 | | Reviews | | |  RORY GALLAGHER
Wheels Within Wheels
CAPO/RCA CAPO 703 82876 503872
Before Irish blues-rock hero Gallagher's untimely death in 1995, he'd intended to make an acoustic-based album. Though famed for his four-decade rock credentials as global million-seller solo artist and founder of late '60s/early '70s band Taste, he cut his musical teeth on the likes of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters and had a solid love of folk music and some strong friendships with the scene's leading lights.
When brother Donal resolved to posthumously realise Rory's dream, some of these connections cropped up in the process. The material spans 25 years of Gallagher's career, encompassing skiffle, trad Irish, flamenco, American folk-blues and a touch of electric and including contributions/collaborations with Martin Carthy, Juan Martin, Lonnie Donegan and the Dubliners, to name a few. From the totally traditional She Moved Thro' The Fair/Ann Cran with Bert Jansch and the 'Irish-Elizabethan' self-composition Bratacha Dubha to the gloriously hooky Lonesome Highway (electric but totally apposite in this context), it's an album full of surprises and treats.
Top treat has to be the ten-minute jam with virtuoso banjo player Bela Fleck from the 1994 Montreux Jazz Festival: an impromptu onstage encounter in which a duelling banjo/slide guitar Amazing Grace segues into a stomping Walkin' Blues and Blue Moon of Kentucky. Pure magic … and they'd never even tuned up together!
Two listens to this and I'm hooked. Impacted on my purse too … made me dig out my old Taste vinyl and now I have to go and buy small shiny versions! That's the way of it with good music.
Mel McClellan - March 2003
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Folk & Acoustic
