By Luke Voogt
Portarlington is a long way from the streets of Dublin where Darren Gallagher grew up.
The Ocean Grove musician, better known as Gallie, will bring his rootsy storytelling to the National Celtic Festival for the first time next weekend.
“I’m very much looking forward to it,” the 47-year-old said. “I’m revisiting some old songs and writing a new album.”
Gallagher will play a bunch of new songs about his homeland at the festival, which starts on Friday 9 June.
“I’m going to stretch my arm on the Celtic stuff,” he said. “It’s great because I’ll have audience who will want to hear Celtic stories.”
Gallagher grew up in Ireland when unemployment was at 19 per cent.
“I remember the queues on Wednesday when you went to collect the dole,” he said.
So Gallagher pursued music at local pubs.
“I was playing in a lot of bands at the time,” he said. “It’s better to be an unemployed musician than an unemployed bricklayer.”
But in the mid-90s he received a call from the Canary Islands which changed everything.
“There was an Irish guy who owned a bar there,” he said.
Gallagher and some band mates lapped up the blue skies, blues seas and white sands on the island paradise off the west of Africa.
“It was like a movie, it was as far away from reality as you could possibly get,” he said.
Soon after he got a new gig in a skiing village in Austria and phoned his band mates to join him.
“Next thing we know we were skiing down mountains,” he said. “This was winning the lotto for us.”
“I just spent 20 years travelling around the world, surfing or skiing during the day and playing at night, depending which country we were in.”
He met his Ballarat-born wife at the skiing village shortly after arriving.
“We were living out of a suitcase,” he said. “Then she got pregnant and she said we might as well go back to Australia – so we did.”
In 2011 the couple moved to Melbourne and three years later they moved to Ocean Grove, to raise their two boys, now aged five and three.
Gallagher continued his musical career in Australia and has won acclaim locally and nationally.
“It’s all I’ve ever done, so it’s all I know,” he said.
Gallagher’s talent for imagery can transport listeners from the bloody battlefields of the American Civil War to a lover’s bed, promoters said.
He looked forward to playing at the National Celtic Festival.
“I live 15-20 minutes away, so I’ll just go there, get some beers and get a taxi home – so it’s great!”
