“BLUES IS ABOUT PASSION AND EMOTION, AND GARY MOORE HAD THAT IN SPADES”
If you play high-gain, uptempo blues these days, chances are the late, great Gary Moore is one of your go-to guys. That’s certainly true of Kris Barras, a leading name among the modern generation of blues rock guitarists. “Gary loved traditional blues,” Kris tells Total Guitar, “but his blues style was very much rock-influenced, and that’s what drew me to him. The blues police are always there – to them if you weren’t around in the 1960s, don’t just play 12-bar stuff and turn your gain up above four, then you’re not real blues! But for me blues is about passion and emotion, and Gary Moore had that in spades. It was the power and passion in his notes. His style was aggressive – with his hammer-ons and pull-offs, his trills and vibrato – the attack he had. He’d be soft and melodic then give it a big powerful burst, and I love those dynamics. I don’t like things being moderate!”
Moderation was something that Moore, who died in 2011 aged just 58, was rarely accused of, but as shown on his new, posthumous eight-track release , his fretboard talent was undiminished to the end. The album’s title track, a hit for BB King back in 1942, is a 12-bar was popularised by the imposing blues genius Freddie King, and in Moore’s hands it’s a roaring blues in D, one he would sometimes belt out at gigs such as Montreux Festival back in ’99. His facility for slide guitar is clear from his excoriating take on , an Elmore James song famously tackled by the Allman Brothers on their classic live LP . And among the ballads and forward-thinking rockers, perhaps the most historically relevant song present is his cover of Memphis Slim’s . This song was given new life on the 1966 album , aka ‘The Beano Album’. It was the sole record Clapton made with John Mayall’s star-making group, and it changed the young Gary Moore’s life.
