Daniel Gallagher on his uncle Rory: "He was an intensely private person... His way of releasing his feelings was definitely through lyrics"

To go straight to the point about why Rory appeals to so many guitarists, I was just reading a quote from Gary Moore yesterday, and it was about how singular Rory was about not selling out. It just appeals to people so much. They get sucked in by the guitar playing, and then you find this guy who doesn’t do singles – he just wants to make albums and play them on the road.

It’s all for the music, and honestly – I think it’s one of the reasons so many people hold him up as a torchlight. You can even see it in something like Rory not releasing singles, which was similar to Led Zeppelin – that was probably born from blues heroes, who didn’t necessarily have singles. I don’t think Rory was going to move away from the blues idiom just to get on Top Of The Pops.

When you read interviews with him, especially from the early ‘70s, he was so stringent on that. Peter Grant from Zeppelin – who was a big fan of Rory and had been to see Taste – actually helped with his Polydor deal, which allowed him complete artistic control. Rory and Jimmy Page would also have come from a very similar background of artists they liked, in terms of blues and early rock and roll.

Then there was the British folk stuff at the end of the ‘60s, like Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy and Pentangle. Led Zeppelin III and Rory’s self-titled debut, from 1971, have a very similar mood, and a lot of acoustic and folk elements. Rory would also have had more Celtic influences coming through in his playing, like the track ‘Just A Smile’.

For the 50th anniversary of Rory Gallagher, we did a remix and remaster. It’s such a bare album – it was recorded on eight-track, but most of the time, they only used around six channels. It was so lo-fi. But with these things – and it sounds so basic – but if the songs are there, that’s 90 percent of it.

Rory Gallagher 1979, NYC. Photo: Chuck Pulin

With Taste having a broken up, a lot of the songs have a tinge of sadness in them, like ‘I Fall Apart’ and ‘Wave Myself Goodbye’. I guess his way of showing emotion was through his songs. I was just at the Rory festival in Ballyshannon, and the Zac Schulze Gang were headlining the Friday night.

When they did ‘I Fall Apart’, a long-time Rory friend and fan from Germany, Frank, came up to me and he was crying. It’s one of those songs that still hits. Rory was an intensely private person, and quite often, people said he came alive for the two hours of the day he was onstage. And then he’d go back into his very amenable and polite, but very shy self.

So yeah, I think his way of releasing his feelings was definitely through lyrics. Then you have a track like the opener, ‘Laundromat’, which is a really fun song. When I spoke to Rory’s bassist, Gerry McAvoy, for the 50th anniversary edition, he said Rory invited him over to record, and they hadn’t played a gig yet together.

He played the riff from ‘Laundromat’ and Gerry said he was absolutely stunned – he had that riff nailed into the wall. Also, it’s not just a silly thing about a laundromat. They spent a lot of time in the laundromat in Earl’s Court, where they lived, because they were pretty much broke after the Taste days. They would go in there because it was warm, compared with the bedsit they were living in, and people would drop by to see it.

Queen were just forming, and they’d be in the area and come hang out. Not to get too weird on it, but Rory sweated intensely onstage! So much so that my dad and him were constantly in doing loads of laundry! Throughout the record, you can obviously also hear the influence of the blues greats like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters.

You take a track like ‘Sinner Boy’ and the slide playing is great. Rory had a really strong blues metronome inside of himself – he picked the perfect BPM for these blues numbers he does. He worshipped these guys, and it was only later on in that year that he did the Muddy Waters London sessions, which was one of his career highlights.

Then there’s ‘Just A Smile’, a beautiful ballad. A couple of years ago, Jack White did a track with The Raconteurs that evokes a very similar guitar part. It’s just a lovely drop D sound – I think they got that tuning from Davy Graham, the folk guitarist. It sounds weird to say it, but one of my favourite bits is where they drop out for a second. It’s just playing on its own and then they come back in for the next verse.

Daniel Gallagher

You get simple things like that in Bill Withers songs – space and timing is a thing to use. You don’t have to play thorugh every second of every song. In terms of the lyrics on the album, if you go back to ‘Sinner Boy’, we always thought of it as Rory being conscious of homelessness. The lyrics are about someone on the street and people ignoring them as they pass.

Lyrically, he had a similar song with Taste, called ‘Hail’. It was an acoustic track about someone busking. On Rory Gallagher, certain songs I relate to the Taste break-up, which really hit him hard. Especially because it wasn’t, ‘You go your way, we go ours.’ One of the other members bashed him in the press. Rory kept his own counsel and didn’t say anything to anyone.

He was very private about these things, so it came out in his lyrics. “You’ve done me wrong for the last time,” is quite a line. And on the next album, Deuce, there’s one called ‘Used To Be’: “Better get used to being my used to be”. I think that’s a real anthem of, “I’ve moved on. This is happening for me now without you.”

There are other ones like ‘It’s You’ and ‘I’m Not Surprised’, which are quite jovial, almost spring-like songs. I wish I could tell you where his head was for each one. But again, he was so private, you can only read the lyrics and conjure what you imagine he was thinking at the time.

• To hear the full conversation between Daniel Gallagher and Paul Nolan, check out the special episode of Hot Press Classics on the Rory Gallagher album, also featuring Muireann Bradley, and available on streaming platforms now.

You can read more reflections on Rory's legacy in the current issue of Hot Press, out now: