Ireland has produced two guitar ‘Gods’ that often get ranked among the greats such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Peter Green, Jeff Beck, etc. Our guitar heros are Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore. Their playing styles are quite different but both men have much in common - they have crossed some of the same genres - mainly hard rock, blues and blues rock, both have had long-running careers starting at the end of the 60s (but sadly Rory’s was cut all to short by his untimely death in 1995). In the late 60’s Rory came to prominance with his power trio Taste which shared the stage with (and some say upstaged) the great Jimi Hendrix at the legendry Isle Of Wight festival in 1970. At this time Gary Moore was making a name for himself in Dublin as a teenage guitar prodigy and member of the eclectic psychadellic rock outfit Skid Row. He continued his genre hopping career as a member of hard rocking Thin Lizzy, jazz rock outfit Colosseum II and had a long solo career as a hard rock/heavy metal axeman in the 1980s before morphing into a bluesman in 1990. The most obvious difference in playing styles between Rory and Gary is that Gary is more of a slick and flashy player whereas Rory is more raw and rootsy in his playing. Gary has done more experimenting with different genres but in my opinion was at the top of his game as a guitar shredding heavy metal axeman, mostly during the period of late-70s to late-80s. Rory generally kept to the same path throughout his career, alternating between blues and hard rock but getting a bit more into the heavy stuff in the late-70s/early 80’s. In my opinon his best output was during the 70s. Now I’m not going to get into which one is better than the other, that’s just personal taste, instead I’m going to present 2 videos of each of these guitar men in action, and you can make up your own mind who you like best or just do as I do and enjoy them both. The first video for each of them presents their all out rocking side while the second set of videos shows them making their guitars cry. Enjoy.

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