Legendary Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher died at the age of 47, as a result of a chest infection he picked up following a liver transplant. Gallagher sold over 30 million records and once auditioned for the Rolling Stones when Mick Taylor left the band in 1972.
The irreplaceable Irish blues-rock guitar virtuoso Rory Gallagher was a cruelly young 47 when he died after complications from a liver transplant on 14th June 1995. Rory Gallagher was born in Ballyshannon in County Donegal and raised in Cork. He began to whip up a storm with his guitar sorcery when he co-founded the trio Taste in 1966, when he was a mere 18. When they started to go international, a couple of years later, they won admiring glances from fans of Cream (for whose famed farewell Royal Albert Hall concert they opened) and Blind Faith, the short-lived supergroup on whose North American dates they also guested. Taste were celebrated with the release in August 2015 of the four-CD I’ll Remember box set.
Taste only lasted until 1970 themselves, but by then they had played at that year’s Isle of Wight Festival and made two studio albums. The second, On The Boards, was a top 20 success in the UK, and when Gallagher swiftly started recording in his own name under a new solo deal with Atlantic Records, he made the top 40 with his self-titled debut and a swift follow-up, Deuce, both in 1971.
They were the first in a long line of releases to win either silver or gold certification, and it’s appropriate that the sole Gallagher album to make the UK top ten was one on which his celebrated, his blistering style as a live performer was commemorated, on 1972’s Live In Europe. That also enjoyed by far his longest chart run, at 15 weeks. The next year, Blueprint gave Rory his initial US album chart appearance.
Never one to court fame for its own sake, Gallagher continued to enhance his awesome reputation with his prolific recording and touring for the rest of his life. His last studio album, his 11th, was 1990’s Fresh Evidence. He had plans to tour the record, release an EP and more besides, at the time of his death.
But it was always all about the music for Rory Gallagher. “Regardless of fashions there are still blues and rockabilly fans,” he told Chris Welch in Metal Hammer in one of his last interviews. “Certainly for a while, the press overlooked rootsy music [which] they thought was old fashioned and irrelevant.
“But what I’m trying to do,” he continued, “is create music that respects the roots, but is based on new material as opposed to just me doing old blues, acid rock standards all the time. That’s the key really, to update the music itself by hitting it on the head, and coming up with new chord changes and tunes.”
In the later years of his life Gallagher developed a phobia of flying. To overcome this he received a prescription for a powerful sedative. This medication, combined with his alcohol use resulted in severe liver damage. Despite this he continued touring. By the time of his final performance on 10th January 1995 in the Netherlands, he was visibly ill and the tour had to be cancelled. Gallagher was admitted to King’s College Hospital in London in March 1995, and it was only then that the extent of his ill-health became apparent: his liver was failing and the doctors determined that in spite of his young age a liver transplant was the only possible course of action. After 13 weeks in intensive care, while waiting to be transferred to a convalescent home, his health suddenly worsened when he contracted a staphylococcal (MRSA) infection, and he died on 14th June 1995, at the age of 47.
