GARY MOORE
After the Still Got The Blues session, Gary’s 1959 Les Paul
“became possibly his most played guitar”, says Graham Lilley, