Headstock

“The Fender headstock is iconic – the way they shape the head with the tuning pegs on one side and the half curl,” says Dónal Gallagher, brother of Rory. “That’s what very much comes to mind with Rory’s guitar head. For instance, Fender does an acoustic guitar, but it still has the same headstock shape".

 Neck

“In the late 1970s, Rory had difficulty keeping the guitar in tune,” says Dónal. “He realised that the neck was so saturated with sweat from gigging that it began to warp. We contacted Fender in California and explained the problem. They made him a second neck as close as they could. The guitar neck was replaced. Rory left the original neck at his place in London.

“About a year later, he returned to it, to find that it had dried out, and was good again. So the original guitar neck was put back on. I’ve often said that the guitar has Rory’s DNA in it. There’s a touch of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman about it. Flann O’Brien’s novel is about how a policeman travels around on a bicycle and he actually becomes part of the bicycle. Rory and his guitar had that kind of relationship.”

 Tremolo (whammy bar)

“In the 1960s, one of the most fashionable things about the Fender Stratocaster was that it had this unique Tremolo,” says Dónal. “Americans call it a whammy bar. Because the tremolo was part of the bridge mechanism it would rock the whole string length, changing the pitch. The whole instrument was so well contoured. The design was of that time. Its body shape looks like an E-Type Jaguar. Particularly the guitar’s upper part is moulded so its arm can be snuggled into.

“If the player was playing a string he could lean on this tremolo and change the pitch of the sound, getting this lovely change. It was widely used by Hank Marvin and The Shadows.

“The tremolo could be loosened out or taken out from the bridge. I remember one of the first things Rory did, a few days after he bought the guitar, was screw off the tremolo and put it to one side. He never put it on again. It was found years later in a little plastic bag; it had never been used.”

 Tuners

“Rory's Fender obviously has six strings,” explains Dónal. “Rory replaced the sixth tuner, which holds the E string, the thickest string. He switched to a different manufacturer, Grover. He felt it was a better tune peg to hold. Obviously, with the attack Rory had on the guitar tuning was important.

“Rory had a natural volume in his hands. He didn't depend necessarily on amplification, but he would obviously make use of every string he could so he did that modification. In fact, when Fender did a signature model – they made a very good replica of Rory’s Fender – they had to go to the other company, Grover, and buy their tuning peg to make it as close to Rory’s as possible.”

Rory Gallagher once gave some extra, spiritual context to his guitar’s rogue tuner in an interview quoted on the artist’s official website: “The machine heads have been changed a million times, except this odd man here [the sixth tuner]. I left the sixth one out for the gypsies. It fell one night and the back came out of it, so I just left it there. It was a little bit spooky so I left it alone. It’s a superstitious thing.”

 Pickup selector and controls

“A thing that Rory did, which was kind of unique, is that because he didn't have the tremolo, he figured out that he could switch out the three pots on the guitar,” says Dónal Gallagher. “One was a volume pot. The Fender also gave you the possibility to switch to the three pickups it had; the pickup closer to the bridge being the sharpest, the more high-pitched whereas the bottom pick folds at an angle – it picks up more the base notes.

“In Rory's case, he did two things. One is that he got the three-way selector switch amended, changing it to a five-way switch so he could put two pickups on a phase at the one time by centring the gear change, for want of a better phrase; he could balance it in between the pickups.

“Rory switched around the bottom pot so it was the volume pot. He would actually extend his little finger all the way down, and while he was playing with a plectrum, he had the ability to use his small finger to rub off what was now the volume pot and by rolling the volume pot up and down while he was playing it would give the same effect as a tremolo, or a vamping effect.”

Rory himself said during an interview with Guitar magazine that the tinkering gave him an extra dimension: “It’s just such a resonant guitar. I love the three pickups, especially the middle one. I like the five-way selector and the way the volume and tones work – the guitar never gets ‘dead’ if you take it below 7.”

