Gary Moore
The perennially underrated guitarist took blues rock to the next level in the 70s and beyond.
The hard rocker who returned to his beloved blues roots and earned the respect of the King of the blues, for one.
In 1990 the most extraordinary thing happened. In the midst of the death throes of hair metal and the birth of grunge, former Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore released an album that took everyone by surprise and took the charts by storm. The album was Still Got The Blues, a glossy set of originals and covers and, as declared by the title, a very blues-based piece of work.
“I did Still Got The Blues when I was thirty-seven years old. And I went back to the music that I always loved,” Gary Moore told Classic Rock in 2007 by way of explanation. “It wasn’t commercial, it wasn’t cool. Nobody in a million years could have predicted how successful it became.”
Moore was a guy from Belfast who had a couple of stints in Thin Lizzy, but whose blues influences underpinned his playing rather than directly informed it. Yes, he’d first come to attention in the 70s with Skid Row, a blues-rock band, but it certainly wasn’t what was expected from him at the turn of the 90s
Growing up in Belfast, it’s not surprising that Moore became fascinated with blues-based music. “There was a great blues scene in Belfast,” Moore said. “All these guitar players used to come up from Cork, like Rory Gallagher. And then we heard about British blues.”
And that’s where it really all began for the young guitar hero. “John Mayall’s ‘Beano’ album [John Mayall’s groundbreaking 1966 album Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton] was a real turning point for me – that was the stuff I really knew about.”
But it wasn’t the post-war Mississippi Delta musicians who were influencing Moore’s guitar playing. “I mean, I’d heard the name Robert Johnson,” Gary shrugged, “but the acoustic blues didn’t mean anything to me at all. It wasn’t even so much the song and lyrics at first, it was all about the emotion of the electric guitar. My friend had the ‘Beano’ album, and I spent all my time round his house. I was very passionate about this new sound. I took the guy’s album and I ruined it by playing it over and over. I came home from school and learned all the sounds, and learned all the songs note for note. I could just relate to it somehow.”
And of course the guitarist creating this blistering new sound? None other than Eric Clapton. “The first time I heard Clapton play guitar, it changed my life,” Moore said. “I was already learning to play, but something very profound happened when I heard that record. Within two seconds of the opening track, I was blown away.”
After a self-imposed apprenticeship with Clapton (including the fact that Moore adopted a Gibson Les Paul as his weapon of choice – a decision influenced as much by Clapton as by his other blues hero, Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green), Moore went on to discover the old-school blues players for himself.
But by using Clapton and Green as a key influence, Moore took their blues essence and injected it with a high-octane fieryness that would go on to characterise his playing with Thin Lizzy, where melody is fused with traditional blues lines. Moore was impressive live, too. There was just something about the passion he brought to his performance.
“That’s the thing with the blues – even if you’re playing the rock stuff, it instils a sense of emotion into you, and into your playing.”
“That’s the thing with blues – even if you’re playing the rock stuff, it instils a sense of emotion.”
Gary Moore
Killer Track: Still Got The Blues