Rory Gallagher played guitar as if he were walking along the edge of a volcano. But offstage, this molten musician was shy and not at all cut out for the glad-handling part of the rock star business. And yet, as we discover in the fascinating new documentary Rory Gallagher: Calling Card (RTÉ One, 6.30pm, June 3rd), the Cork maverick was arguably among the most influential Irish rocker figures of the 20th century.
“The most amazing musician. One of the main reasons I do what I do is because of Rory,” says Queen’s Brian May early in this gripping, authoritative and moving film. “It always struck me as weird that a kid who came out of a showband could play the blues,” says Bob Geldof. “Not the Mississippi Delta but the Leeside Delta.”
Gallagher’s fan club encompasses the entire spectrum of rock music, from Johnny Marr of The Smiths to Gun’ n’ Roses guitarist Slash. It also included The Rolling Stones, who in the mid-1970s tried to recruit him as a replacement for Mick Taylor (he gave it a go but wasn’t particularly taken with the Stones and their circus and headed off to tour Japan instead).
There have been several Gallagher documentaries, but this latest entry comes close to being definitive. It celebrates his talents, acknowledges the tragic aspects of his story, and traces the grand arc of his life, from his birth in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, to his childhood in MacCurtain Street in the heart of Cork city, where he fell in love with the blues and acquired his first guitar.
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Rory eventually found his way to London, where he headlined the Marquee Club with his power trio Taste. Among those watching in awe was future Queen noodler-in-chief Brian May. “You can hear him turn it up, you hear that distortion kick in,” he recalls of Gallagher’s maximalist technique. “It sings. That’s what I wanted.”
He wasn’t the only one. Bob Geldof recalls witnessing Taste’s final show, at the 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival, where, by his estimation, Gallagher overshadowed Jimmy Hendrix. “I was completely blown away. I saw Hendrix later. This sounds like heresy – I’d take Rory on that day. Exceptional – just exceptional. ”
Rock biographies often end in tragedy, and so it proved with Gallagher, whose career petered out in middle age. He never settled down and had little to live for beyond live performance. “He was just a music man,” says Clannad’s Moya Brennan. “That was his life. He never got involved with many people. Everything was around music.”
His brother Dónal, also Rory’s manager, felt music fuelled his demons. “There was a depression there, there was a melancholy.
When you’re writing in the blues idiom, everything is a negative. You are compounding the situation.”
Like many rock stars, he had issues with addiction. A fear of flying fuelled a reliance on prescription medication, which, combined with heavy drinking, laid waste to his liver. He died in June 1995, having contracted MRSA while in hospital for an organ transplant. He was just 47. As Hot Press editor Niall Stokes observes, “to die as a result of MRSA, it was horribly unfortunate.”
Gallagher’s rise and fall could easily have been told as a cautionary tale. But Calling Card turns it into a celebration of his music and his legacy. “You always believed in Rory,” says broadcaster Dave Fanning, who remembered receiving a Christmas card each year from the guitarist. “He communicated through his music. He got lost in his music and we got lost with him. It was as simple as that – brilliant.”
