Original subtitles

I once saw him change a string

without stopping the song.

Which I still think is just like...

You know, just for that alone,

there should be a monument to him.

Rory always struck me as a priest with long hair.

You know, that sort of quiet sort of Cork thing.

And, you know, he could've been in a seminary,

except his chalice was his guitar,

and his prayers were the blues.

Everyone loved Rory

because he just signified something so important

for the kids of my era,

which was the Irish guitar player

who was up there on the international stage,

up there with all the greats.

And so there was a great sense of pride

in his achievements.

And he didn't want to do singles.

Rory Gallagher did not want to be defined

by a passing trendy sound

that would have possibly branded his career

in one way or another.

I play the music I love. I play what I feel.

In ten years' time, who knows what's going to happen?

But I know I'm not going to play with an orchestra,

I'm not going to play with a huge brass section.

I'm not going to become Bryan Ferry

or the Police or anyone else.

I'm going to be Rory Gallagher.

You were born March 2nd, 1949.

I was born in Ballyshannon, Donegal,

but I was brought up in Cork City,

and that's where I went to school and so on.

So, I regard that as my hometown.

My father and mother met in Cork.

My father was in the military.

He was a lieutenant in the Irish Army.

And after the war, when they were demobbed,

he was assigned to the building

of the Erne Scheme for the ESB.

So, thus Rory was born there.

Ironic Rory was born in the Rock Hospital, Ballyshannon,

christened in the Rock Church.

And my father's involvement in the making

of one of the first dams in Ireland

to create electricity for us all in future years.

We finally ended up at Cork at the age of eight.

Rory had already established he wanted to be a musician.

When did you first start playing?

I was a child, about seven or eight.

Guitars were scarce,

and money was scarce in those days,

but I got a ukulele, believe it or not,

with a picture of Elvis Presley on it out of Woolworths.

And plunked along on that until I was about nine.

Then I got a real wooden acoustic guitar.

I just worked away on acoustic for three or four years

before I got into electric.

I just learned from records

and looking at guitar tutors.

But I couldn't read music, so I'd only work

from chord diagrams and that sort of thing.

Ireland had been economically stagnant.

There was a huge level of unemployment here.

There was a very high level of emigration.

And it was a very insular place,

where people were closed off

to influences from abroad in almost any sense.

The American Navy had their naval base at Derry,

the port of Derry.

So, they had their own AFN stations,

which you could pick up on radio.

And, of course, it was all the very early origins

of what's now better known as rock music.

It was basically the merger of the jazz, blues, and elements of that.

Well, it's just hearing people on the radio,

Lonnie Donegan in particular.

He was sort of doing Woody Guthrie material

and Lead Belly and so on.

And plus all the rock 'n' rollers of the time.

Everyone heard Presley and Gene Vincent

and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry.

From a very early age, I was just interested in music and the guitar,

and particularly American music.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't switched on by music

or certain sounds.

I just developed it through the radio.

Back in 1963,

Rory was looking for a Fender guitar.

Had his mind made up. Nothing else would do, only a Fender.

His dream ambition was to have a guitar like Buddy Holly.

And lo and behold, one day the spaceship landed for Rory.

Jim Conlon was the original owner of the guitar.

Jim played with the Royal Showband.

He had played it for possibly about a year,

a year and a half, before he traded it in.

This Stratocaster was in the store as a second-hand instrument.

It was £100.

In today's money, you couldn't even compare prices.

You might as well have said at the time a million pounds or 100,000.

It was just beyond comprehension, £100.

My mother was saying, "We'll be in debt for the rest of our lives."

And Rory said, "Actually, with a guitar like this,

"I can play both parts - rhythm and lead.

"We won't need a rhythm player.

"So I can earn more money and pay it off."

So, the Stratocaster became his partner for life, if you like.

Well, the point is, I tried to get a beat group together.

The only groups around, I think,

were Van Morrison and Them in Belfast.

And a few other groups. And a few in Dublin,

like the Creatures and a few bands like that.

But in Cork, still you couldn't find a bass guitarist.

The odd drummer would be around.

Most musicians decided if they got a job with a dance band,

at least you got paid for doing that.

Whereas a beat group, you had to pay to play, nearly.

There weren't any group musicians around at that time.

He had tried to enlist the rest of us

and convert us into possible musicians.

My case was a failure anyway.

So...

this was his only opportunity to perform.

There really was no way out at that time.

You were in a showband.

I was in the Fontana Showband.

It's like my military service.

I had to do a couple of years with them.

No, it was all right.

At the age of 15, you're more than happy

to travel around and plug into a Vox AC30,

which you couldn't otherwise afford.

They were a fairly loose showband in that respect.

Obviously you'd have to wear a suit now and then.

Plus, I was only there for two years with the band.

Rory and Van were the lucky ones.

The showbands destroyed Irish musicians.

One generation, two generations of them.

They really were a disgrace.

And I really mean a musical disgrace.

They really were not engaged in anything that was...

especially creative or risk-taking.

He didn't particularly like the comedy routine sketches

that the rest of the guys would...

It was always "Make the people laugh

"and send them home sweating", as the phrase was coined.

You've got to assume

that amongst the many showbands,

there were some fabulous musicians with something to say.

He knew the records he was listening to in Cork,

and he knew the step, the rung, the ladder, was to go showband.

Nothing wrong with that. It was the right thing to do.

You ply your trade, you go up and down the M1 of Ireland in your van.

It's all good for you.

Rory was able to finish his education

at the age of 1 7.

And literally the day he completed his exams,

he was on a plane to Spain.

I first left Ireland in a showband

to do the Irish circuit in England

at the age of 15, I think.

And then came back here

and worked in a showband, and made various trips with...

This showband was called the Impact Showband.

And went to Spain.

We just tried to get work wherever we could.

We couldn't get that much work here,

because we were doing sort of...

We were the Jim Reeves showband at the time.

We were doing sort of what we thought was pretty far out,

doing sort of Chuck Berry and a bit of Georgie Fame.

We still did a bit of the showband stuff.

