Rory Gallagher’s ’61 Stratocaster is one of the most iconic guitars of all time. Fender’s Custom Shop replica of it is a good guitar, make no doubt, but no craftsperson could truly recreate what that guitar has been through, where it’s travelled and what it represents. Bought in Crowley’s music store in Cork when Rory was just 15, the guitar was purchased when his mother took a leap of faith to underwrite the hire-purchase agreement for an instrument that was, at the time, beyond the means of most pro musicians.
And yet how he repaid her trust – the 14 solo albums that Rory recorded before his untimely death in 1995 remain a benchmark for all guitar players. Not only for the headlong, ecstatic energy of tracks such as Big Guns and Walk On Hot Coals but also the tender poignancy of songs such as I’ll Admit You’re Gone and I Fall Apart . Not all of his songs were recorded with the Strat, of course – Rory was a collector of all kinds of guitars, most of which he put to use in the studio or on stage – yet the ’61 Strat somehow contains them all, embodies all he was as a musician.
In the dark years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the sound of Rory playing this guitar in Belfast’s Ulster Hall brought people together, dispelling the shadow of gunman and car-bomb for a few fleeting hours. Its voice rang out from the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 and inspired a young Brian May with a lifelong love of how single-coil pickups could sound when they howled at.