Album – Tattoo, 1973
For his fourth solo studio album, Rory Gallagher and
band kicked things off in Cork City, Rory’s hometown. The Shandon Boat Club was
hired for rehearsals , and as Dónal Gallagher put it, allowed the group to make
as much noise as they wanted, with Rory able to return to his family home
in the evening.
In a way, rehearsing at the Shandon Boat Club was
something of a rewind for Rory. As a teenager, playing in the Fontana Showband,
later renamed The Impact, Rory would have been on the bill at many shows played
here and other boat clubs, as they were regular venues for local bands. There’s
a tale somewhere that circa 1974, Rory stood in as guitarist as a favour to a local
showband, though by that point the showband scene in Ireland was dying out.
Using the Shandon Boat Club allowed Rory to have the
group rehearse material for what would be the Tattoo album thoroughly. The
line-up at that point of Rod de’Ath (drums), Lou Martin (piano/keyboard) and
Gerry McAvoy (bass) hadn’t been together that long, Rory adding Rod and Lou in
mid-1972. However, they had toured a lot in that time, and quickly became a
tight band.
The change of scene by rehearsing in Cork also seems
to have added fuel to the fire, as they sound nuclear on Tattoo. Rory often
faced the criticism that he couldn’t reproduce the same energy in a recording
studio that his live shows had. Well, logically, of course not. There’s a
massive difference between performing on stage in front of an eager crowd and
recording in a studio. They are both vastly different environments. And it
doesn’t detract from the quality of music on the studio albums. If anything, on
Tattoo, what you hear is a group of tightly meshed musicians whose playing
grabs you.
The album, released on 11 November 1973, was one in
which the critics saw a broadening of Rory’s songwriting. It’s also the one
recommended to many new fans as a good starting point in Rory’s music. While it
contains two songs that would become two of his classics, ‘Tattoo’d Lady’ and
‘A Million Miles Away’, there are several other gems to be found.
‘Sleep On A Clothesline’ takes its title from a well
worn idiom that you feel so tired you could, well, sleep on a clothesline. It
can be traced back to when the homeless, too poor to pay for a bed for the night
but having enough money to not have to sleep rough, would pay for a spot in a
room where a rope was stretched from wall to wall. You would sit on a bench, shared
with others paying a similar fee, and sleep sitting up, resting against the
rope. Mention of it can be found in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris
and London.
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| A classic example of any photo to be found in a school history textbook |
It seems like the kind of evocative image that would
spark the imagination, and it certainly did just that for Rory. With the
extensive touring he did, sleep was something that could be hard to come by, sometimes
being up for a few days on the go. Rory was also an insomniac, so would stay up
well into the wee hours. He must have felt so tired that at times he could
probably have slept anywhere that seemed comfortable.
He puts this to able use in the song. ‘Sleep On A
Clothesline’ lyrically smacks of the strange tinge of the world of the sleep
deprived, with a quiet tinge of desperation and frustration of a man looking
all over the place, exhausted, for his other half, who’s apparently wandered
off the face of the earth. It’s similar to the plight of the protagonist in
Elvis Presley’s ‘Kentucky Rain’, who has taken it to the next level after
waking up to find his lover gone and been searching for days non-stop since. Though
while Elvis’ is a slice of Southern melancholia, Rory’s is a rocker, yet it
still manages to retain a sense of urgency, the lyrics showing that there’s a
bit more anger and frustration at the wanderlust by the girlfriend, which comes
across in the vocals and guitar, as well as the lyrics.
Like ‘Kentucky Rain’, we don’t see any resolution for the searching man in ‘Sleep On A Clothesline’. For all we know, he’s still out there looking. It’s a great piece of short fiction wrapped up in a song.