But...

that eventually finished for me

because I wasn't happy there.

What he then did after that with the Taste thing

hadn't been done by anybody else before.

Sure, there was the Skid Rows and the Thin Lizzys,

but Rory realised a long time ago what he wanted to do.

He headed off then with Eric Kitteringham

and Norman Damery - Taste Mark 1 - to Belfast.

In Belfast,

there was a very popular blues scene, as compared to Dublin.

And I think Rory was attracted to that.

He did a couple of gigs there, had a success,

got offered a residency at the Maritime,

which had just changed its name to Rado.

The Maritime blues had coincided with the era

of the showbands and the ballrooms

and the formal dancing in the dance clubs.

Then here was that little club that emerged

that played beat groups, they were called.

And in those beat groups,

Rory Gallagher found his way to there,

through a fella called Eddie Kennedy.

He was an agent for Robert Stigwood at that time,

so he was bringing in bands like John Mayall's Bluesbreakers,

Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, Cream.

So, all these bands would come over and play in the North of Ireland.

After two weeks in Belfast, Rory was a star.

First of all, because of the band, they way they played.

But also the way he looked.

This is sort of, you know, '67.

Everybody was getting into the mod thing.

And there's Rory walking around with long hair and a leather jacket.

It was totally out of place.

In the meantime, word was getting back down the grapevine to London

and a couple of dates in the Marquee were secured,

till eventually it was better to actually move

and establish a residency in London.

The line-up changed in late '68

to John Wilson, Richard McCracken and myself.

At this point, we'd made a foothold, you know, in London

thanks to the Marquee Club and a few other places like that.

And we got a record contract,

and we started working on the first album.

At this point, we'd done nearly every club up and down the country

and quite a few festivals on the continent.

So we had a lot of material ready to go,

and we cut the first album in late '68.

It was released in early '69, I think.

Will you allow me a stupid question?

How do you describe your own music?

It's hard to...

There's lots of roots. It's blues-based, obviously.

But we don't... Let's put it this way.

There's lots of roots there,

but we just play it as free as possible, as we want.

We don't restrain ourselves from playing certain phrases

for the sake of losing a certain tag.

The late '60s was a very fertile time

in terms of the way music was progressing and developing.

The band started to expand out into Europe.

Jimi Hendrix by now had moved back to America

and formed a new band.

You then had Cream deciding to split up.

And Taste had become the sort of new hot three-piece,

and the phenomenon of the three-piece happened.

And Rory was at the forefront of that.

Could I say that your influences are more almost jazz-like

as opposed to rock-like, with Cream?

Cream became the big hit,

and Jimi Hendrix, and so on.

But Taste started off more on the lines of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates,

or The Big Three from Liverpool. There are so many influences.

We didn't stretch out the numbers to 20 minutes like the Cream did.

Their set - I think they did four or five numbers.

InfIuences crept in aII over the pIace.

A IittIe bit of jazz, a IittIe bit of foIk, a IittIe bit of bIues.

It wasn't as heavy as Cream.

It was a little more arranged than Hendrix's music.

Is it fair to say that you specialise

in interpretations of blues standards

like Sugar Mama and things like that?

Not really. I think that Cream,

their complete set initially was all blues standards

brought up to date - Rollin' and Tumblin' - things like that.

We did a couple of old classics updated.

But all the rhythm and blues groups were doing that.

So, let's say that the songs that I wrote were different.

So, I think we hit a balance between the rhythm and blues stuff,

and whatever I was writing, which was a mixture of all kinds of things.

The fact there was three members and there's a blues bass,

that's the connection with Cream and all those.

I was more interested in Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran.

I discovered Taste through another friend of my brother's

who sold us a bunch of records.

And I came across this album,

and I didn't know it was Rory.

It was kind of an interesting cover.

It was a live album of Taste.

I put it on, and I just thought it was amazing.

It took me a while to put it together

that was the same guy that was Rory Gallagher.

I saw Taste at Stella House Ballroom.

I used to go to dances there on Saturday, I guess.

I was really impressed

because there were no Irish bands,

save Van Morrison,

who was in any way making any sort of name for themselves.

Essentially, it was the first time I'd heard a blues band,

an electronic blues band

that actually was the blues.

That band were about as good as it gets

in that form.

Utterly apart from his music, which is quite a different thing,

but what he represented culturally was just as important, in a way.

And he paved the way for all of the other rock 'n' roll people

that came from Ireland afterwards.

He basically went and set the footprint around the world

for everybody else that came through.

I'm talking Van Morrison, Thin Lizzy and, you know...

and eventually U2, to take it on board,

to take on the mantle of carrying the Irishness

and establishing the credential

as it developed down through the years.

By '69, they were doing a follow-up album to Taste,

which was on the boards,

and then got their first American tour

supporting Blind Faith.

Blind Faith did their one and only American tour.

It was Clapton, Ginger Baker,

Ric Grech and Steve Winwood.

So, we got an opening to go and play on that show,

and that was the first trip to the States,

and it was six weeks.

And the other group on the bill

were called Delaney & Bonnie & Friends.

The very first gig we did was Philadelphia in the Spectrum there.

We stepped onto the stage, it started revolving, and the promoter didn't tell us.

There we are, playing in front of 20,000 people,

more people than we'd ever seen.

And the stage was moving?

Yeah. I thought, this has got to be sort of...

a bad trip, or whatever they call it.

But it was good experience.

The fractures in the band had started on that tour.

Rory wasn't very happy with his management.

He didn't feel enough effort was being put

into getting their own gigs.

By then the first Taste album had been released,

and that was bulleting up the charts.

It was level pegging with the Blind Faith album,

which was one of the hot albums of the time.

The second album, On The Boards,

by the end of the tour had also been released in Europe.

So, that got picked up as well. That was also charting.

And Rory wanted to stay in America and crack it.

But he found it hard to cope with the manager and attitudes.

The other two musicians were siding more with the manager

than they were with Rory.

By then, basically, I think the writing was on the wall.

The unforgivable had happened.

