Daniel exclaims. “As we were moving them all over,
I noted when I thought, ‘Oh that looks a bit odd...’- things that had stuff written on that I hadn’t heard
of before. And we were able to say: ‘Well, let’s digitise
that and see what’s on it!’
“We found stuff that we never knew existed. There
was a tape just marked, ‘Rory with Van Morrison’.
And I was like, ‘If we’ve got a fucking track and he’s
convinced Van to do the vocals...’ So straight away,
I got them to digitise it, but it turns out that Van was
just sat in the control room having a cigarette and a
drink listening to the band record, but apparently the
engineer wanted to mark the occasion!”
This deep dive wasn’t all wild-goose chases,
however – sometimes the archive’s eccentric labelling
turned up some gems.
“There’s a full electric version of As The Crow Flies
with the full band that would have been recorded at
Polydor Studios in 1973, the same session as Tattoo...
but it was written ‘Crawford Files’, or that’s how it
looked on the tape! So I was like, ‘Is this some old
TV show that he’s recorded?!’ But we digitised it,
and found these two takes of him doing As The Crow
Flies, which he later decided to go on and do solo
with the National resonator.
RORY GALLAGHER38