Rory G and what an artist looks like

RORY Gallagher was on the cover of the first edition of Hot Press magazine, the guitar man dominating the page, which also had a collage made up partly of characters representing Official Ireland at that time, such as Liam Cosgrave and Paddy Donegan.

It was a clear declaration that there was a culture war going on, between this rock’n’roll spirit embodied by Rory, and just about everything else in the country in the late 1970s. Julian Vignoles worked in Hot Press in the early days, before leaving for the paradise that is RTE. And he has now written a biography of Rory, called The Man Behind The Guitar. It does not have the endorsement of Rory’s brother Donal, who managed him and who still devotes himself to the cause. But it got me thinking again about Rory, and how important he was.

The young The Edge was at the Macroom Festival of 1977, to see Rory, and while he would obviously have been inspired by the man’s virtuosity, there was something else about Rory to which any creative person could relate — he was serious.

In a country which was in love with what Patrick Kavanagh called “bucklepping”, in which gifted people were often required to have a “gimmick” of some kind, Gallagher stood there and played and gave out this message which was unspoken and yet beautifully eloquent: this is what an artist looks like, this is how you do it.

It is often said of Rory that he was enigmatic, that “as a person” he was largely unknown — and yet he could not have been clearer in this enormous statement that he made every time he plugged in his Stratocaster: this is what an artist looks like, this is how you do it.

And even if you’re Irish, it works.