A Taste of what made Rory great

I WAS too young to see Taste live. When Rory Gallagher formed his blues band in 1966, I was in primary school. When the band split up in 1970, after four astonishing years, I was in secondary school.

Now a concert in the Everyman Theatre in Cork this Friday will feature the new manifestation of what Rory and his band put together 51 years ago.

John Wilson’s Taste is led by Belfast-born drummer John Wilson, who, with along bassist Richie McCracken, joined Taste in 1968.

Rory, John and Richie enjoyed the peak years of the band’s success, culminating in their legendary Isle of Wight Festival appearance in 1970, when Taste shared the bill with luminaries like Jimmy Hendrix and The Who.

The band also recorded two seminal albums: Taste and On The Boards. These recordings showcased Rory’s early songwriting prowess with stand-out tracks like What’s Going On, Blister on the Moon and Born on the Wrong Side of Time.

The future was theirs, but sadly it was not to be. Issues about money and management brought the great blues adventure that was Taste to an end and Rory began his celebrated solo career.

But Taste are embodied again by Wilson, with Sam Davidson on lead guitar and Alan Niblock on bass, and with the spirit and songs of Rory Gallagher, as the band returns home to Cork.

And Taste was, first and foremost, a Cork band.

In his very fine book, Rory Gallagher: His Life and Times (Collins Press), Marcus Connaughton chronicled Rory’s early days in Cork.

Gallagher moved here as a young boy with his family from Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, where he was born, living first on MacCurtain Street.

Connaughton’s book chronicles his passion for playing the guitar, his precocious talent in mastering the instrument, and at the age of 15 being taken on by The Fontana Showband, and playing the dance halls.

But, in essence, Rory was a rocker and bluesman. Immersing himself in the roots of guitar- playing, his reference points became artists like Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Freddie King and Son House. His own self-expression as a musician and a songwriter was always going to reflect this sooner or later.

In 1966, with Corkmen Eric Kitteringham on bass and Norman Damery on drums and Rory on lead guitar, Taste was born. Irish rock history had turned a new page.

But I missed all that. I was too young. And for some reason my father had always wanted me to play the accordion — perhaps that was down to his love for accordionist Dermot O’Brien and the huge hit he had with The Merry Ploughboy in 1966, the year Taste was formed.

But I didn’t learn to play the accordion. Instead, having seen her on TV, I had a massive crush on Eileen Reid in her uniform with The Cadets Showband and I hid photos of her in my bedroom that I had cut out of Spotlight magazine.

I had joined the Pioneer Club at the Fr Mathew Hall and the pinnacle of my time there had been working back-stage on a concert by The Miami, when Dickie Rock still sang with them.

Girls sat in the front rows screaming for Dickie. This was the big time.

But then I found myself in the Savoy Cinema one night in the early 1970s.

How or why I was at a Rory Gallagher gig in the then cavernous 2,000 seat cinema, I cannot recall. I was only vaguely aware of Rory and knew nothing about Taste, his band which had just split up.

There were no uniforms and fancy lights here. This was primitive, pared down, bare stage stuff. A couple of amps, a microphone and a drum kit. A man in denim with straggly long hair, drenched in sweat, who performed with his Stratocaster guitar as if his life depended on it, at that moment, on that stage.

It was frightening. It was exhilarating. It was loud. I had never experienced anything quite like it in my young life.

Thus began a process of looking back to try and understand where this had come from, combined with what would become an annual pilgrimage to a Rory gig, usually at the City Hall at Christmas. As was so brilliantly captured in the film Irish Tour ’74, Rory’s gigs in the City Hall were like People’s Republic of Cork rallies, long before that term was invented.

It was a rite of passage. Rory was being embraced by the world but he was one of ours. He sang American-based blues but he was Cork.

As Rory howled into the mic that he was ‘Going to my Hometown’ and the seething mass of bodies at the front of the stage yelled its approval and bounced up and down on the sprung floor, our city was the centre of the universe, and nothing would ever improve upon this collective roar of shared identity.

I saw Rory perform in Cork for the last time in the Everyman Theatre in the early 1990s. A dark, intense midnight gig which pre-figured the further darkness that would soon envelop him.

But Taste is where Rory’s journey began. It is fitting that the songs of that great band should now bounce off the walls of the old Victorian theatre on Rory’s beloved MacCurtain Street.

Pat Talbot is a theatre producer/director/playwright.

John Wilson’s Taste play the Everyman Theatre on Friday, November 24.