The manager had given the record company

the right to release a single.

Rory was being very anti-singles.

Artistically, to Rory, this was without his consent,

and this shouldn't be done.

He was quite upset with that scenario.

In time, the band were enormous,

but they were still travelling in a single-wheelbase Transit van.

The back seat was the old seat

of a Volkswagen bus that had been driven into the ground,

and that was put across a couple of speaker cabinets.

The band were making very good money, yet they were earning a pittance.

It was Rory's inherited PA system from the showband as well.

Nothing had been updated.

Then Rory looked to the management

to improve the conditions, etc.

And Rory liked to have control.

It was his band. He was the bandleader.

He'd formed... He'd named the band,

he'd brought it up from the South of Ireland,

and he felt this was being hijacked by somebody else.

It hit a peak at the Isle of Wight Festival,

which the band played there on a Friday.

The night before, the equipment had been stolen out of the van

in Earl's Court.

So, the band had to borrow bits and pieces of equipment.

I saw Rory at the Isle of Wight Festival.

I was there selling drugs.

And...

I was really tired because it was just endless,

all day, all night music.

Really, I think the gigs ran over so much.

Leonard Cohen, who was headlining,

came on at 2:30 in the morning.

And...

I saw Rory at about 2:00 in the afternoon.

They tore the place up.

I mean, really. People stopped collecting firewood for the night

and scratched themselves getting up. Everyone just went in.

And they sounded brilliant.

They just got their sound together.

Actually, that was the first time I felt proud

that an Irish band had done something.

Meantime, Polydor had booked out

a huge European tour,

which they were sponsoring.

And they had Taste headlining with two other Polydor acts.

Rory said, "No, I'm not going to do it."

Not only that, didn't have any money.

There was no savings to fall back on, but Rory didn't care.

And I recall our mother sent some cash registered

over to the flat we had in London, which was stolen.

And that was a really destitute situation.

Why did the band break up?

We just got tired of playing with each other,

and driving around, doing a million gigs.

Why does any band break up, really?

There's usually friction with management as well to stir up things.

But we didn't have any great fistfight or anything.

You just... One week everything is going fine.

The next week, everyone wants to do something else.

It's a shame that it didn't last a bit longer

because, you know, like so many times in Rory's career,

you could've said that was the moment where,

if he'd really gone for it,

he could've broken America in a much bigger way.

But I think Taste were really amazing,

really ahead of their time,

and probably didn't get the recognition that they deserve.

The break-up of Taste

was undoubtedly traumatic.

Because when you have the kind of momentum that Taste had,

and when you're beginning to experience

the world of rock 'n' roll,

with the real big acts of the time -

people like Eric Clapton and Blind Faith,

and Led Zeppelin coming through,

people at that kind of level -

to suddenly have the sense of unity

that goes with being in a band like that,

to have that taken away

would have been very difficult for Rory.

Did these two albums - Rory Gallagher and Deuce -

were they a turning point for you?

Yeah. Well, I also wrote 90% of what Taste had done as well.

But I had the freedom. I produced the album.

We recorded it in a studio, 8-track.

And we recorded it.

We did three weeks, or something like that,

and we had the whole album completed.

But at the time, we enjoyed doing it because it was a very...

very non-state-of-the-art type of studio,

and we did everything live - live lead guitar, live vocals.

Very natural sound.

So, with that, of course, you get some imperfections.

He went into the studio

and did his Rory Gallagher album

in early '71.

Went on tour, and while he was on tour,

had a second album made which came out in the autumn of '7 1 .

So, it was a quite prolific period for Rory.

When I first started doing rock journalism,

it was 1972, 1973.

And it was quite a privilege,

because all this great music was coming out.

I got a job on this local underground paper

where my sister worked, which was like a hippie commune.

I'm talking about, like, pot is thick in the air.

And my family had been really staunchly anti-drugs.

And I was that way too,

but I loved music, and I loved records,

and vinyl and album jackets.

One of the album jackets that I saw

sitting against a sofa in this commune...

Because they'd get free records and it was just,

"Man, hey, put them over there."

So there'd be all these great records that you were dying to listen to.

But I saw this record,

which is Rory's first solo album.

And I just thought it looked so cool.

It was just kind of like a thoughtful, intense,

but, but...

deeply musical expression.

The sound that Rory Gallagher made in the '70s

is a sound that I absolutely love.

It's one of the things I like so much about Rory.

The album Deuce, there was one track called Crest Of A Wave.

And it actually is as muddy as bejabers.

It's a brilliant song, almost ruined by bad production.

In this sense, ruined is a good thing.

Around '73 or thereabouts,

Rory Gallagher was voted number one guitarist

in Melody Maker, as the best guitarist of the year,

with all the rest of those luminaries behind you.

So, what did that mean to you?

I was delighted to see I was voted high in the polls.

But then you look at the polls,

and see one of your own favourites not even in there.

So, you can't get carried away with them.

But you're a pop artist if you capitalise on everything that happens.

But I think if you overcapitalise on things,

or you become too political,

you'd be better off joining the Conservative Party.

Let's put it this way, the playing of music is a busy enough thing,

it leaves very little time to be playing a chess game with the public,

or playing a chess game with the press.

It must've been quite a highlight in your career

to play with Jerry Lee Lewis

and Albert King as well.

Is that intimidating when you play with somebody like Albert King?

In his case, yeah.

Jerry Lee Lewis was every bit as crazy in the studio as he is onstage.

- He's a genuine... - Nutcase.

Lifting the Steinway off the ground, and just terrifying,

but not in a way that...

Albert King wasn't particularly pleasant,

but that was a live record,

so the tension on a guy going on stage is difficult.

But Muddy Waters was the dream for me

because he had a great kind of kindness about him.

You just watched him tuning up,

hitting certain chords, unusual positions on the neck.

It was like an education for me.

But he never really kind of stood at you.

He just let you breathe around him.

Tell us a little bit about working with the Rolling Stones

in Amsterdam in 197 4.

