#8 Shadow Play

 

Album: Photo Finish, 1978

Check also: Stage Struck (1980), Notes From San Francisco (2011) – and just about every live video of Shadow Play on YouTube.

 

The start of 1978 is perhaps one Rory Gallagher may not have described as happy. He had been working with Elliot Mazer on a new album that he became increasingly unsatisfied with. On the day he decided to scrap the album, he also broke his right thumb after trapping it in a taxi door returning to his hotel from the cinema, and wound up in hospital. He called it a bit of a Django Reinhardt moment, a reference to the revered Belgian jazz guitarist who lost the use of two fingers in a fire! Fortunately, Rory’s thumb did heal and didn’t affect his guitar playing.

Shortly after his stint in a splint, Rory changed the structure of his band, from the four-piece to a three-piece, removing drummer Rod de’Ath and pianist Lou Martin, who had been playing with Rory and bassist Gerry McAvoy since 1972. He brought in Scottish drummer Ted McKenna, who previously played in The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, which had just split. After a few festival dates, which included Ted’s first live show with Rory at the Macroom Mountain Dew Festival in Co. Cork, Ireland on June 24, the band went to Dieter Dierke’s studios near Cologne in Germany (read more about Ted and Rory working at Dierke’s in Spotlight On The G-Man #3 – ‘Bad Penny’) to record new material replacing that which Rory had discarded.

Photo Finish, released on October 1, 1978, was so-called because it literally just made the deadline! It retained some songs from the Mazer sessions that were re-recorded with Ted, but Rory added some new songs that he felt were, as he told one interviewer ‘in keeping’. One of these new songs was Shadow Play a somewhat surreal song, which Rory wrote on a 12-string acoustic guitar while in bed with a dose of ‘flu. Rory commented on the impact this had on the lyrics, describing the impact of the liminal state between sleep and being awake he was in while unwell.

"In the flinty light, it's midnight
And stars collide.
Shadows run, in full flight
To run, seek and hide.
I'm still not sure what part I play
In this shadow play, this shadow play.

In the half light, on this mad night
I hear a voice in time.
Well, I look back, see a half-smile
Then it's gone from sight.
Won't you tell me how I can find my way
In this shadow play, this shadow play.

Sounds come crashing
And I hear laughing
All those lights just blaze away.
I feel a little strange inside
A little bit of Jekyll, a little Mr. Hyde."

 Lyrically, this is probably the one song of Rory’s that can be read just like a poem when the words are laid out in a text. The world it describes is dark, terrifying, and unreal. As someone who has been dealing with an anxiety disorder for years, it’s the one I feel I can relate to the most on a personal level because that’s how having anxiety feels like to me. Dónal Gallagher says of Shadow Play on Rory’s website, “Starting with a pile-driving classic Gallagher guitar riff, this self doubting song gives us an insight into Rory’s double life, on and off stage, poetically described in the line – ‘A little bit of Jekyll, a little Mr. Hyde’.”

 There has been much comment on the duality of Rory’s nature, the confident firey performer on stage versus being quietly reticent off stage. He said, “…sometimes I don't recognize myself up there, and sometimes I don't recognize myself when I come off the stage. I don't know. I am not aware of this Jekyll and Hyde change. I mean, if I were as crazy offstage as I am onstage, people would lock me or they wouldn't talk to me.”

 Musically, it is a primal sound. To this day, when it is played live by one of the many excellent Rory groups at events ranging from the Ballyshannon Rory Gallagher Festival to a tribute night in a local venue, it gets the fans into a pogoing, dancing, sweat-drenched lather. It’s almost as if Shadow Play is an entity that possesses both the audience and the musicians who play it. At the Montreux Festival of 1979, Rory himself literally loses inhibitions and goes for broke, from duck walking all over the stage, jumping offstage to be with the delighted audience, throwing the drum microphones to the ground, dragging his Strat across the floor, and fanning both it and Gerry with a towel!

 Shadow Play also is a testament to Ted’s legacy as a brilliant drummer.  He wasn’t a stereotypical ‘powerhouse drummer’, he was in a league of his own. From the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, to Rory, to the Michael Schenker Group, to Ian Gillan and many other projects and band he played in, he left his mark. One fan commenting on archive footage of a Rory special from 1980 remarked that ‘the drummer is a monster!’ He was, but by all accounts a very friendly guy too!

 Ted also formed a strong partnership with Gerry McAvoy, joining him on drums for his 1980 solo album Bassics, joining in Gerry’s jam sessions at the Bridge House at Canning Town, London, and latterly in Gerry’s Band Of Friends, with whom Ted was still performing when he suddenly passed away during elective surgery on a hernia in January 2019. He is sadly missed.