Rory Gallagher Blues Rock / Co. Cork

Breaking away from major label and setting up independently, Rory’s output had become less prolific as he increasingly agonized over recordings. Even so later albums ‘Jinx’, ‘Defender’ and ‘Fresh Evidence’, the last release before his death, showed him still moving forward, breaking new territory. The soaring ‘Loan Shark Blues’ is a timelessly potent cry of financial desperation while ‘Heaven’s Gate’ and ‘Ghost Blues’, the title of Ian Thuiller’s excellent career spanning 2010 Gallagher documentary, cut from the same self revealing cloth as ‘A Million Miles Away’, contemplated life’s fragility. His dedication to the muse was absolute, perhaps at a cost to his personal life: he had no marriage, no long-term relationship and no children. The man who could unite thousands in performance lived a solitary unindulgent life away from stage, seeming to identify with the solo operatives who peopled the noir detective fiction of such as Dashiell Hammett from which he often took lyrical inspiration. So tied was he to life on the road that his final years were spent living in a hotel overlooking Chelsea harbour. Rory literally played until he dropped, after collapsing onstage in Rotterdam in January 1995, he was hospitalised in London with liver failure. Following a successful transplant operation he seemed to be recovering, but he caught an infection and died in June 1995.

The music world sent their condolences, 15,000 lined the streets of Cork as he was laid to rest. But Rory’s dedication to the rock’s skills base would also see him teach a budding player how to play a riff or get a certain sound – Brian May was one such beneficiary – and he took pride in founding the still prominent Registry of Guitar Tutors.