GARY MOORE
A gifted guitarist who could turn his hand to any style of music, “he just happened to come along after all the guitar heroes, so he never really got the acclaim,” says Bernie Marsden.
Words: Mick Wall
He was one of the greatest rock guitar players of his generation, but Gary Moore would squirm and pull a face if you ever dared suggest as much. “I don’t even listen to rock music any more,” he shrugged disdainfully the last time we spoke, shortly before his death in 2011.
Never mind that he’d been an influential member of Thin Lizzy, one of the greatest rock bands of all time. “I’m too old for dressing up,” he snapped.
Surely, then, one of the greatest blues guitar players of his time? “Wrong again,” he insisted. “BB King, that’s a great blues guitarist. Not some white guy from Belfast.”
Not known for going out of his way to please people, it was exactly this indifference – hostility, even – to others’ opinions that made Gary Moore such an astonishingly accomplished and distinctive guitar player. And, paradoxically, one of the most overlooked.
As guitarist Eric Bell, Moore’s predecessor in Thin Lizzy and another Belfast boy, who first met Moore when he was just 11, says now: “There was never any half-measure with Gary. Such a nice guy when we were on our own, laughing and joking. But if he didn’t like something he’d soon tell you to fuck off.”
Indeed he would tell Lizzy to fuck off, in effect, no less than three times. This, in spite of the fact that nearly all of Moore’s significant commercial successes came from his love-hate relationship with Lizzy mainman Phil Lynott.
“Phil was like an older brother to me,” he recalled of the pre-fame days when the two of them shared a flat in Dublin. “He was such a workaholic you wouldn’t believe it.”
That alone, though, wasn’t enough of a draw to keep Moore in the band for long. “Gary always had his own thing going on,” says former Lizzy drummer Brian Downey. “He didn’t see himself playing second fiddle to anyone, not even Phil.”
At the time Moore was brought in to replace Eric Bell, in 1974, Lizzy were seen as a busted flush. Having failed to followup their novelty hit Whiskey In The Jar, while Moore was happy to play on demos for their next album, Nightlife, he was already busy fronting his own Gary Moore Band, whose album, Grinding Stone, displayed a range of Moore’s talents, from rock and blues to piano ballads and dreamy, Santanaesque instrumentals.