In 1975 the Rolling Stones flew Rory Gallagher to Rotterdam to jam with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. After a couple of days he left a note with his contact details, boarded a commercial flight, and went off to play his own tour of Japan. That decision captures the Irish guitarist's fierce independence. Born in Ballyshannon in 1948 and raised in Cork, he discovered Muddy Waters and Lead Belly through American Forces Network radio, taught himself chords on a plastic ukulele at age nine, and bought a 1961 Fender Stratocaster on credit as a kid, then paid it off by playing five- and six-hour sets of sanitized pop hits in the Fontana Showband.

This episode traces his 1965 live television ambush, when he swapped an approved Buddy Holly cover for Larry Williams's Slow Down, the rise of his power trio Taste, its peak at the 1970 Isle of Wight fe ...