They telephoned would I come over,

and I went over and played with them for a couple of nights

with their mobile unit, and ran through some songs.

Then I went off to Japan and Australia.

But because Mick Taylor had gone,

they had Jeff Beck over as well at some point.

And they had a couple of others.

Wayne Perkins and Harvey Mandel.

But I couldn't stick around. I had tours to do.

But it was interesting working with them.

There was all that thing when Brian Jones died, he died in July '69,

and Mick Taylor came in then for about five years.

Around that time, there was talk that Rory Gallagher would maybe join.

The Stones had been making noises about Rory even prior to that,

because they had formed the Rolling Stones label.

We were going to go there to record.

The night before we left, Mick Taylor said he wasn't coming

and he was going to leave.

He gave us no notice whatsoever.

So, Rory stayed two or three days there

and played some nice stuff.

We had a good time with him.

But Mick and Keith felt that he wasn't the kind of character that would fit.

If he'd been in the Stones, he wouldn't have been singing.

And that was one of his strong points.

And he would've just been playing solos, some solos.

And to be subservient to two big egos...

I don't think that would've really worked.

Rory wasn't a sideman. He was a frontman.

Ronnie Wood was a sideman.

It would've got pretty complicated.

I'm not really sure what the Stones were thinking,

except they wanted a good guitar player.

But I also think they were going to try and mould him

into some character that would fit in the Stones

and do their bidding every single day for however many years.

He could never have put up with the bollocks of Mick and Keith.

Never in a thousand years would he have put up with it.

Of course he would've been more than competent.

But he was a lead player, he was a frontman,

he was a singer, he was a writer.

Up against Mick and Keith...

he'd have shot himself.

They went through several other guitar players,

from Jeff Beck to Harvey Mandel to Ry Cooder.

Steve Marriott.

They all were auditioned,

but certainly Rory was the first one to be asked in,

or invited in.

He's just such a clear, concise, soulful player,

that the music kind of goes to a deeper place in his hands.

Just listening to his stuff this morning,

the stuff that I really loved when I first discovered him...

it matters. It's music that matters.

If I'd made a good song,

and it got onto the turntables of various shows

and it got into the charts,

it wouldn't hurt me too much.

But what happens is that you get lectured by people,

or you know damn well that it's not...

No matter what you do. And then you go off,

like a lot of artists that I used to admire,

and they make a real frilly song just to get in the charts,

and they've put pain into 18 years of credible work.

That's what...

- It takes away from it. - It does.

And I'd rather never have a hit single.

You'd certainly never go out of your way to "record a single".

No, not really.

With hindsight, Rory probably knew what he was doing.

Certainly he could've picked off some hit singles.

Certainly it would've broken through in America

to get the airplay, but he wasn't interested.

I don't regard myself as a top-20 musician at all.

Even though I could write a top-20 song,

but I wouldn't.

I don't think that's important.

He obviously was his own man,

and the marketing people don't like people who are their own man.

They like people to be malleable, to be pliable,

to be able to be moulded.

But he didn't do that. He did his own thing.

It's not wise in career terms.

It's wise in terms of your soul, if that's your view of music.

He didn't want to be involved in the business,

in the industry.

Rory was grafting away, doing the festivals,

filling auditoriums, clubs.

And yet the records wouldn't be in the store.

So, he'd begun to resent record companies.

They came down from New York with an edited version -

Edged in Blue.

They said, "We'll get this to number one in America for you."

And Rory went berserk.

"How dare they edit the music?"

He was an album guy, you know,

and a great live performer.

You went to see him live, or the audience did,

and you bought his records.

He wasn't heading for the single charts.

We were. We had to have hit records where we were.

I mean, down to his sneakers, to his jeans, to his shirt...

You know, what do you want this guy to say?

In an Irish tour, I always try and include Belfast

and the North of Ireland.

After all, I lived there for a while,

and I learned a lot playing the clubs there.

So I have a certain home feeling for the place.

The '70s in Ireland were a particularly difficult period

because the Civil Rights movement

had begun to be active in the North in the '60s.

Things had spiralled downward with the conflict

that resulted from that.

The Provisional IRA had become established,

and the troubles had exploded.

There was violence on an ongoing daily basis

in the North.

It's always a great audience.

It's a pity almost no one else goes to play there.

He was the ultimate hero there.

And he did cross that sectarian divide

that was such a phenomenon in Northern Ireland.

And in the context of the most intense conflict,

people from both sides of the divide

came to see Rory at those great gigs at the Ulster Hall and so on.

It's a reflection of the real connection

that he made with people at a grassroots level,

where the ordinary people felt connected

to something magic and something brilliant.

I remember the first night, the first concert.

It would've been Christmas, '7 1 , '72.

We did this show, and there was bombs going off.

About six bombs went off around the city centre

the night of the concert.

And the people didn't care. It was fantastic, great atmosphere.

I first was introduced to Rory

through the usual route,

which is mates, friends in school,

who would talk about their favourite band.

This would've been North County Dublin

in the mid-'70s.

So, the bands that everyone were excited about then

were Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher.

At that point, I wasn't really even playing myself.

I had a guitar, but I'm not sure I'd learned how to tune it at that point.

I think the next time I really took an interest beyond that

was when he played his first show in Macroom.

By the mid-'70s,

Rory's growing power, pulling power,

had increased to three Cork City Halls,

or a couple of Savoys in Cork.

There had been rumours

of somebody trying to do an open-air rock festival.

That was everybody's ambition, to be the first to do it.

There was no such thing as the massive business there is now,

but Rory is one of the founding fathers

of the Irish rock business.

I got approached by a committee down in Macroom

to say would Rory come down and play

at their Mountain Dew Festival?

So, I said, "If you guys want to go for this,

"we'll give it a shot."

That was 1977.

Myself and my brother and our friend next door

decided we'd go down to the Macroom show.

I think I was 15 at the time.

Then the problem I had was persuading Rory,

who was not convinced

and really had a bit of a fear of going outside cities,

because rock bands never really worked

beyond the city confines.

