My favourites - Rory Gallagher
When Jimi Hendrix was asked how it felt to be the world's greatest guitarist, he is reported to have said: ‘I don't know, go ask Rory Gallagher’.
Rory Gallagher was born in Donegal, in the north of Ireland and his family later moved south to Cork. His mother lived near where I grew up in Cork. He died aged 47 in 1995 and his body was laid out in the funeral home nearest our home. My mother was also from the north and living in Cork. She wanted to go see him and perhaps pay her respects to a fellow northerner. Perhaps too, because he had sadly also died so prematurely and so close in age to my dad. She brought me with her. It's a strange claim to fame to have seen Rory Gallagher laid out in his coffin. We passed his packed funeral mass a few days later at the Descent of the Holy Spirit church at Dennehy's Cross when we were going out to collect my summer exam results in the then RTC (Regional Technical College). Rory had played his last Irish concert in the RTC over a year beforehand in the college's new atrium area. I was a quiet swotting student at that time. I didn't know of him or his music too well but I remember that it was a big deal that he was playing at the college's inaugural arts festival.
It was another few years before I really got to know and love Rory Gallagher. I was playing cello in a band in Cork and our lead guitarist Ben introduced me to Rory's music. Ben, putting it mildly, is a massive fan of Rory. "Sinner Boy", an excellent Rory Gallagher tribute band, visited Cork a few times around that time and our band members trooped along to see them each time. The first of their gigs that I went to blew me away with the pure genius of Rory Gallagher's music. I went straight out the next day and grabbed a load of his albums, mortified that I didn't know of him sooner. I'd always been a fan of blues music but I feel an incredible honesty in Rory's music, a raw celtic sweetness that reaches right into the soul. These songs are my favourites:
Brute Force and ignorance
Shadow play
I fall apart
Million miles away
This video from Rory's Irish tour in 1974 has some bonus images from the 1970s of my beloved Cork.