Rory Gallagher was born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in 1948, and raised in Cork. His father sang and played accordion in local bands, while his mother had been a member of a theatre company. The young Rory got his first guitar at the age of nine, and his listening tastes gravitated from Lonnie Donegan to Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. The dramatic theater that emerges from this musicianship is hardly the contrived sort of mere crowd-pleasing, but that which arises from the natural stage presence of musicians fully and completely immersed in their playing. Likewise the rowdy but respectful crowd reaction: Rory Gallagher played with a raw, gutsy intensity that carried impact all the greater for the ever-so-slight but tangible restraint he employed, a touch that precluded any of the heavy-handed and blowzy self-indulgence that was the bane of British (and American) blues.

BAD PENNY with it’s swaggering tempo, is a perfect showcase for the three piece and performed live, gave the band room to stretch itself musically.

Onstage, it was another matter entirely, and Gallagher understandably jumped at the chance to record another live album. But this one would be different: it would be recorded in Ireland. At the time, in late 1973, Northern Ireland was in the iron grip of sectarian violence. The previous year, the Provisional IRA had killed more than 100 British soldiers and carried out roughly 1300 bombings; Loyalist paramilitaries had responded by carrying out their own campaign of violence.

He said, ‘It was probably the worst gig I’ve ever seen and the best gig I’ve ever seen’,” recalls Donal. I only joined a showband because there was nowhere else to go with an electric guitar,” he later explained. He was no virtuoso singer, and his vocals were rough around the edges (“His range, when he tries hard, is virtually nil,” said one critic), but the array of sounds he squeezed out of his trusty red Strat were loaded with rawness and emotion. More than anything, he wanted to capture the visceral energy of a live show, as McAvoy found out. He’d run himself into the ground, and by the time the album was finished he would be verging on a nervous breakdown,” says Donal “And then he would have to go out and do PR for it before touring to promote. He was 24/7.” He even witnessed the Sex Pistols’ infamous final show at San Francisco’s Winterland in January 1978.

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. 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.