It was a complete shock to us all

in the sense of Dolan came in one day and said,

"Macroom Mountain Dew Festival have been on,

"and they want us to play there."

And it's like...

They wanted to have the first rock festival in Ireland,

and they were pioneers of their time.

We obviously had the contacts

for the PA system and the lighting system,

so ingenuity was put into effect.

And I think it was three flatbed trucks

raised and scaffolded underneath,

with scaffolding overhead with drapes.

We got a kind of package ticket,

which was a coach trip down, the show,

and then a coach trip back.

It was the first time I ever went to what you might call a big gig.

I'd been to a few small shows, but that was the first ever big gig.

Dolan grasped metal full on.

And kind of...

We ended up basically doing everything that you could do,

from a technical point of view, you know,

in the entire production aspect of things,

where, you know, you were kind of told, "There's a field.

"The rest is yours."

You figure it out from there.

In the old town hall of Macroom,

they had a backdrop

from a theatre production of The Castle.

We put that up behind.

A couple of very good friends in the UK

whose company we used.

And when I told them what we were endeavouring to do, they came over.

Not only did they bring the PA system,

they brought a load of extra kit.

So, it was hugely successful.

It was like the moment when an emerging group of people

get a sense that there's something more happening here

and that this might be a key into a bigger world,

and that we here in Ireland,

and the musicians coming through in Ireland at the time,

might become part of this enormous energy

that rock 'n' roll represents in world terms.

In a way, the advent of Hot Press fell into place

at the same time as Macroom.

It was the real big breakthrough that Ireland was waiting for.

Hot Press was so vital to the encouragement of Irish music.

It's arguable that you don't get U2 if you don't have Hot Press.

And it was Rory...saw the need for that and put up the money for it.

Hot Press was launched in 1977.

It was...

It coincided with the Macroom Festival in Cork,

which was really Ireland's first major outdoor rock festival,

and Rory was the man.

Rory was astonished.

It was one of those great concerts.

And it was during, I think, probably the heyday of his band as well.

All his... All the best musicians were playing that day with him.

Rory was always opening for a lot of the bands

that I was touring with.

He would always be around, playing these American sets,

where he didn't play quite as long as he did in Europe.

So, he'd play these blistering sets,

and then be hanging out backstage a little bit.

You'd always see him.

And he was built for touring, I remember.

Not a lot of, "Hey, man, I'm here for the lifestyle."

It was really, like, "I'm here for the music."

And the circus swirled around and passed Rory Gallagher,

and he was generally the hard-rock blues man,

with his suitcase,

there for the music and these bursts of shows,

and then he's on to the next.

He'd play with Faces or Jethro Tull or people like that.

Since '7 1 , we've been back quite a few times,

over 20 times.

So, we've played at all kinds of venues there,

from clubs to stadiums to colleges.

And we've done pretty well there, really.

We're just still working at it, you know.

I remember he played Central Park.

He was opening for Aerosmith.

I'd say about a third of the crowd was Rory's.

But by the time he got done playing,

more than half the crowd was Rory's.

And when Aerosmith came on,

everyone was chanting, "Rory! Rory!"

Aerosmith comes on, I think they'll die down.

The first three songs of Aerosmith, they're still chanting, "Rory! Rory"

People were throwing bottles at Aerosmith.

I've never seen a band get so blown off the stage in my life

as they did that day.

They'd probably have done a great show, but they didn't have a chance.

I did an album in San Francisco many years ago.

The whole thing went in the bin the day it was being cut.

And that was the precursor of an album called Photo-Finish.

This was going to be the big one

that was going to get the royal treatment.

So the day that we'd mastered the record, the vinyl,

I went into Rory's room and said,

"I'm presenting it to the record company, to Chrysalis."

They'd brought in 50 executives from all over the States,

and Rory literally took the album and said,

"You know what they can do with this album?"

And he literally dropped it into the bin in his hotel room.

I said, "Rory, you can't do this.

"Let me play it. You can remix it or whatever."

"Don't do this."

He said, "I don't want this album to happen."

He put it in the bin.

It was kind of a foolhardy thing to do, to throw away months of work.

But by the same token,

it made me rethink whether it was good enough,

whether we were in the right direction.

So, in a weird way, it was actually a good thing to do.

It's something you couldn't afford to do every other year.

I was just dissatisfied with that particular album.

I remember that day,

having to face the record company executives

and think of some bluff excuse.

But, to my eternal sadness, I'll put it that way,

I left Rory's hotel room and said,

"I feel like I could break your legs."

I came back to the hotel to find a little note from the hotel

saying, "Dear Mr Gallagher, don't worry.

"Your brother is okay.

"He's been taken to Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles."

The receptionist said, "Well, we don't quite know.

"He was in an accident out in the street,

"and he had to be rushed to hospital."

I came back from a Bob Dylan movie,

Renaldo and Clara,

paid the taxi man and closed the door

with my thumb still in the door.

Oh, well. Stone-cold sober and everything.

It was an omen from the ghost of Django Reinhardt

to appreciate what you've got.

Rory, I don't think, musically, was happy

with the outfit at that time.

He wasn't happy with the production,

wasn't happy with the mixes, with anything.

So, he split up that band

and wanted to go for a clean sweep.

He brought in Ted McKenna on drums.

The record, when I joined, when I looked at the cover,

it was quite a glamorous cover, Photo-Finish.

It made me think later

about the whole way the record industry works,

and that any record company would like to have groomed him

and smoothed him up,

to reach a bigger market.

And that is where he probably didn't want to go.

I still have really fond memories of this one time

where I was just feeling dejected

for having failed on this other story.

And here comes Rory Gallagher

and his new publicist from his new record company.

And they're, like, "We're going on this promo tour,

"and Rory is meeting radio people and pressing plant people."

They really had him on a cattle call.

And he would get lectures from all kinds of people

about how he should have a hit single, or...

"What more can we do with you

"to make you a super-superstar?"

And at the end of the day,

he'd be back in this wherever hotel room,

and he'd have a brandy or something or we'd be in the bar,

and he would just talk about,

"You know, this really isn't who I am."

