Rory Gallagher: New live album created from 1990 concert in London
Rory Gallagher on stage at the Town and Country club in London in 1990, the gigs that appear on the album All Around Man – Live In London.
In 1981, as Rory Gallagher played, Athens burned. A crowd of 40,000 had turned out for the Cork bluesman as he brought his Top Priority album to the Greek capital. Such was the demand to see Gallagher, fans without tickets forced their way into the venue. In response, the police unleashed a volley of tear gas. A full-scale riot ensued.
Gallagher was no stranger to lively crowds – but had never seen anything like this. The riot has since become part of Greek rock’n'roll folklore and is still remembered. As is Rory Gallagher. And when his extensive back catalogue of studio and live albums came to streaming services such as Spotify several years ago, his nephew Daniel was struck by how many plays the iconic guitarist was receiving in Athens.
“The UK and US are the top for streaming. If you break it down and get into cities, you have places such as Athens, because of a concert he performed in 1981 which led to a huge riot,” says Daniel who, along with his father Dónal (Rory’s brother and former manager) has served as custodian of Gallagher’s recording legacy since he died in 1995. “It was a big story. So he’s always had a huge, huge following in Greece.”
Top Priority came out in 1979 and was followed by the live record Stage Struck. Throughout his career, Gallagher liked to pair studio and live LPs – his 1973 tour-de-force, Tattoo, was followed 12 months later by the live disc Irish Tour 74. But while that phase of life is extensively documented, the same cannot be said for Gallagher’s later years, around his final two long players, Defender (1987) and Fresh Evidence (1990).
At least until now. Daniel and Dónal hope to shed new light on the fascinating period of Gallagher’s career, five years before his death at age 47. That’s the motivation behind the new live LP All Around Man – Live In London. The double album was recorded at the Town and County Club in London, a storied venue also headlined by David Bowie, Ozzy Osbourne and Eric Clapton (today it is the 2,300-capacity O2 Forum).
Gallagher laid down a blistering set over two nights in December 1990 at the end of a UK tour promoting his swan song, Fresh Evidence. The sun was going down – but Rory Gallagher was still raging for all he was worth.
“Fresh Evidence was his last studio record sadly,” says Daniel. “It is a very undocumented time of him playing live. Even the Defender album, which came before, there’s not a lot of live material, even visually. To come across 24 tracks recorded at a London show was a great find for us.”
In his early 40s, Gallagher had progressed as an artist, says Daniel. It wasn’t that he had slowed down as much as begun to explore a different way of dazzling his audience.
“At this point, it’s a lot more groove-based. Tracks like Ghost Blues [from Fresh Evidence] are about sitting in a groove, seeing where that goes. It’s similar to what Billy Gibbons does with ZZ Top. They were quite similar in their love of the blues. With having a simpler, catchier riff rather than, ‘I just threw 30 notes out in a second’. That’s definitely where Rory is at on the record. There are still incredible bursts of speed and technique that you would expect with a Rory album. But more groove with it too.”
The recordings came from the trove of 1,000 tapes making up the Gallagher archive. Fans are always eager for fresh material, and Daniel and Dónal work hard at finding music that brings a new perspective to the Rory story. In the case of All Around Man, the tapes were unmarked except for the letters T&C – “Town and Country”. There was no indication who had recorded them or why.
“They did a very short UK tour. They were in Manchester the night before. These [London] were the last two dates,” says Daniel. “He must have figured they were on a good roll. Recording the concerts might have been a test – to try out a new sound desk, as a favour to someone. It’s not recorded on the sound-board. It has its own complete recording desk [ensuring better quality and less background noise from the audience]. I don’t even know who the engineer was. It’s crazy.”
Fresh Evidence caught Gallagher at his most introspective. The ill-health that would eventually claim his life was becoming an issue, and songs such as 'Heaven’s Gate' (“You’re feeling haunted/See those shadows on the shades?”) and 'Walkin’ Wounded' confirm he was increasingly concerned about his mortality. He had no clue he had so little time left or that he would die after a liver transplant – a consequence of years of overuse of medications. But he had reached that age where he realised he would not be going on forever.
“It had started out as medication to help overcome his fear of flying which had hit its peak in the 1980s,” says Daniel. “A dodgy doctor in London had started giving him all sorts of stuff. He was conscious of it. The tracks off this record such as 'Heaven’s Gate' – they’re very foreboding. I don’t think he’s thinking he’s going to pass away five years ahead. He is definitely aware of the situation.”
Gallagher’s popularity ebbed and flowed. But his hardcore audience never deserted him. Even in the late 1980s, when blues-rock was thoroughly out of kilter with music trends, he could still sell out two nights in London. Today, he is an icon from Glasheen to Greece, Aghada to Athens, and recent live records, put out on Daniel and Dónal’s Strange Music imprint and distributed by Universal Music, have charted worldwide.
There is a lot more in the vault. The challenge, says Daniel Gallagher, is to keep fans happy while not blotting Rory’s legacy with a glut of releases – or overshadowing iconic live documents such as the volcanic Irish Tour ’74.
“It’s that tightrope balance of not over-saturating things and people going ‘oh, I don’t need to buy a triple-LP every other month’. I’m trying to release one or two every year without regurgitating the same things. We’ve done a couple of anniversary boxed sets of Rory’s early albums.
"I’m also conscious I don’t want to dilute the importance of the Irish Tour album. He was brilliant every night of 1974 – but I wouldn’t want to dilute the significance of that record. It’s about striking the balance – about finding pockets of his career that deserve a live record or another light put on them.”
- All Around Man – Live In London is out now
