Many of us have ventured across the water to earn our crust. Or as Christy Moore sings: …..you can’t live on love, on love aloneSo you sail cross the ocean, away cross the foam Missing You, Christy Moore And Gerry certainly did his stint away cross the foam. You might be aware of the recent…

It was a real joy to come across an interview from Omagh Today on Gerry’s dude days in Omagh. Brian DaMuff Murphy posted the interview on The radio ulster Gerry Anderson fan group on Facebook. The group is a wonderful resource and a fabulously friendly community of Gerry’s fans (ourselves included, of course! ;)). As…

Gerry wasn’t a man for camping, or indeed for a tent at all. Neither did he love getting wet, and he certainly did his best at all times to avoid peril. He did not readily welcome discomfort. How ironic was it then, that tents played quite a major part in his early career at events…

Matters of hair, or its scarcity, placed high on Gerry’s list of priorities. He was particularly follicularly sensitive himself, given what he referred to as his “skylight”, and was always curious to find out how people prevented or treated baldness. So, he took that growing curiosity and put it to work, resulting in the 2012…

As you might expect, Gerry’s introduction to life as a musician on the road was neither wholly planned, nor strategically timed. Mind you, it wasn’t entirely accidental either as it was bound to happen one way or the other. As a casual musician, he, along with his fellow similarly employed musos, and, of course, the…

When we write articles for this blog, we draw on memory, the writing, photos and music Gerry left behind, plus the accounts of his friends and those he worked with. So, we get quite a well-rounded picture of Gerry as an adult. I was curious to know a little more about his childhood. So I…

Good Friday this year, 2023, marks the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, a true turning point in the course of Northern Ireland’s history. In the recent words of Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris: “The signing of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement on 10 April 1998 brought an end to 30…

Hail Glorious St. Patrick! For many of us, St. Patrick’s Day is the day we wrap up in green and flock to local parades to watch blue-kneed, curly-wigged Irish dancers display their talents in front of the judges’ podium (the back of a container lorry). And marching bands bring colour and a sense of occasion…

Rich Pickings There are rich pickings indeed in the Belfast Telegraph column that Gerry wrote over the years – Life According to Gerry. I delight in browsing through the articles and losing myself in the reveries that they offer. In each one, he leads me down various meandering paths that somehow get tied together at…

It’s important to know who you are… who your people are, and where you come from to give you context, grounding and identity. For Gerry, it was Derry. But for his mother’s people, the McLaughlins, that was deepest Donegal. A wee homestead called Shandrum – a two-bedroomed, whitewashed cottage with a series of sheds, a…

According to The Dictionary of Irish Biography introduction: The Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) is a project of the Royal Irish Academy. It tells the island’s life story through the biographies, at home and overseas, of prominent men and women born in Ireland, north and south, and the noteworthy Irish careers of those born outside Ireland.…

Gerry was nothing if not a keen observer of life and the people in it, and his take on their antics was often wry, regularly witty, but always wise. He was an enthusiastic student of human behavior and was driven by an innate curiosity, as he peered at the world through the informed lens of…

A part-time musician and folk singer at the time, Seán Donnelly was a busy man running his shoe shop in Newcastle, Co. Down when his recording of The Homes of Donegal was played in 2010 by BBC Foyle’s Éamon Friel – a man who likes a good song. Éamon was not alone in that. The…

Having moved in similar circles in the 1970’s, Mark and Gerry’s paths would once again cross in later life. The result is ‘A City Dreaming’. The film, written and narrated by Gerry and directed by Mark McCauley, is often termed “a love letter to Derry” and rightly so – see it here. How the film…