 Strings

“Rory was the number one hero of Johnny Marr, the guitarist from The Smiths,” says Dónal. “RTÉ screened a documentary earlier this year called Calling Card, which features an interview with Johnny in which he talks about how puzzled he was about how Rory could break a string on stage, manage to keep playing, change the string and tune it pitch perfect – in the middle of a number.

“I witnessed it myself many times. Off stage, you’d be conscious that one of Rory’s strings had gone. It might have been at the start of a number. I’ve seen times where he bust two strings and continued on. It all goes back to his early showband training, days before bands had teams of roadies. Nowadays, guitar techs are almost stars in their own right. It came natural to him. With a showband, and a string goes, but the show must go on. Rory just had this mental expertise of being able to keep playing, by maybe changing the shape of his fingers on the neck so he could keep the thing going by improvising some notes.”

 Input Jack

“Fender got the jack plug right from the start – it slipped in at an angle,” says Dónal. “It didn't get in the way of Rory’s right hand, or voluntarily come out, particularly as Rory was a mile-a-minute across the stage.

“What comes to mind with the amps is a night on tour with ZZ Top, a double package, playing the college circuit in the early 1970s. ZZ Top had gone off the scale in terms of their popularity in America, but they were terrified of Rory being on before them stealing their thunder. There was a rider in the contract which stated that Rory wouldn’t use any pyrotechnics on stage.

“We were in Wichita. Needless to say, Rory was going over so well. It was rocking so hard. The crowd was going absolutely mental. ZZ Top were getting nervous. Their road manager was on top of me: ‘He’s gotta cool down.’ They knew he’d be a hard act to follow. I'm indicating to Rory with my watch that his time was winding up.

“The next thing, two jet flames shot out of Rory’s old Tweed amplifier, which he had modified by fitting a miniature fan that would blow onto the valves to keep them cool. What happened was that the cooling fan was blowing heat from the amplifiers onto the speakers, which had nitro-glycerine around them, so that ignited and then the fan pushed these flames straight across the stage. Of course, the audience then went double mental. They’d never seen anything like this ever happen.

“I ran and got a fire extinguisher. Rory screamed: ‘Don’t spray it. You’ll destroy the amp forever!’ One of the road crew threw a blanket over it. The crowd was still going ballistic. Rory walked off stage nearly in tears. The next thing ZZ Top’s management were down on us, saying, ‘You guys broke the contract! We said no pyrotechnics. How dare you? How could you pull a stunt like that?’”

 Pick guard

“The thing I used to worry a lot about was when you had to take off the pickguard to get at the pickups because it came off as one piece with wires still running to the jack plug,” says Dónal. “You had to be very delicate when you were going to tackle any small soldering job. With Rory sweating gallons every night, with the sweat running into his equipment, there was a problem with the screws that held down the pickguard – they were all getting rusted. I would do some running repairs occasionally.

“I remember returning to Corona, California, to the Fender factory after Rory passed away. They hadn't figured out how they were going to replicate his guitar. I met the guys in their custom shop. When we got out the guitar, the first thing they spotted was the screws. They asked: ‘How the hell did you replace the screws?’ We used to use woodfiller putty because the holes were getting bigger, but we still used the same dimension screws.”

 Body

The body shape of the 1961 Fender Stratocaster, which was manufactured in their old factory in Fullerton, California, is like a spaceship. Gallagher’s Strat endured more wear than most, particularly deterioration to its sunburst-coloured paintwork. The body looks as if it’s been heavily sanded down. “It probably took a bit of a beating too when it was stolen,” adds Dónal, referring in an incident in Dublin in 1967.

Rory’s band Taste’s van was broken into on Harcourt Street, and his Strat was taken, along with a borrowed Telecaster. Rory contacted the producers of Garda Patrol – a crime appeals programme on RTÉ television – to publicise the theft. A few days later, the guitars were found in a ditch near the South Circular Road, with some strings missing and the bodies a bit bruised.