When Rory Gallagher’s blues gave Belfast the very best of us

IHAVE seen the film Rory Gallagher: Irish Tour ’74

a few times — yet when I happened upon it on TG4 last Sunday night I could not bring myself to change the channel.

From the opening scene of a stormy sea segueing into Rory on stage doing Walk on Hot Coals, Tony Palmer’s film somehow seems to be getting better all the time.

I am now increasingly of the view that if you were to pick the work of one Irish artist of the 20th century, and send it off in a spacecraft to represent us in front of the extraterrestrials, you’d hardly do better than Rory Gallagher: Irish Tour ’74.

It’s not just that Rory was a staggeringly brilliant musician of fierce integrity — though that’s nice too — for all the modernity that he was bringing, there is also something really ancient and elemental about this film. Something almost monastic indeed, in the musician’s devotion to his craft, in the sparse simplicity of the dressing room as the band gets ready.

But it’s the “74” bit that takes it to another dimension — the fact that in the year when these gigs were happening in Cork, Dublin, and Belfast, very few people in their right minds were even thinking of playing Belfast.

But Rory insisted, because that was the sort of thing that Rory insisted on, leading to scenes in the Ulster Hall which drew this from Roy Hollingworth in Melody Maker: “I have never seen anything quite so wonderful, so stirring, so uplifting, so joyous as when Gallagher and the band walked on stage. The whole place erupted, they all stood and they cheered and they yelled and screamed, and they put their arms up, and they embraced… it was one of the most memorable moments of my life.”

Send it out there.

For a while there, it looked like Sweden was losing its reputation for intelligent decision-making. Losing its brand, which is all about being independent-minded, making the big calls and making them right.

On coronavirus, its state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell had apparently made the wrong call, with Sweden not going for the full lockdown, favouring instead a lighter regime of social distancing.

Now they reckon that too many people died, that for once they should have done what most of the other countries were doing, the other countries which usually look to Sweden as their guide — in theory at least.

Ah, but then the Swedes showed what they’re made of, then they pulled it out of the fire, then they showed their class — Anders Tegnell admitted that he made the wrong call. That their restrictions should have been a bit tighter.

Anders Tegnell admitted that he made the wrong call — I can hardly even believe that I wrote those words, but there you go.

Class is permanent.