From Woodstock to Wings: a rock'n'roll survivor's tale
The beat goes on: guitar virtuoso Henry McCullough, who impressed Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix, is back with a new album
Who was the only Irishman to play the original Woodstock? It sounds like the perfect pub quiz question; the answer is Henry McCullough, a guitar virtuoso from Portstewart, Co Derry, who played the legendary rock festival as part of Joe Cocker's Grease band.
"Kids come up and ask me what it was really like," says McCullough in a soft Northern burr, speaking from his home in the countryside between Coleraine and Ballymoney. "It was just a huge festival with a big stage and a big PA. That was it.
"We were flown in by helicopter about an hour before our spot. You did your gig and you hung about for an hour and then you flew off again. That's about all that most of the artists would have experienced of Woodstock. But then the movie came out and the legend grew."
But Woodstock is just one illustrious chapter in what has been an extraordinary career. After the Beatles split up, McCullough went on to record and tour with Paul McCartney's Wings; was signed by George Harrison's label; supported Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd on early tours; and recorded with everyone from Donovan and Marianne Faithfull.
Not bad going for a Northern lad who started in the music business by playing in showbands from Enniskillen in the early Sixties. So how did he end up in a band with Beatle Paul?
"It was from 1971-73," he explains. "Paul had been up in Scotland with Linda [McCartney] and Denny Laine, who was the singer in the original Moody Blues. I got a call. I went up to Paul's place in the Mull of Kintyre. He's got 300 acres or so and a few wee cabins. He said: 'Do you want to join the band?' I said: 'No problem'.
"The apprenticeship I had in the showbands stood me in good stead because he didn't want just a blues player or just a country player in Wings. He wanted somebody that could do love songs. I was adaptable.
"We toured Europe in an open-top bus that had been painted in the Sergeant Pepper vein. If you're floating around in the south of France in a psychedelic open-top bus, you don't have too many cares!"
What about the fans?
"Beatlemania didn't touch me or my bandmates," he says. "The only one who had to run for the bus would have been Paul. It was a great time!"
Before joining Wings, McCullough was at the centre of our Green Beat scene, which was chronicled a few years ago in Darragh O'Halloran's book Green Beat: The Forgotten Era of Irish Rock. McCullough remembers playing guitar with Sixties' r'n'b acolytes The People, whose admirers included the likes of the young Phil Lynott and Paul Brady ... and Jimi Hendrix.
"Me and Jimi had the same management," says McCullough. "Chas Chandler had been the bass player in the original Animals. He was more of a businessman than a musician. He saw Hendrix at The Scene club in New York and brought him to England. And he heard us in a club called Middle Earth on Tottenham Court Road in London.
"We were called The People and he changed our name to Eire Apparent and sent us to Spain for three months to write songs -- but we only came back with one. Any gigs that Jimi did in those days we would have supported him.
"It was something else to be sitting at the side of the stage looking at this great artist. People were just gobsmacked. I remember when Cream were doing a gig and Chas Chandler asked if Jimi could get up and play a few songs. When he came on, Eric Clapton just put his guitar down and walked off stage. He couldn't cope."
McCullough could easily have been a rock'n'roll casualty like Hendrix. But he came out the other side and now, when he's not touring, prefers to tend his chickens with his partner Josie.
McCullough has a new album out, titled Poor Man's Moon. High-class bluesy guitar work-outs sit side-by-side with country and gospel-tinged ballads. The record is a collaboration with his old friend Eamon Carr, the former Horslips drummer and current rock critic with the Evening Herald.
The partnership is in full bloom on the opening song The Burial Ground. Double-bass, harmonium, piano and keening pedal steel set the scene, as McCullough sings, in a lived-in, weary voice, of a rendezvous with his lover under a yew tree in a graveyard. Devastatingly, he later sings: "I lost my love to the burial ground/I planted that tree in the burial ground."
It's a killer moment, his voice now haunted, inconsolable, broken by grief. It's simply one of the saddest songs you'll hear.
"A lot of people really like that song," he says. "I know a few people that have shed tears listening to it. There's something about it that does that to people."
