The art of darkness

Sometimes the adage is proved wrong and the cover reflects the content. Rory Gallagher’s forthcoming posthumous album Wheels Within Wheels, a collection of unreleased tracks showcasing the legendary guitarist’s acoustic/roots expertise, comes with a striking sleeve image courtesy of renowned English rock ’n’ roll portraitist David Oxtoby. The artist, once a prominent figure amongst the Swinging ’60s set, had in later years become something of a reclusive figure following a series of personal tragedies. Rory Gallagher’s brother and lifelong manager Donal was a fan of the artist’s work since buying two of his Elvis lithographs in the late ’70s, but didn’t establish a connection with him until relatively recently.

“Down through the years I got the various books and I read up on him,” Donal explains. “Rory always loved him as well. And then in ’91 he’d been through a bit of a tragic situation and was selling them off and I went along to an exhibition of his work in London. When I bumped into him, I said that I had these two Elvises – because the originals were destroyed in a fire and the prints are very rare now. So I said that if he wanted them back he could have them, that they were a great source of inspiration to myself and Rory.”

As it transpired, Oxtoby had started a portrait of Rory back in 1969 when the guitarist was still fronting Taste. The meeting with Donal set the artist to thinking about finishing it, although it was still some while before he got back in contact with Donal – who in the meantime was in the throes of finding a suitable cover for Wheels Within Wheels.

“I was down at BMG and they had put together a couple of covers from photographs I had submitted of Rory with acoustic guitars,” he recounts, “and as nice and flattering as they were, I just knew it wasn’t what Rory wanted. In his apartment after he died there were lots of bits and pieces of sketches and drawings. Rory was quite a good artist himself, and I knew that he was driving towards either a self-portrait or to have somebody paint a cover.

“The sketches were very honest, and in some ways brutal. So I said to the BMG guys, ‘It has to be a painting’. And then out of the blue I got this new catalogue from Oxtoby, and the cover of it was Rory in 1969. He’d titled it Blue Boy.

“Oxtoby got quite reclusive after he sold everything off in 1991, so I had to go via the printer who put me in touch with his manager, who then conveyed to Oxtoby that I was trying to get in touch and thank him. I wanted him to have the last record Rory did, the newer stuff rather than Taste.

“A couple of weeks later he got back in touch and said, ‘Could you send some to my pal in Australia, he’s not well and he’d like a Rory CD’. So I did that and a few days passed by and I got another phone call saying, ‘Seeing as you sent that to my pal in Australia, I know you’re legit – would you like to come and see the Rory painting?’

“So I got the opportunity to go over to his house, and in the course of that I said, ‘I’d love you to do the Rory cover.’ And he said, ‘I’ve never done any covers for anybody, I’ve turned down Andre Previn, McCartney, various people, I don’t do that sort of thing’. So I said okay, it was worth a try.

“But about two days later I got a call from him, bright and early, saying he’d had this unusual experience of Rory waking him up at three in the morning telling him to get on and start painting. He said, ‘I started to stretch my canvasses and it was an image coming through of Rory. It’s not like my early work that you like, my new stuff is all very abstract, and this is quite a strange image, even for me. If we do this, what you see is what you’re gonna get’.

“When it came through it was quite a challenge for me. It’s like facing your ghosts if you like. It was a little bit off-putting, but I’d had so many strange experiences over the past year with Rory that didn’t spook me one bit – although I’d sooner it was described more as a theatrical mask of life rather than a death mask. There was a lot of sadness and pain, and I felt in a way that’s what it had to express. Oxtoby was almost acting as a medium in a way.

“Luckily, I had the support of Mark Jessett, who is the art director down at BMG, he adored Oxtoby and loved working with it, but I think it was a serious challenge to various people in the more commercial divisions!”

The music on the album itself represents something of a treasure trove for Gallagher fans, including the gorgeously melancholic title track, an unreleased studio version of the vintage ‘As The Crow Flies’ that could almost be Planxty backing Howlin’ Wolf, crackling collaborations with The Dubliners, Bela Fleck, Lonnie Donegan, Bert Jansch, Juan Martin, Martin Carthy and others, plus a version of the ageless trad-arr air ‘The Cuckoo’ to rival Clarence Ashley.

“Down through the years, particularly the latter years, I knew of Rory’s fondness for the style of music that the album represents: a cross section from the early days of his listening, Davey Graham, Pentangle, Martin Carthy and Irish traditional music,” says Donal.
“I think a lot of times he felt like dumping the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing, the pressures of band rehearsals, recording – it got too complicated for him. In a way he was envious of folk musicians, ’cos they could take an acoustic guitar, get on a train, arrive at a gig, crash on somebody’s floor for the night and have a good laugh without road crews and catering crews and how big is your lighting rig and how many trucks do you have, the whole management factor that had started to dominate music.

“He really wanted to get back to this music, and he had his own hard and fast ideas of what he was going to do and the album he was going to make, and I knew that was an unfulfilled wish. It would’ve been relatively easy to put an acoustic album together from all the various albums, but to me that was an easy way out and wasn’t offering anything new, and wouldn’t have given the breadth of Rory’s capabilities.

“Obviously if he had made this album it would’ve been far broader, perhaps incorporating a lot of international styles, country music, flamenco music, Irish music – but all those strands are represented here, and this is as good as I could do.”