Who would be the last person you would invite to your birthday party?’ He answered: ‘Father Mathew’.3

Gallagher recalled being intrigued while in Derry by AFN radio. So what were the musical influences on him as the family settled in his mother’s home city? He remembered experiencing music in ‘the ether of his childhood’, in 1977. ‘Even as a toddler, I think I was very aware of hearing people like Guy Mitchell and Tennessee Ernie Ford on the radio, along with things like the “High Noon” theme, and all that. Apparently, I was always singing around the house, because most Irish families are interested in music in the first place – not necessarily pop music, but they were all singing around the house.’4

The young Gallagher had already become aware of the popular singer Lonnie Donegan through his 1955 hit, ‘Rock Island Line’. The Glasgow-born performer’s work was also a route to the blues for Gallagher. Another song Donegan recorded, ‘Bring a Little Water, Sylvie’, is an example of how blues art emerged. The holler, as it was known, had developed as a way of communication for people working in the fields, in this case to ask that water be brought to deal with the heat. Its latent musicality was revealed and became global after Lead Belly added his guitar to turn the water-call into a song. According to Chicago-born Jack White, of the White Stripes: ‘When you’re digging deeper into rock ’n’ roll, you’re on a freight train headed straight for the blues.’5 Paul Oliver, the famous blues historian, summarised the music that began to draw Rory Gallagher: ‘Blues is the wail of the forsaken, the cry of independence, the passion of the lusty, the anger of the frustrated and the laughter of the fatalist. It’s the agony of indecision, the despair of the jobless, the anguish of the bereaved and the dry wit of the cynic.’6 Blues was also the popular music of the black community in the 1930s and ’40s; performers from the American South became famous stars. But it wasn’t all pain and woe; as one writer put it: ‘It was the music’s up-to-date power and promise, not its folkloric melancholy, that attracted black record buyers.’7

During 1958, Rory Gallagher became a pupil of the North Monastery primary school, just north of the city centre. Billy Barry, who sat next to him on his first day, remembers an extremely shy classmate, who, when he did speak, had a Northern lilt in his voice they weren’t used to, one that he lost fairly quickly. He was enrolled through his Irish-language name, Ruadhrí Ó Gallchobhair, as was the custom then, but because he had gone to school in Derry, Irish would have been less familiar to him. As the boys grew older, Barry recalls that Rory did not share the majority’s passion for hurling and football - he was to shine differently. ‘If he had been good at hurling, well, the whole story would have been different’, he says.

Gallagher recalled Cork as a ‘guitar-free’ place at that time. But he remembered two buskers, one blind, who entertained playing fiddle and banjo on football match days at their regular pitch at the Prince’s Street entrance to the city’s famous indoor emporium, the English Market. ‘They were like the Mississippi Sheiks of Irish music’, he said.8 They were well-known local men, the Dunne brothers. Pete Brennan was a contemporary and can still picture the men’s long gabardine coats and the Clarke’s shoebox in which they used to collect coins. Gallagher’s memory of these musicians may have partly inspired his 1978 song, ‘Mississippi Sheiks’, a celebration of humble music-making in the work of the 1930s American country blues group of the same name:9 It felt like a dream, he says in the song, or time travel, as he imagines seeing the band on a street corner.

The eventual master of the guitar was still taking his fundamental steps. By the age of ten, he had graduated to an acoustic six-string guitar, one apparently bought in Crowley’s, the shop in Cork that later became famous in the Gallagher story. A neighbour on MacCurtain Street, James O’Brien, who ran an ice-cream parlour, helped the young Rory. Gallagher later recalled: ‘He used to tune my guitar for me, otherwise I’d never have been able to tune it myself! I worked out “It Takes a Worried Man” and “Freight Train” and all those folkie things, and then bit by bit I had a bash at Eddie Cochran songs and Buddy Holly ones, and the rhythm ’n’ blues came later, once I’d learned there was more to rock ’n’ roll than met the eye.’10 In 1975, Gallagher gave another snapshot of the genesis of his career: ‘I got photographs of Lonnie Donegan and people like that and tried to figure out what shape their hands were in on the photographs.’11

Gallagher regretted not being able to read music: ‘I went into the library once and got Teach Yourself How to Read Music or something, and it said, “Sit down at your piano.” We didn’t have a piano, so that went down the chute. Then I worked out F, A, and C and gave up, because I was too impulsive, and I was already delighted that I could play “Lost John” and a couple of other songs. Then, next thing, I was playing blues and rock ’n’ roll, which is fairly instinctive and primitive stuff anyway.’12 In 1987, he returned to that theme, saying that the soul of his music was the blues. It brought him to Lead Belly: ‘I wanted to check out the originals of “Rock Island Line” and “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie”. It’s not too far then to get to Big Bill Broonzy.’13

Rory Gallagher was beginning his lifelong engagement with this music. It was a commitment that would become total for him. However, it’s difficult to know how he saw his own worth. He was certainly determined, but did he sense he had a superior talent? Some musicians are fortunate to have an early awareness of a special talent. For example, Mike Scott of The Waterboys tells of a key moment for him when he was on a bus one day, aged just nine. He was hearing sounds in his head, so began stamping his feet in response. The driver stopped the bus and remonstrated with the child. Scott thought that his banging was ‘a sophisticated rhythm to a magnificent soundtrack’. So the driver’s annoyance was for Scott ‘a rude awakening’. He realised that the sounds were in his imagination and only in his imagination. He concluded: ‘… figuring out a way to let other people hear this music will become the object of my adult life’.14