REWRITING RORY

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS

Rory Gallagher: Calling Card starts with a bang rather than a whimper.

Viewers are immediately hooked in by footage of Rory’s explosive live performances interspersed with clips from Brian May, Johnny Marr, Imelda May and Bob Geldof singing his praises as a musician.

This is swiftly followed by a more sombre peek into Rory’s life offstage as his depression, crippling shyness and loneliness are introduced. “It was hard to understand that he was so solitary. There was a depression there, there was a melancholy,” says Dónal, Rory’s brother and manager. “We knew him but we didn’t know him,” adds Moya Brennan of Clannad.

Of course, this Jekyll-Hyde aspect of Rory’s character has been mentioned countless times before in biographies, articles and documentaries about his life. Viewers may even wonder at this point what this new documentary could possibly add that Ian Thullier’s Ghost Blues: The Story of Rory Gallagher (2010) did not.

But the next scene makes clear that Rory Gallagher: Calling Card is a documentary like no other Rory documentary before. This is going to be a deeply personal and emotional hour ahead. And of course, that’s when my first tears of the evening start to fall.

We see Dónal climbing into his attic and retrieving boxes of Rory-related items. The camera pans across Rory’s extensive record collection that Dónal has kept all these years, along with numerous other pieces of memorabilia and valuable artefacts. Dónal flicks through an envelope of family photographs, showing them to the camera and telling the stories behind them.

The early years of Rory’s life are beautifully covered by Dónal. He talks about their parents with great affection, again sharing private family photographs along the way. My tears flow once more when Rory’s 1988 RTÉ interview with Gay Byrne (“they haven’t put the plaque up yet”) is juxtaposed with the actual plaque that now sits on the Rock Hospital in Ballyshannon. Oh, if only Rory knew…

We then follow Dónal up to Derry as he walks around the city and talks about Rory’s musical awakening thanks to AFN Radio. Then, it’s back down to Cork and a poignant recollection of their parents’ separation and how he and Rory were always “hopeful” they would reconcile. “We know how much they loved each other, on the one hand, but the circumstances post-war weren’t kind to them.”

Crowley’s Music Centre, the showband years and Taste Mark 1 – all pivotal moments in Rory’s career – are covered with footage from Rory’s 1972 Music Maker interview supporting Dónal’s own words. We really get a sense of Taste’s might from music promoter Paul Charles who went on to become Rory’s agent in the 1980s:

It’s really hard to get a grasp on nowadays just how vital and how important they were as a band and to people’s lives. Rory had this ability to engage every single member of the audience from the minute he stepped on stage. I always felt that I was drained by the end of the set. You were just totally immersed in what was going on.

We now follow Dónal to London as he visits the site of the Marquee Club and recalls a funny anecdote about Taste’s first gig there. Put on the same bill as a band called Robert Hurst and the Big Taste, Taste were forced to change their name for the evening. They ended up on the bill as “The Erection”, which Rory was understandably “furious” about. “I tried to square it with my mother saying it was to do with Irish building and construction…” Dónal says with a laugh.

Then it’s on to Taste Mark 2, the Isle of Wight Festival and the launch of Rory’s solo career. We hear of Rory’s prolific work throughout the 1970s, his aversion to singles and Top of the Pops, and the classic tales of being voted Melody Maker’s Best Guitarist, jamming with the Rolling Stones and recording with Muddy Waters – all well-known stories yet great entry points for new fans. Tensions with Roger Glover during the making of Calling Card are also covered, along with the scrapped San Francisco sessions.

Accounts of Rory’s first tour of Japan in 1974 are accompanied by footage shot on Dónal’s camcorder of the cityscapes and bullet trains. It’s lovely to see Rory’s dear friend, Shu Tomioka, make a small appearance at this point, talking about the impact of that tour: “The first Japan tour was so successful because [Rory] gave everything to the audience.”

All these stories come with supportive comments from fellow musicians like May and Marr, their love for Rory shining through in spades – particularly in Marr’s humorous anecdote of decorating his Rory poster with real buttons! But for me, the best part of all was when commentary was handed over to the fans, such as in the segment on Belfast and what Rory means to Northern Ireland.

In this segment, Dónal meets up with Barry McGivern and Frank Girvan of the Rory Gallagher Statue Project Trust at the Ulster Hall. Talking about Rory’s concerts, Barry states:

It was a chink of light. We got that for two nights of the year when Rory was here and then it just went back to madness outside. No other artist has played that hall more times than Rory Gallagher. People say, ‘What was so good about him?’ It’s just that undefinable factor. He could take you down onto the ground and then right into the sky. He just had that natural ability.

These fan accounts are so valuable, and it would have been great to make more use of them throughout the documentary.

Moving into the 1980s, we hear how this was a difficult time for Rory musically as he did not fit into the scene, and personal challenges slowed his prolific output and touring schedule. It was good to see, however, that this perspective was more balanced than in Ghost Blues, with Paul Charles emphasising that Rory was still “very very much in demand. Every festival that was going wanted to book Rory Gallagher.”

