Coleraine is not the kind of place one readily associates with music, let alone rock’n’roll legends. A sleepy, medium-size town near the mouth of the river Bann, its best-known cultural asset is the Riverside theatre. Yet, living just beyond the suburbs is a figure whose remarkable story mirrors the development of popular music throughout the 1960s and 1970s, encompassing, among others, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Paul McCartney, Marianne Faithfull and Andrew Lloyd Webber. For Henry McCullough has played guitar with them all.

Hens and peacocks strut around his cottage garden as he plucks a blues riff from an old Gibson ES. Quiet and dry-humoured, McCullough recalls how a journey that saw him riff with Hendrix, perform at Woodstock, and tell a superstar ex-Beatle that his guitar parts were rubbish, began in 1960, in a concrete shelter overlooking the harbour of his native Portstewart. “All my friends bought guitars because of the whole skiffle craze,” says McCullough. “But I couldn’t afford one, so if I borrowed an acoustic, I played in this shelter, because I liked the reverb it gave me. If the guitar was electric, I plugged it into the wireless and played Eddie Cochran. The skiffle thing passed, but I kept on playing, because there was a hunger in me for the music.”

His mother worked in a dance-hall cloakroom, so the teenage McCullough turned up every weekend just to be near the guitars. “I even went to gospel meetings if I heard they had guitars.” The showband scene was taking off, and at 16 he was auditioned by the Skyrockets, from Enniskillen. “I didn’t even know what a minor chord was, but next thing I knew I was away around Ireland in a Morris van,” he says.

His apprenticeship began in earnest. “Every Sunday, the tape recorder was put on beside the radio, and you spent the week learning the Top 20. We played everything — pop, dance songs, old-time waltzes. Sometimes you could be on stage for six hours, so you needed a big repertoire.”

He owned 27 mohair suits, “but the charts were full of the Stones, the Beatles, the Animals and Manfred Mann, and I so badly wanted to be in a beat group. Eventually, I got a call from a Belfast outfit called the People, and the suits were sold.” After a spell in Dublin, his new band got their break when they played the ultra-hip Middle Earth club in London, supporting Procol Harum and Soft Machine. Chas Chandler, the Animals’ bassist-turned-manager, was in the audience, and he added the People to a package tour that included his other new signing, Jimi Hendrix, as well as Pink Floyd.

“Jimi was a quiet man, very shy. But when he went on, he became a different guy altogether. And you had to stand back and watch because he was so good.”

But it wasn’t all glamour. “Five of us lived in a van, which had a hole in the roof, so at night we parked under a railway arch in Camden Town,” says McCullough. “Before gigs, we changed in the toilets in Trafalgar Square. We went to religious gatherings for free sandwiches and tea, and picked fag butts off the ground in Victoria station. But when you’re young, everything is great.”

He was also getting wise to the tricks of the music industry. “Chandler changed our name to Eire Apparent, which I hated. He tried to make us wear fancy hats and boots, and I told him I’d left the showband scene to get away from bloody uniforms. Everything he tried to make us do, he eventually did with Slade — all those funny clothes and silly pop.”

McCullough abandoned Eire Apparent and returned to Dublin to join Sweeney’s Men, progenitors of the folk-rock sound that paved the way for Horslips. “I wanted to play everything — rock, blues, folk, country — and not get bogged down in one style,” says McCullough.

An invitation to join Joe Cocker’s Grease Band followed. The Woodstock festival in 1969, retrospectively hailed as the defining moment of that era, is rarely shown on television without the obligatory clip of a passionately wasted Cocker singing With a Little Help from My Friends. Standing directly behind him, guitar in hand, is McCullough. “Woodstock didn’t seem all that special at the time,” he says. “It was just this big, muddy field.”

And was Cocker as strung-out as he looked? “He was worse. As well as the drink, there was a lot of cannabis about, and LSD, which I found enlightening. I just felt honoured to be part of such a hardcore rock’n’roll outfit.”

Cocker quit the Grease Band afterwards, but the group was in demand for session work, which is how McCullough found himself recording the album soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970.

“Rice and Lloyd Webber offered us £500 each, or a percentage of the profits. None of us thought that a record with that title would sell, so we all took the £500.”