Vanja Sky on Rory Gallagher: "His vibe and his energy were just something else"

Rory Gallagher may have played Zagreb back in 1985 – as part of his groundbreaking tour of what was then Yugoslavia and Hungary – but it wasn’t until much later that Croatian musician Vanja Sky sparked a powerful, career-altering connection with the Irish guitar legend’s work.

“It was when I first started playing, when I was 19,” she recalls. “I started late! And sadly I couldn’t have seen him live because of my age, but I remember seeing him in a video, and saying, ‘What is this?!’ I had never seen anything like that. Of course I’d seen bands before, but this kind of energy – even through the video – I was just like, ‘What kind of man is this?!’

“Besides him being an amazing musician, his vibe and his energy were just something else,” she adds. “You don’t see that anymore. It’s not about being this technically perfect player – like, ‘Look, I practised for ten hours a day!’ For me, the music isn’t about that. It’s about this connection to the audience. It’s all about the feeling, when it comes to this kind of music. And Rory had that. He was a man of the people.”

But it was by no means the kind of music that Vanja – who was working as a pastry chef at the time – had been exposed to growing up in Umag, on Croatia’s Istrian peninsula.

“I didn’t know anything about blues music,” she says. “Rory, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix weren’t really the names you’d come upon. What you’d hear was mostly the mainstream, like Beyoncé and Britney Spears. To hear about Rory, you’d really have to go into the underground.”

With three studio albums now under her belt – including collaborations with the likes of Gerry McAvoy, Carl Sentance of Nazareth, Ric Lee of Ten Years After, Mike Zito and Bernard Allison – Vanja has made a point of continuing to celebrate Rory’s seminal influence on her work. Her debut album featured, and was titled after, Rory’s Top Priority track ‘Bad Penny’, and each subsequent project has featured a rendition of one of the Irish musician’s songs: “To let the people know that he is the man,” Vanja explains.

Getting to work with Gerry McAvoy on a version of ‘I Take What I Want’ on her 2023 Reborn LP proved particularly special.

“He’s a legend on the scene,” Vanja reflects. “It was amazing that he accepted first of all. But I think, with pretty much all of these legends – like Ric Lee as well – their mission is to keep it going, and bring this music to younger generations.”

That mission was also at the forefront of this year’s 30th anniversary edition of the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival, which returned to Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal – where Rory was born – at the end of May. Vanja and her band were part of a star-studded line-up that also included legends such as Gerry McAvoy’s Band of Friends and Jimmie Vaughan, as well as younger blues-rock acts like The Zac Schulze Gang.

“It was amazing,” Vanja enthuses. “I’ve really wanted to do this for years, and now we’ve finally played it. The whole organisation, and the show, was great, and the audience were so nice. I still feel like I need to pinch myself, like, ‘Did we really do that?’

“It was all really special,” she continues. “After I did the sound-check, I went to Rory’s statue for the first time. I was almost crying. It was quite emotional to be there, really.”

Vanja at the Rory Gallagher statue in Ballyshannon

Vanja’s rendition of ‘Shadow Play’ is one of the highlights of her live sets – and it felt extra special, she says, to play the Rory classic in Ballyshannon.

“I almost fell apart when the audience started to sing that woah-woah…” she reflects. “It still feels like I dreamt the whole thing – because I was dreaming about it for years. For the people who were there and saw it, they know what I’m talking about. The rest should definitely go and experience the whole thing in Ballyshannon.”

She was encouraged by the amount of young people soaking in Rory’s music at the festival.

“Usually when you go to these shows, it’s people who are 60s-plus,” she says. “We all need to bring it back to the younger audience. Or else, in 10 years, the whole scene is going to be in really big trouble – and everything is going to be artificial intelligence and shit.

“But seeing those young people in Ballyshannon was very emotional,” she adds. “It gave me hope that it can be done.”

Vanja Sky’s new live album, Access All Areas – Live, is out now.

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