Edged in Blue: A Rock & Roll Odyssey with Rory Gallagher - Ireland’s first rock star

Edged in Blue: A Rock n’ Roll Odyssey with Rory Gallagher

Author: Dónal Gallager with Jamie Dickson

ISBN-13: 978-1-78605-253-7

Publisher: Red Stripe Press

Guideline Price: €25; 368pp

Rory Gallagher was Ireland’s original rock star. Now, his beloved brother and manager, Dónal Gallagher, tells his side of Rory’s story in all its exhilarating and heartbreaking detail. In his preface, Dónal employs a delightful Irish phrase, “minding mice at the crossroads”, to describe the challenges he faces as the custodian of Rory’s estate and back catalogue in a post-internet world 31 years after his death.

The elder Gallagher connected and inspired this island and the wider world in a deeply profound and enduring way. Last year, a statue of the guitarist was unveiled outside Belfast’s Ulster Hall, a venue he insisted on playing at a time when most live music was being cancelled during the murderous fever pitch of the Troubles.

His Ballyshannon birthplace also immortalised Gallagher in bronze, as did his native city of Cork with a memorial sculpture. Dublin’s Temple Bar has Rory Gallagher Corner, while Ris-Orangis, a southern suburb of Paris, boasts Rue Rory Gallagher.

Born in Donegal and bred in Cork, via shorter stints in Derry, Birmingham and Coventry, Rory truly blossomed as a musician in Belfast, London and his favourite city in the world, Hamburg. Dónal Gallagher documents how Rory turned music on its head and influenced artists of the peerless calibre of Jimi Hendrix, The Edge, Slash from Guns N’ Roses, Johnny Marr of The Smiths, and BB King’s guitarist Joe Bonamassa, who contributes a glowing and loving foreword to this volume.

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Jamie Dickson, who holds the post of editor-in-chief of Guitarist magazine, weaves and marshals Gallagher’s recollections into an entertaining narrative that straddles the old and new Irelands, chronicling how the Catholic Church tried to close dancehalls during Lent and banish the devil’s music from this sacred isle.

Edged in Blue is the substantial fly-on-the-wall biography by the man who knew him best that Rory aficionados have been patiently waiting for. Tragically, he died far too young, and Dónal poignantly revisits the sadness, grief and confusion of Rory’s agonising final days in a London hospital. Premature death has extinguished many of our brightest musical lights in recent times, but in these revealing pages, and his classic songs, the one and only Rory Gallagher is still very much alive.

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