Charles’ words lead nicely into footage of Self Aid – the unemployment benefit concert that Rory played in 1986. For the first time, the concert footage and interview from the Self Aid: Behind the Screens documentary are presented in HD – a real highlight! And then later on, we are even treated to segments from Rory’s incredible performance at the 1992 Temple Bar Blues Festival. To make this even better, the footage is of ‘Tattoo’d Lady’ – one of Rory’s finest ever versions of the song. We hear Mary Stokes note how Rory “moved onto that stage like a thunderbolt,” sending the crowd into a frenzy.

On a minor down point amid a huge series of ups in this documentary, Jinx and Defender are not given any airtime and Fresh Evidence is only mentioned in relation to the “frightening” themes of Rory’s lyrics (“That’s where Rory’s head was at the time,” says Gerry McAvoy in reference to ‘Heaven’s Gate’). This felt like somewhat of a wasted opportunity to expand the narrative, talk more about what a musical masterpiece the album was and how it laid the foundations for what Rory would have gone on to do next.

Listings for the documentary claimed that it would reveal more about Rory’s life offstage. While I had hoped that this would mean a focus on his love for reading and painting, even his religious devoutness, we instead got a candid insight from Dónal into his brother’s mental health and how much daily life was a struggle for him. Dónal notes wistfully how their mother Monica always hoped that Rory would find a partner and settle down one day, but he had decided “that wasn’t going to be a factor in his life.”

Rory’s difficulties are handled with great sensitivity here, from his fear of flying and stress to his anxiety and depression through his workaholic nature and overreliance on prescription medication and how this contributed to his health decline. “The simple thing is you can’t play every night, every night, every night, every night,” states Johnny Marr, “He had no plan B. He had no family time. To him, why would I? All I want to do is play the guitar.”

I found myself fighting back tears once again as Dónal described the cruel irony of Rory being “the straightest guy you could think of” and yet drugs prescribed to help him ended up contributing to his premature death. He recalls the ill-fated Town & Country Club gig in 1992, as well as coming across Rory’s 1992 diary recently and being shocked at the amount of medication he had been prescribed. “Where did he get all of this medication from? Some of it, you would only get if you were in a psychiatric ward and under supervision.”

The documentary ends with a tearful Dónal watching home footage of the two brothers messing around and posing in front of the camera as he tells the story of sleeping in Rory’s bed the day before the funeral and meeting Rory on the other side. “This is where I want to be. I’m happy. I’ve moved on,” Rory told him. There was not a dry eye in the house at this point.

Then, we follow Dónal as he places a large bouquet of flowers on Rory’s resting place at St Oliver’s Cemetery. Tears fell again as I saw the bolo tie I left Rory back in July 2022 still in place on his headstone. But they were quickly replaced with smiles as footage from the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival in Ballyshannon rolled, showing the tremendous impact that he still has on so many lives.

One hour was, of course, never going to be enough to tell the Rory Gallagher Story, and it left some gaps that may leave new fans uncertain. The story of the San Francisco record being thrown in the bin, for example, ends abruptly before we hear about Rory breaking his thumb in the taxi door, and there is nothing about Brendan O’Neill, Mark Feltham or indeed the members of the final Rory Gallagher Band and Rory’s powerful 1994 shows on the European festival circuit.

However, Daniel Gallagher did mention at the Ballyshannon festival that there is a lot of extra footage, so I’m hopeful that we may see an extended edition of the documentary in the future that could offer some more insight into Rory’s musical achievements in his final decade, rather than just his declining health, and perhaps give more attention to the final band and bring in more personal tales from other family members, friends and even fans (appearances from Mark Feltham, Roland von Campenhout and Roberto Manes would have been greatly appreciated).

Overall, Rory Gallagher: Calling Card definitely stands out as the best Rory documentary to date. For new fans, it offers (on the whole) a good introduction to Rory’s life, while for old fans, it just reiterates Rory’s greatness both as a musician and as a human being. It’s always a pleasure to hear Dónal talk and I could have quite happily continued watching him for several more hours.

It’s over to Johnny Marr for two final words of wisdom.

Firstly, it was “a real blessing” that Rory’s manager was his brother.

And secondly, Rory taught us that “all you need in this world is a guitar and maybe an amplifier and everything is alright.”

Bless you, dear Rory. You are so deeply loved and so sorely missed.

LAO

NB: This review was based on the 52-minute version of the documentary that aired on RTÉ on 3 June 2024. The 58-minute version for the BBC does include an excellent segment on Defender, Rory’s songwriting abilities and how his love for crime noir influenced his lyrics. Keeping that in would have helped balance out the focus on his declining health with his continued musical excellence. The longer version also had more analysis of Rory’s guitar techniques, more fan insights and some extra information on his early albums.