I was 15, which is pretty young even by contemporary standards. Your first encounter with those venues came at a very early age - with the Fontana showband. The southern ballrooms, C&W ballrooms that feature rock nights. The feeling, in fact, was more like certain gigs in parts of the southern United States. But there was a sense of deja-vu in seeing posters for Philomena Begley for the next week’s gig! There was an air of fun to it - it’s good that rock music can do those venues, as well as the big cities, and on our own terms, with no compliments to anyone! But when you do it, you don’t think about those aspects - I just enjoyed it a lot. When I was in a showband, we had difficulty getting gigs in some of the halls. Rory Gallagher: A mixture of feelings really. After it was over, we sat down to throw an eye over the days that have gone down since he last pounded the Irish roads on such a scale.ĭermot Stokes: This tour closed a circle with your early days - how did it feel?
To mark the end of a decade working solo, and to take the music to the people, he embarked on a lengthy, and highly successful tour of Ireland. Ten years ago, give or take a few months, Rory Gallagher left Taste, with whom he had established himself as an important guitarist and singer on an international level. Originally published in Hot Press in 1980. This interview, conducted by Dermot Stokes in 1980, offers a marvellous window into the life of a genius guitar player, band leader and songwriter, finding his way in the world – and delivering extraordinary, enduring music that is still loved and remembered today. That has been proven a hundred thousand times since – but what happened later was only possible because of the pioneering work of players like Rory. And generally to help make the wider public aware of just how powerful a force rock 'n' roll really was at the time, and can be. Of course, there was a lot of fun to be had, but one of the serious things that we set out to do in Hot Press was to create a kind of living history of Irish music. There is a huge volume of extraordinary material in the Hot Press vaults – not least about the great guitar maestro.
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