Archive for the ‘Looking Back’ Category

On Feb 6th 2011 we lost one of Ireland’s rock heroes and one of the world’s top guitarists, Gary Moore. Autopsy reposts indicate that Gary died of natural causes - a heart attack while he was holidaying with his partner in Spain. He was only 58 years old.

Gary was an internationally highly regarded guitarist, featuring prominently in many world’s top guitarists lists. He played a diverse range of styles - psychedelic, jazz-rock, melodic hard rock, heavy metal and blues rock. He started his career at the young age of 16 when he moved from his home town of Belfast to Dublin and joined Skid Row. His playing at that stage was very mature and complex - you would never think it was coming from a teenager! In his Skid Row days he got noticed by another guitar legend, and one of his own guitar heroes, Peter Green. Skid Row had opened for Fleetwood Mac in Dublin and Peter was so impressed with what he heard that asked to meet Gary and invited him back to his hotel to jam with him. While in Skid Row Gary met Phil Lynott who also briefly was a member. Gary had a long association with Phil as a member of Thin Lizzy and contributing to each other’s solo projects. Gary did a brief stint with Thin Lizzy in the early seventies was a member of the jazz rock outfit Colosseum II in the mid-seventies and was back with Thin Lizzy in 1978. In the 80s Gary was a leading heavy metal guitar hero and released a string of blazing solo albums. He turned back to his blues roots in the 90s and successfully reinvented himself as a bluesman.

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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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