But somehow, being on this little ragtag promotional tour with Rory,

I felt very close to what he probably was about -

a guy that was willing to pay a price

to continue doing what he loved, if it wasn't too high.

Because, really, all he wanted to do was play

and to be able to make records for as long as he could.

It seems to me that the blues is essentially very personal.

It comes from the guts of the person who's put the original down.

You've no qualms about doing other people's,

like Muddy Waters' material, for instance.

Well, I do. I write 95% of my own stuff.

But I do do Muddy Waters numbers occasionally

or a Junior Wells number.

You have to have the pomposity to do it.

I mean, it's...

If I couldn't convince the audience

that I'm doing a good version - my version -

of a Muddy Waters number, I wouldn't do it.

It either works or it doesn't.

Either it convinces the audience and the artist or it doesn't.

And if I can convince the audience,

I can convince myself,

for want of simple words to explain it.

And I'd be playing the blues at home anyway.

So, it doesn't...

Some sociologists and people like that

say it's not possible.

"This man wasn't bound up in chains

"and thrown into the sea."

It doesn't work like that.

Whatever I play, I don't give a damn what they call it, I'm doing what I do.

It just depends on the soul of it.

And this is it. Even if you have to say, "It's white soul.

"It's white European soul." Who cares?

You know, he was part of that generation of British musicians

that took mostly American influences,

things that were blues-based,

and then made them their own.

You had the feeling with Americans at that point in time,

they didn't really respect their own history.

And suddenly, a lot of British musicians saw the blues,

and they took it into their hearts

because they felt as if it connected

to the way they saw class.

People always say that we were very much aware

of the class system in Britain.

That's why that music appealed to so many British musicians,

because they felt it reflected some of the situations

from the class they came from.

Even in our interviews,

he talked a lot about where he was from,

how it infected what he did,

how it was always there.

There's very few true blues people.

Rory stood out because he did it all the way through his life.

That's what he did.

Who else is there? I can't think of anyone

that stands out as a real, true, honest follower of the blues

and a singer of the blues, as Rory was.

Irish blues seems to come very much from the players,

and less like US blues is often players paying tribute to the form.

There was a kind of lyricism to his playing which was quite his own.

I don't think any other player

really had his particular approach and phrasing.

Whilst I don't think he would've thought about it as being anything Irish,

I picked up quite a lot of the Irish influence

in his particular version of the blues.

I remember Rory saying years ago

that he was actually a folk musician

in an electric world.

I think that's very true about Rory.

That's why it was so special, because of his playing.

You listen to his playing on some of the songs -

there's Irish in there.

He's playing blues, but he's playing Irish blues.

Nobody else did it. He developed that himself.

That's why he's so wonderful and so unique.

He was the Dylan factor in the blues.

He wasn't unnecessarily flash.

He just didn't go that extra yard.

But he could be flash. He was flash enough.

He had some really great things that he did that were his own things.

He'd ping this note and he'd like...

and he'd higher it, rather than use a tremolo bar,

which was a little bit fancy-schmancy.

He'd just do it with the guitar, pull the string at the top.

That was his. I'd never seen anyone do that before, or since, really.

I've robbed it a couple of times.

We say in Spanish "el monstruo". He was a monster of the guitar.

He was a big deal.

Every musician knows

that Rory Gallagher was an explosive guitarist

and a convincing guitarist,

and kind of innovative in terms of being blues-based.

But a lot of things he's playing are very modern.

The way he damps things and the progressions he plays,

and the way he messed around with his volume.

I think musicians completely acknowledge him

as being one of the best of that genre

that Ireland, or anywhere, has ever produced.

As a young guitar player, I just found

I was drawn to the way he played his phrasing.

I found it fascinating. I found it also accessible,

as much as I would sit in my bedroom for hours

trying to figure out what he was doing, there was always a kind of...

It wasn't showy. It had a beautiful elegance to it.

And there was never too many notes.

There was just the right amount to get the message across.

The cool thing about Rory's guitar playing

is that it had this real hardcore rock 'n' roll thing.

It was cranked up real loud.

But it also had a certain delicate kind of thing to it.

I couldn't compare it to anybody else.

It was really loud and very haphazard style-wise.

It wasn't everything had to be sort of perfect and whatnot.

Sort of loud virtuoso rock 'n' roll guitar playing.

There wasn't a lot of rules, and there wasn't...

There was tons of feedback and tons of volume,

but it had a certain sensitivity to it,

no matter how brash the licks were.

He was a musician that listened to the music, first and foremost.

You could tell that everything that he did

was inspired in that childlike way of just loving music.

It just blew my mind. And ever since then...

I have a radio show. I play him on it all the time.

People who don't know him are missing out, hands down.

One of the best guitar players and best songwriters

and best performers that ever was, I think.

Some people are technically brilliant,

but they never really have their own voice on the guitar.

And I think Rory did.

His own touch, his own feel.

That's it. It's a rare thing.

As I started learning how to play guitar myself,

I suppose some of the first songs I would ever try and work out

would've been Rory's songs.

He was, certainly early on...

If you ever hear our first demo,

there's quite a bit of influence there,

evident in my own style.

He was my first guitar hero.

The Against The Grain album cover,

where it just has the close-up of the Strat

and the rust parts and the paint coming off -

that was so cool. I hated shiny guitars.

Still, to this day, I have an aversion to shiny guitars.

Because it was Belfast in the '70s,

I had to order it and wait forever.

It came the wrong colour and the wrong model,

but you had to take it anyway, you didn't want to wait another six months.

But the first thing I did to a Les Paul was take sandpaper to it

because I was so into Rory's guitar,

and it had to look used. It had to have a patina to it.

The first electric guitar I ever owned

was one I'd got with money I'd saved from the paper round.

I wanted it to look like Rory's guitar.

His guitar, which everyone knows,

is beaten up and battered over the years.

It always looked like it'd been through a fire or something.

So, I thought, "Yeah, fire, OK."

He was a very rare blood group type.

