On this day – 15th December – back in 1992, I had the pleasure of supporting Rory Gallagher at the famous Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, Holland with my band Albatross.
We had been finishing up some dates in the south of France and I’d called our booking agent in Holland to check on gigs for the following February/March period. We usually toured Holland around that time of the year.
So our agent asked me – “where are you right now?” I said – “in the south of France, why?” He replied – “well, you’ll have to travel through Holland on your way home because I have two dates for you in Paradiso.” “Great” I answered, “who with?”. “Oh, some other Irish guitarist… someone called Rory Gallagher. Have you ever heard of him?” He was teasing of course because he knew what it meant to me. It would have been hard to give me any better news that that!
We supported him on the 15th and the 16th. Those were great gigs for us. It was the perfect crowd for us. We had the normal 45 minute set you get as a support act, so we asked the organisers if we could go on 10 minutes earlier. They didn’t understand why. “But there will be no one in the hall” they said, but they allowed it. That gave us time to get really warned up so that when they opened the doors ten minutes later we were already in full flight.