Brendan Gallagher: Open Up.

Brendan Gallagher launches The Open Tuning Chord Book For Guitar at Ric’s Café on April 16.

What’s all this then? A music workshop at Ric’s? Well, not really. Yes, it is a launch for a music book, but when the said book has been put together by Karma County guitarist and songwriter Brendan Gallagher, and he’s hitting up Grant McLennan of the Go Betweens as his musical companion for the night, you know you’ll be getting something special.

“I think I’m going to torture people with some guitar music first,” he jokes. “Tell some stories, smoke some cigars… But just a little bit, it’s not a workshop. I’ll play some songs, Grant’ll play some songs. We play some songs together. Songs we like, other peoples’ tunes. We can talk nuts and bolts about guitars, but you’d bore people stupid, basically.” 

The technicalities of the book aside, the show basically gives you the opportunity to catch a couple of Australia’s finest songwriters doing what they do best; making heartfelt music. While the gig will be more than a music book launch, the history of the book goes back a few years. 

“I actually wrote this book seven or eight years ago now,” he explains. “I went through two print runs and basically it went out of print a couple of years ago. It was time to remake and remodel. So it’s been updated and there’s tabs for four Karma County songs."

The book will be available over the web by emailing chordbook@hotmail.com while a publishing deal is stitched up, something being looked after by Brendan’s music publishers.

“Generally you’ll find people have an impression of musicians being a bit disorganised or hotheaded or whatever. I use this trick of pretending to be a third person. I’d call and say I was my brother. It’s hard to talk to people about how terrific you are and tell them why they should book you,” he laughs. “It’s easier to go ‘I’m his brother Tim, he’s really terrific’. You’ve got to have two heads.”