GARY MOORE
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
