Monday 7 February 2011

Death of a bluesman

By now you've probably heard of the sudden death of blues and rock guitarist Gary Moore yesterday morning. I saw Gary live with Thin Lizzy during the band's Black Rose era, and I've also got a couple of his later solo blues CDs.  I think he was underrated as a guitarist, never quite seen in the same league as Clapton or Jeff Beck, but to me he was very versatile, easily capable of hard rock, blues and the lyrical guitar playing you hear in the video below. Peter Green was a great influence (he bought a guitar from Green), and he played along with blues greats BB King and Albert King. It is disrespectful and sloppy of some websites to describe Parisienne Walkways, as well as the great Out In The Fields, as Thin Lizzy tracks: they weren't. They were Gary Moore tracks with Phil Lynott as a guest artist.

Here he and Phil play Parisienne Walkways live, the full version that goes on for almost another two minutes after the point where the single fades out.  It's one of those melancholy coincidences that Gary died 25 years and one month after Phil, whom he'd played alongside on and off since they were both in their teens in Dublin.

3 comments:

  1. Yes, very sad that. I actually saw Gary Moore play with Colosseum in Chester in about 1976.

    Great guitarist, but must have been one of the ugliest men in rock'n'roll ;-)

    Quite a run of untimely rock/pop deaths recently along with Gerry Rafferty, Wooly Wolstenhulme and Teena Marie.

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  2. I was thinking precisely the same thing myself.

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  3. Still Got The Blue & After Hours were classics. Moore recorded the former because he wanted to do a blues album & was pleasantly shocked when it sold very well

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