Not your average blues lyrics
Rory Gallagher (1948–1995) is often described as one of the greatest blues-rock guitarists of the twentieth century. For over four decades, he toured across the globe, building a strong international reputation through his incendiary live performances. The overwhelming focus on his exceptional musicianship has, however, taken attention away from his songwriting, playing down both the quality and depth of his lyrics.
Often unfairly tagged as ‘mundane’ or mere ‘shortcuts’ to his guitar solos, Gallagher’s lyrics were, in fact, intelligent and incisive, drawing heavily on his passion for and knowledge of crime novels. This was a theme that the bluesman drew upon throughout his career, although it became a core part of his music from the late 1970s onwards as he looked for ways to bring ‘more artistry’ to his songwriting and stretch the lyrical possibilities of the blues beyond standards like ‘Little Red Rooster’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’.
How crime fiction inspired Rory’s blues lyrics
Gallagher was an avid reader, particularly enjoying hardboiled fiction – a style of early-mid twentieth-century American crime writing set in an urban environment full of corruption and deceit. Hardboiled fiction was typically narrated by an imperfect hero – often an emotionally resilient, hard-drinking private detective – who lived by his wits rather than seeking rational solutions. Standing in direct contrast to traditional detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, hardboiled detectives were deeply cynical and somewhat detached from the world around them, yet had a strong moral code and were able to resist the charms of the genre’s typical femme fatale (Nyman, 1997).
Gallagher’s love for the genre started as a child through trips to the cinema with his brother Dónal, where The Maltese Falcon (a screen adaptation of the 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel about Detective Sam Spade’s search for a jewel-encrusted falcon statuette) and Purple Noon (based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 psychological thriller The Talented Mr Ripley) had a significant impact on him. He frequently cited Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as his favourite authors, but he also enjoyed the works of Patricia Highsmith, Peter Cheyney and Walter Mosley (Muise, 2002). All of these influences merged together in his songwriting, resulting in a unique form of ‘hardboiled blues’.
Gallagher spoke often in interviews about his love for hardboiled fiction and the strong parallels that he saw between the life of a detective and that of a musician. As he told Tuam Herald in 1988:
However, it was not so much the violence of the stories that intrigued Gallagher as the psychological aspects – something that his brother Dónal emphasised in a 2002 interview:
According to Gallagher’s nephew Daniel, his uncle had a cynical attitude towards the music industry and – in the same vein as a hardboiled detective – saw it as a ‘villain/mob type which he ha[d] to duck and weave in and out of to survive’. Gallagher preferred to remain fiercely independent and keep outside the mainstream, adhering to his own strict moral code when it came to ‘gimmicks’ like releasing singles, recording videos or appearing on Top of the Pops. He was, therefore, drawn to similar characters like the detectives Philip Marlowe, the Continental Op or Sam Spade, who operated alone, stood up for their own beliefs and maintained a certain emotional distance from others to do so.
Hardboiled blues lyrics analysis – Defender
Perhaps the apex of Gallagher’s hardboiled
blues came with 1987’s Defender – as close to a concept album as he ever
got – with each song portraying the sleazy underbelly of a city and offering a
tough, realist look at the constant fight between morality and survival.
On the album’s opener, ‘Kickback City’, Gallagher perfectly captures the gritty urban environment of the hardboiled novel with his calculated realism about the corruption and misery of Kickback City – a place so soulless that it could ‘take a child’s smile and turn it into stone’. This is followed by ‘Loanshark Blues’, which was inspired by the 1954 Marlon Brandon movie On the Waterfront and features a desperate character who has borrowed money from a loanshark and, unable to pay it back, fears for his life. ‘Continental Op’, on the other hand, pays direct homage to Dashiell Hammett and the no-nonsense, wise-cracking detective who featured in many of his stories, while ‘Seven Days’ tells the tale of a man who has committed an unnamed crime and is expecting to face the electric chair, yet wants to settle some scores first.
For Gallagher, Defender marked a turning point in his career, bringing a new feeling and maturity to his songs as he incorporated characters on the borderline of the law. He would continue to explore these themes in his music until his untimely death in 1995 at the age of 47.
Real blues lyrics meet real crime fiction
Gallagher also saw links between hardboiled fiction and the blues genre more generally, particularly in terms of the ‘sparse, sharp and bittersweet — usually bitter’ tone of the writing. This link was emphasised by best-selling crime novelist Ian Rankin – a self-confessed Gallagher fan who mentions the guitarist on several occasions in his phenomenally successful Rebus novels:
In 2013, Rankin, in fact, teamed up with the Gallagher estate to develop the unique, immersive boxset Kickback City, which featured a selection of Gallagher’s crime-based songs and a novella, The Lie Factory, written by Rankin in the hardboiled style and based around Gallagher’s lyrics. Widely praised by critics, Kickback City sought to provide belated recognition of a dimension of Gallagher’s creative output that had hitherto been unrecognised.
It is rather fitting that the fiction that
once inspired Gallagher to write songs has now been written with his songs as
the very foundation. As Rankin joked upon the release of Kickback City,
it could well be that the boxset ends up one day in Rebus’s record collection
and appears in a future Rebus story.
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