Live! In Europe

Product Information

I n July ’73, the band should have relocated to Cork to rehearse for their fifth album in three years, Tattoo. It was the first time Gallagher had worked on an album in Ireland since the Taste days.

By the 90s, Gallagher had become marginalised by both the record industry and music fans. Although he gigged constantly, the gaps between albums became longer and longer; he released just two albums in the 10 years before 1990’s Fresh Evidence, his final release.

Release

Gallagher’s lifestyle eventually caught up with him. On 14 June, 1995, the guitarist died from complications following a liver transplant made necessary by his reliance on alcohol and pills. He was buried in Ballincollig, near Cork City. Thousands of people lined the streets of Cork to bid him farewell with an ovation. Not one to drag his heels, Gallagher moved fast. In January 1971, the trio got acquainted via series of intense jams in small basement rehearsal room in Fulham. By late February, they were in the studio, recording Gallagher’s first, self-titled album. If Rory was feeling pressured to prove himself after the demise of Taste, he wasn’t letting on, even to his bandmates.

He’s not worried about the attention he gets. He has it well worked out. “Some people get all worried about this fantasy and reality thing, you know, the stage only being the fantasy. I don’t see it like that. It makes things easier if you treat the stage as reality. Reality is doing the thing you’re best at.” KEYCHAIN a tough modern blues, features the Man in fine vocal scatting mood over his slide guitar. On this particular performance, I recall Rory stretching and bending his guitar strings to the limit of their tolerance, causing the tuning of the instrument to alter dramatically. Taste played their final show at Belfast’s Queens University on October 24, 1970. It was a hard decision for the guitarist –“I don’t like to think about it too much, because it upsets me,” Gallagher later said of Taste’s split – though, typically, that didn’t stop him making it. We did a couple of shows in the north of France and only a handful of people turned up,” says McAvoy. “But that was OK. Our attitude was if we put on a great show then next time twice as many people will turn up. And that’s generally what happened wherever we played.” Live In Europe has served as a massive influence on budding musicians: Adam Clayton and The Edge of U2 both cite this album as the recording that made them want to learn guitar and play in a band – they were still schoolboys at the time!The film presents a balanced view of the political climate in Ireland at the time, along with the fans’ total devotion to a man who had become a cultural hero as much as a musician. Always concerned with remaining “a musician, not a politician”, Gallagher went out of his way to appear neutral on all matters political. By the time Rory Gallagher was released in May 1971, the trio had played their first live shows, a series of dates in Europe. The first gig, at Paris’s Olympia Theatre, was sold out and filmed for French TV. Other shows in were less successful.

Nevertheless, Gallagher’s relentless integrity, combined with the furious immersion in his live performances, won him a staunch following. Working as a solo artist following the somewhat tumultuous dissolution of Taste, it took this iconoclastic musician no longer to document his concert work than when he was with the unsung British power trio: the now fifty-year-old Live in Europe album (released 5/14/72) was his third overall release under his own name after the eponymous debut LP and its sophomore follow-up Deuce. Rory avoided pandering to his audience. He preferred to simply play music and, in so doing with such unabashed abandon, he rendered it with an irrepressible glee that radiated from the stage to his enraptured audiences.

Recommendations

Like every young Irish musician who came of age in the early 60s, Gallagher served his apprenticeship on the showband circuit, playing covers of popular hits.