And he'd had a lot of alkaline in his blood.

And that's why his Stratocaster was so stripped of paint.

It wasn't because he took a chisel to it.

This was pure hard work and sweat.

And the sweat would literally... It was like paint stripper.

It would lift the paintwork off his guitar.

So, I was in woodwork class.

I would've been about 1 4 or something in school one afternoon,

and, as usual, taking very little interest in it.

So, while the teacher was talking to a few lads

about making a bookshelf or something,

I'd brought in the body of the guitar,

taken the guitar to pieces, and I brought it in.

I put it up against this kiln thing.

The teacher's talking. I'm going, "Yeah, yeah." I've got a blowtorch.

I started going...

I started just setting fire to this guitar.

The teacher's off doing his thing,

and this guitar suddenly, of course, is in flames,

which I hadn't anticipated.

So, sanded it off, buffed down all the parts,

and make it look comfortable, I suppose.

I run up to it, and...

I'm blowing it out,

and managed to blow out,

physically blow out myself,

unaided by any of my so-called friends,

this sort of, you know, flaming guitar.

So, of course, it was just a burnt guitar then.

It looked dreadful. I thought I've got to finish the job. So off I went again.

This time I turned it up to eight or something.

I'm rocking this blowtorch, and the flame's going again.

I'm blowing it and blowing it out.

It hadn't occurred to me that this lacquer thing,

this red plastic coating is so poisonous.

So, I went at it again.

I burnt this guitar about four or five times.

The whole thing was just going up in flames.

It set the standard for me.

I wanted my guitars to look as used as Rory's Strat,

as comfortable, like they were serious instruments,

and not something to pose with.

I think it looked quite good in the end, actually.

But it was a pretty stupid thing to do.

But that's being a fan, you know.

The fatigue began to show

by the time Rory started to hit his late thirties.

He developed a horrendous fear of flying.

But he knew that if he didn't get on planes,

he couldn't tour.

He'd started, probably by the late '70s, taking tranquillizers.

After the Defender album, his health did fail,

and he agreed and went into hospital for three weeks.

The doctors said to me when he went in the hospital,

they found it quite alarming what he'd been prescribed.

He was a bit naiÏive, to say the least,

about his medication,

particularly when it came to mixing alcohol.

It was a drinking man's band.

We drunk as hard as we played,

so we found ourselves in the bar a lot of the time.

A serious amount of drinking went on at times.

He'd also been put on steroids,

which were absolutely the wrong thing for him.

And it would swell his body.

He had water retention.

And not least what it was doing messing his head up.

And, of course, the very nature of his music - the blues -

the whole potency of the alcohol and the blues

and the woman trouble and the loneliness,

the melancholy,

he was in his own way living the bluesman's life.

Rory spent most of his life on the road,

so it's difficult to keep a relationship going.

And for whatever reason,

I can understand that there is a certain loneliness.

He just didn't really know how

to make a commitment to somebody else.

And, through his younger years,

he was so devoted to becoming a musician,

the idea of having a girlfriend was going to sidetrack him.

Then, of course, by the time he'd got into his twenties,

he was so caught up in the whole transition of his career,

between Taste and going solo and having to produce albums,

he knew that he couldn't.

And then the effect of his health on his appearances as well.

I certainly think that...

that anybody who lives a life like that...

It's a life I've lived most of my life as well,

it's not the easiest thing to conduct a relationship

in the first place.

I get more worn out when I'm off the road

in nervous tension.

I'm better off when I'm touring.

I wallow in it. I become fit.

Whereas, if I'm just doing rehearsals

or just doing bits in the studio or something,

I become really...

I don't know, less together than I am when I'm on tour.

I think it was a tour in Switzerland.

It was his first tour in I don't know how long, a long time.

He was really jumpy about it.

I phoned him up. And, sure enough, he was as jumpy as hell.

"I'm not sure if I can do this."

"Of course you can. You've done it before, you just lay the table.

"Decide what you're going to sing, and do it,

"and people will turn up, will actually want to see you.

"They're not there to shoot you down.

"They're there because they love you.

"You're Rory Gallagher. They know your albums.

"They know what you can do.

"And they'll be really excited that you're coming to Switzerland.

"So, you have to tell yourself, 'what's the problem?"'

I got a message saying he'd done the first gig,

and he'd had a fantastic time.

I rang him up and said, "You had a fantastic time?"

He said, "Yeah, it was great."

I said, "Do you understand why? Did the people want to see you?"

He said, "Yeah, they did."

And he was almost slightly perplexed

that an audience would still want to see him.

But audiences don't forget. You know?

Especially they don't forget someone like Rory, do they?

The tour manager called me up

and said, "Your brother's given me his prescription.

"But I can't let Rory down."

I said, "OK, go off to the chemist's.

"I'll come with you." And I went to this chemist's.

And I produced my passport.

And I said to the chemist,

"Look, this man is my brother.

"This is a prescription for him.

"I don't think he should have it.

"But I'd like to understand whether I'm doing the wrong thing

"by withdrawing medication,

"whether it should be done.

"What do you do in these cases?"

The guy took the prescription off,

and he came back to me about 10, 15 minutes later

and said, "This man takes a drink as well?"

And I said, "Yes, he does."

And he said, "Well, I'll tell you, my friend,

"with this medication, this guy doesn't have an alcohol problem

"as much as this is a drug problem,

"if he's been on this."

He said, "Certainly, if you put all these tablets in one glass,

"put in some alcohol, stir it, you've got the devil's brew."

I then booked another tour in Holland,

thinking, rather than let him get lazy

and wait another couple of months,

let's get straight back out on the road.

We went out to Holland. By then it was...

His health failed on the tour.

He had actually picked up a flu

because his immune system was...

We had to cancel the tour in the middle of it.

I got back to London.

He'd isolated himself into an apartment

down on Chelsea Harbour.

He wouldn't let me into his apartment.

I managed to get in to Rory, who was by then saffron.

And I said, "Rory, what are you doing?

"Do you want to die?" He said no.

