Rory Tributes
"He was such a gracious man, I'm sure everybody tells you this. The most gentlemanly person you could ever meet in this business - or any other business probably. Such a sweet guy y'know, such a completely gentle and generous person with his time and everything. So this couple of kids come up, whose me and my mate and say y'know "How do you get your sound Mr Gallagher" and he sits and tells us - he says "Well mainly its this little box here - this little Rangemaster treble booster. And I just plug my guitar in here and the treblebooster goes into the amp and thats me sound." So I ran straight out and got myself a Rangemaster and a couple of AC30's, second hand of course, all beaten up but they worked. And from that moment on, I had the sound that i wanted. I didnt have his guitar, I'd already made my own guitar. But my guitar just seemed to work perfectly in this setup - so I owe Rory my sound" - Brian May
"Rory had this Celtic approach, which is very similar to mine y'know, where your playing blues but there is always that real, sort of, edge of, in his case, the Irish feeling.....Scottish folk music and Irish folk music obviously are very close - a lot of it's on the Pentatonic scale. A lot of the rhythm's - usually starts off with an eight kind of a feel and suddenly change in the middle and speed up and go into this twelve feel which is very close, the rhythmic feel is very close to a kind of shuffle. It always amazes me when people, sort of, think "Well, if your white and you come from Ireland, you come from Cork in particular, or you come from Glasgow that you can't have that feeling and express that. You can, it's as simple as that. If your just living the music, you can do it. He certainly could do it. He embodied honesty in the music business in the way of playing music and in his life, I think he lived the music and maybe he lived it a little bit too hard, as some of us have been guilty of. But that was because...of the Celtic spirit"......Jack Bruce
" I met him at a gig at a college somewhere. I knew who he was obviously, and he just came straight up. It occurred to me later that he's just that kind of a bloke, he just walks up to somebody and starts talking to them. And he walked up and he gave me a lecture about playing the guitar in other than normal tuning (laughs), and we had a really nice chat. He wasn't offensive at all, he just spoke his mind. Five years later I saw him and he was enthusing about playing guitar in other than normal tuning" ....Martin Carthy
"I remember him coming to a gig at the Troubadour - came to a couple of gigs. He got so excited that he got thrown out (laughs) and he was furious "Oh bugger them blasters, they threw me out I was just having a good time. I was yelling and shouting and they said "Shut up or get out" and they threw him out. But he was just an enthusiast basically about music and he responded to music, and he made people respond".....Martin Carthy
"I'd a lot of old recordings here of Maggie Barry who was a street singer and Joe Heaney, his Irish name was Seosamh O hEanai.....and I used to send Rory tapes of these people, because he was very interested in hearing, y'know, where he came from - which showed that he wasn't just a fella out to get a bit of fame for himself, he didn't play his music to be put on a pedestal. He played it because thats what he wanted to do, and as i said earlier on, followed his talent" ....Ronnie Drew
"About 1975 or 1976, I was about 13 or 14 and occasionally I would come across these records by this enigmatic, mysterious guy. So one time I shelled out 2 pounds 50 or whatever it was for a Polydor sampler and I never looked back really, my world was pretty much sorted out for the next few years because then i had kind of found my man really. He appeared to be like his audience - a lot of people have his idea that he had no image, when in fact he had a really, really strong image - he seemed very street. Seeing him live was quite an eye-opener, particularly if you were very young because it was bordering on terrifying in its intensity. He was a very beautiful man and a lovely gentle presence but when he plugged in and started playing he got this kind of bug-eyed stare going and occasionally if he looked down and I was in the audience half of me wanted him to clock me and the other half was thinking "Oh no, don't" because he was on fire - he was right in the moment., and was the centre of about 2,000 people. As soon as I could, I got the money together to get "Deuce" and that was the first proper, real album that I got and started to try and play along with it. One day I pulled a sicky off school and spent the whole day playing along with that record and it really moved me on as a guitar player massively" ......Johnny Marr
"Here was a man who managed to combine the gift of being an authentic creative genius with the even rarer gift of being a genuinely decent, honourable human being." Hotpress, July 95
"He had this amazing capacity to create riffs and i love those riffs. I am holding it in my hand now, Tastes "On the Boards", "Morning Sun" you know thats a great riff and its very influential on me. You know, if you look at "Tie Your Mother Down", the riff on that is not so dissimilar from "Morning Sun". I'd be the first to acknowledge a huge debt to the man. I wish he here to say that to, I really, really, wish he was here" .....Brian May
"an uncompromisingly serious musician" - The Times
"Rory said to me one time he had a song which he'd like me to sing and its called "The Barley and the Grape Rag", and I was delighted. Rory was doing a concert for the city in Dublin and there were a lot of people there, like maybe 10,000 people and he was such a gentle and quiet man offstage, that when he got onstage it was a revelation to see the metamorphosis if you like, he turned into this aarrrrghhhh!!!!! He said to me, would I sing the song with him, so I was thrilled of course. It was one of the highlights of my life, and I'm a little bit proud too that I sang with Rory Gallagher (laughs)"...Ronnie Drew
"The first Irish rock'n'roller and a unique blues guitar voice rolled into one. Missed by everyone" The Guitar Magazine, August 1995
"I met him again in the early nineties, and that was when I was with BBM with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker and we were in the Conrad Hotel in London. Rory was living there at the time, and I walked into the bar one day after rehearsals or something and there was Rory sat at the bar there..one drink lead to another and we ended up up in his room that night. He had all his guitars up there, he's turned kind of turned it into a little music room and he was showing me his guitars and I was playing him little bits bit I was quite shy to play in front of him and he was going "Now don't be shy, don't be shy" in the way he used to have that real friendly thing and that old kind-of wise look he would give you "Don't be shy now" so I just played him a little bit. and I played him some of the BBM album ...and he said "I'm very jealous you know" and I said why, 'cos he - the fact that I was playing with Jack and Ginger, he was enjoying it and he was saying to me "Ah yeah, you're playing with a lot of space, I like to see that" cos I think he thought I used to overplay - which is absolutely correct!! He was kind of sitting there listening to the music and we ordered some drinks and some sandwiches and he was just telling about a lot of his personal things which I won't go into here, but it was a lovely night. I was really, really glad that we had that little night together y'know because I never saw him again after that, and we just hugged each other at the end and told each other that we loved each other and kind of went our seperate ways...I only ever spoke to him once again after that, on the phone"........Gary Moore
"I was Influenced by the playing of Rory Gallagher and used to listen to him so much that I ended up playing just his licks for awhile!!!" - KK Downing
"Rory Gallagher is the first person I saw who really exploited the harmonic thing. I couldn't understand how he did it when I used to watch him" - Glen Tipton
"He (Rory) was a great man in many ways. I never met him though. You know, some people don't become HUGE because they are too SMART! They hold back a little so they can remain true to themselves, Maybe Rory was like that?" - Pete Townshend
"Rory Gallagher he was a great player. I've seen him perform
several times he just used to use a little Fender amp and that beat-up old Strat,
but boy, he could make that guitar talk... He was another guitar player who
never got the credit he deserved, it's incredible. He either had a bad
publicist, or I don't know." - Ace Frehley
"There is a saying in Ireland: First there was Jesus, and then there was Rory." Phil McDonnell - Rory's road manager