Joe Bonamassa won’t be forgetting about the first three nights of July 2025 in a hurry. The blues supremo performed a trio of shows to a 5000-strong sold-out crowd at Cork festival Live At The Marquee.
The setlists, however, weren’t your typical Bonamassa fare.
Instead of playing any originals, he was booked to pay tribute to late local hero Rory Gallagher, something which the American singer/guitarist described as “the biggest challenge of my musical life”.
On his latest live album and concert film, The Spirit Of Rory Live From Cork, Bonamassa can be seen doffing his cap to a Northern Irish legend – a man whose influence on the guitar world cannot be overstated.
For Bonamassa, it was a great honour to celebrate the music given how he’d been living with these songs since his very earliest years. It speaks volumes that Bonamassa’s debut album of 2000 opens with 1973 Gallagher cut Cradle Rock, the same song that opened the performances in Cork and kicks off this latest release.
“Cradle Rock has always been quite special to me,” he smiles, talking to MusicRadar in the weeks following his Spring 2026 European tour. “My introduction to Rory was the Irish Tour ’74 album. It’s interesting that when we went started working together, all of the musicians in this entirely new band ended up defaulting to those live versions. It was meant to be.”
The new line-up included Jeremy Stacey [King Crimson, Noel Gallagher, Sheryl Crow] on drums. “Someone I’ve always wanted to work with,” Bonamassa says. “He’s so good because he understands English music – there’s an English pocket that a lot of American drummers don’t get.”
Also in the band were local guitarist Conor Brady, bassist Aongus Ralston [The Waterboys] and Lachy Doley on keyboards.
Together the quintet sought to bring to life legendary songs like Bed Penny, A Million Miles Away and Tattoo'd Lady – which given Rory Gallagher’s distinct musical personality had to come from the heart.
Like other blues trailblazers including Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gallagher had the tendency to pull things out of thin air, approaching performances from a very human, off-the-cuff and spontaneous perspective, with very much his own sense of time and feel.
“Yeah, he was raw and honest,” agrees Bonamassa. “It became very clear to me that they took the razorblade to a lot of the Irish Tour ’74 tracks to fit them onto vinyl. Some of those versions went on for 10 or 12 minutes, but they’re not like that on the record.”
He continues: “So [producer] Kevin Shirley and I sat at Abbey Road for three days asking ourselves how deep we wanted to go. In the end we decided it would be better to have more songs than longer versions of less songs.”
The guitarist was also adamant this would be more of a loose and heartfelt celebration than a clinical note-for-note replication of timeless songs.
“Honestly, I didn’t replicate any of them,” he shrugs. “I was Joe Bonamassa playing Rory Gallagher. I wasn’t going to use an SG or a Les Paul. It had to be a Strat, plus a Vox and a Twin, which was basically the Rory 1974 rig.”
The details of the rig had been confirmed by Rory’s nephew Daniel Gallagher who, as MD of The Rory Gallagher Archives, has spent much of his adult life working through his uncle’s equipment and recordings.
“Daniel told me that – it was a Vox and a high-powered Twin,” nods Bonamassa. “I also used the Dumble as a gain boost for some parts.”
The hero worship went a step further, with Cork Public Museum loaning the guitarist Rory Gallagher’s very own 1930 National Triolian resonator to be used for the song As The Crow Flies, which Bonamassa describes as “a big deal”.
At one point he was even trying to loan out Gallagher’s iconic 1961 Fender Strat from the National Museum Of Ireland.
“Getting Rory’s Strat from the National Museum would have taken an act of government,” he shrugs. “The Irish Prime Minister would have had to intervene. I’m actually kinda relieved we didn’t do that because it would have felt a little cosplay. But having that resonator for one song was really good in the end.”
For Bonamassa a big part of the electric tone came from something else that also used to belong to Gallagher, though much smaller in size.
“The real trick was having Rory’s Number 1 Rangemaster,” he admits. “The Gallaghers were kind enough to gift it to me. When I plugged that Treble Booster into the AC30s, I was like, ‘Now I fucking understand where all this came from!’ You can’t really dial in anything pedestrian.”
He adds: “Plug a Strat into that pedal and those amps and it’s like ‘Holy shit!’ We got close tonally. But when I listen to the record, it just sounds like me.
“Maybe that was the point to begin with. There was no point doing an anorak sounds-alike thing. I just can’t. That’s not me. Rory is Rory and there’s only one of him. It’s like trying to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. You’ll never do it.”
Joe Bonamassa's new live album “The Spirit Of Rory Live From Cork” is released on CD + DVD, CD + Blu-ray, and red marble vinyl by J&R Adventures.
Order the album from the UK and Europe here – https://lnk.to/JoeBonamassa. Order the album from North America here – https://joeb.me/OrderTheSpiritOfRory
