© 1970 John Maher. All Rights Reserved

I got with Rory Gallagher’s music around the same time I got with Bach (specifically Brandenburg Concerto No. 3) and Sean O’Riada (specifically the album O’Riada Sa Gaiety, with its harpsichord substitute for Irish harp.) The three musical languages answered different needs, I suppose – in the same way Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Dylan Thomas did. Bach was melodic maths, O’Riada was the concatenation of Irish traditional music over the years and Gallagher addressed something else, with soul-searing blues, melancholia- drenched slow songs and kinetic rock. The scorching tones of his savaged Strat spoke to me in the shallows of adolescent angst. And Rory Gallagher had an academic element too: an encyclopaedic knowledge of American blues, nurtured by hours of listening to AFN (American Forces Network) as a young man.

            I got to meet the guitarist, as a diminutive, mouthy, fifteen-year-old, at a Taste concert in the National Boxing Stadium, in 1970 (See Exhibit 1). To the background of the Northern Troubles kicking up a gear, I gate-crashed backstage with a cousin and ended up in what might very loosely be called the dressing rooms. I took photos with a little instamatic camera – the one with the square, slot-in flashbulbs. (12 shots on the film, 3 cubes with 4 flashbulbs in each. Simples). You had to get it right first time. The aperture and focal distance were set and, if you did get it right, you got surprisingly good results. I got shots of Gallagher, of myself and the cousin in combination, and even a shot of Phil Lynott, newly emergent. Sadly, the materfamilias put most of them away ‘for safekeeping’ and they are now out in the universe, somewhere. All except the one shot of Rory Gallagher in the corner of the dressing-room. (See Exhibit 2).

22-year-old Rory was about to emerge from the train wreck of Taste to a solo career. There was a pay-it-forward nostalgia about Taste’s concert in the boxing stadium in Dublin that night. That, mixed with the fragrance of the spray disinfectant on the seats and the throbbing tones of the Strat mark the night in my memory.

            And last weekend, thanks to a kind offer from a friend renting a campervan up north, I made it to the Ballyshannon Rory Gallagher festival – if not for the canonisation as much as the beatification, by imitation, of the great Gallagher, of blessed memory.

            Rock in Peace, Rory…