I said, "This is like committing suicide."

I said, "You've got to go into hospital."

He said, "Well, maybe next week or the week after."

I said, "Frankly, I think you've got 24 hours."

I got onto the Cromwell Hospital, they had a bed waiting for him.

And, sadly, when it came to waiting for a donor,

when he was to have his transplant,

then the issue of how rare his blood was,

and getting a match was going to be extremely difficult.

Then I went in, and they said,

"Look, he's picked up a bug.

"We can't send him to another hospital while he's got this bug,

"and we're treating him with antibiotics."

Then it got more serious,

and they were re-culturing the antibiotics,

and the bug was getting more virulent.

They did everything to comfort him.

They tried absolutely every medical experiment they could,

and the staff were fantastic to do that.

But, sadly, on the 1 4th of June, '95,

he slipped away.

All I could do was look at his hands

and look at his guitar and say, "You poor orphan.

"Who's going to ever play you like he did?"

Do you know that thing about black blues musicians

who have as much credibility as they ever had

when they're 60 and 70 and more?

Do you think, with the way you've done things,

it's helped with the fact that in 20 years,

Rory Gallagher will still be doing the same thing,

and there'll be complete credibility because of that?

For my own hobby,

when I'm 60-odd, or whatever it is,

I'll be playing blues at home and still be enjoying it,

just like a traditional musician would,

which is a different thing from playing with a band

and doing gigs and all that.

It's just an interest for me, like flamenco music or something.

But I think the blues,

what makes it more important than some music

is that it gets right into your veins

as a lifestyle and as a mind,

as a little beacon in your life, you know?

God Almighty, that's very profound.

He's left an incredible legacy,

from a human point of view

aside from his musical point of view,

something that anyone could be proud of, really.

Anyone who knew him...

doesn't have a bad word to say about him.

And everyone's human. You think, well, come on.

I remember he was playing at the Roxy.

And I was probably...

22 or 23 years old, something like that.

And Guns N' Roses had just become a big band.

And I think I was just starting to be recognised

as more of a guitar player

than just a fuzzy guy with a top hat on.

Which is how it all started.

But I'm really into guitar

and the people who play them.

So, I was the one-in-a-million guy in LA

that thought that Rory Gallagher was bad-ass.

So, I remember going down there.

And I was surprised that he even knew who I was.

So, they came down and asked me if I wanted to jam.

I hadn't met him yet, so I was a little nervous.

Definitely intimidated.

But, just like with everything else, I'll go for it.

So, we got up there and had a great jam.

And it was cool, and we just were winging it.

And after it was over, we had a couple of drinks and we talked,

and he was the most cheerful, unimposing kind of guy.

And we just went back to the Hyatt and hung out

and drank all night and played acoustic guitars,

and didn't talk about anything in particular

or let anything sort of ruin the mood.

And we just went all night

in that sort of aloof, cheerful kind of thing.

Then, finally, I probably had to leave.

My experiences with him

are the same as, I guess, everybody's experiences.

They've got to be. He's just a very humble...

sweet, low-key guy.

But you didn't really want to trip on him too much

because you didn't want to intrude.

He seemed like a very private person.

The best time I met him was when I waited outside...

the Apollo Theatre in Manchester in the pouring rain,

seeing him this Friday night.

I queued up with a bunch of other lads in checked shirts.

He just stayed behind

and said hello to every single person who was there.

And I'd seen him a few times before then,

but that was the first time I got to meet him.

And he gave me a pick...

and just exchanged a few words.

I said how much I loved the show.

He was very gracious and really sweet.

In waiting to get to see him,

I missed the last bus home and the last train home,

so I had to walk for miles in the rain to get home.

But it was worth it. I didn't even notice it was raining, really.

The one I remember is playing the Paradiso in Holland

when he was ill.

It wasn't long before he died.

And I can remember there was an entourage with him.

He had a lot of people around worried about his health.

And I've mentioned it to you before.

There was a busker at the other side of the road,

and there was traffic going.

He purposely stopped the entourage and the traffic,

went over, put the busker...

He was always a man for the underdog.

He put money in the guy's case.

Wasn't he always a man for the underdog?

I remember that very well, that particular incident.

And I thought, "That's just him all over."

He was always... He was a wonderful human being.

If you really look closely enough...

behind the riffs and the good-time boogie,

there's an artist there.

That probably had a lot to do with his character, obviously.

And...

I think he was a purist in more ways than one.

He really was an artist. But that's what I'm saying.

Just because he's playing a riff in open-A

and has got long hair and everyone's boogieing

doesn't make him any less an artist.

Where he was coming from, and at that time,

and for people who were looking for it,

he was the shit.

No one could come anywhere near him because he had it down.

It would be nice if that's what continues on down the road.

No bollocks. That's what he passed on.

You don't have to bend.

You don't have to do what people tell you.

You absolutely don't have to.

You do what you want to do. Stay true to it.

That's the essence. Be a musician.

While Rory may not have had a string of number-one albums,

didn't have hit singles, didn't want hit singles,

it's quite amazing, for the guy that he is,

where you probably have more streets called after him.

You have Rory Gallagher Place in Cork City,

Rory Gallagher in Ris-Orangis outside Paris.

Then, of course, you have Temple Bar in Dublin.

It was named Rory Gallagher Corner.

I wasn't really supposed to say anything,

but I couldn't let this opportunity go by.

So I'll keep it brief.

I just wanted to say

that Rory was an incredible influence on me as a guitar player,

particularly early on.

And then I got to know him a little bit,

and I would like to call him,

I did call him my friend, which was an amazing thing.

And I think Rory's legacy

will obviously live on in his music.

But I think, even more than that,

in the hundreds of rock 'n' roll bands,

including my own band

that started as a result of his example

and what he achieved,

with Taste and then as a solo artist.

So, he laid the road

that the rest of us have managed to find a way over,

and we owe him a great debt.

So, it's absolutely an honour and a privilege

to be able to unveil this great monument

and tribute to Rory, the man and his work.

So, if I may...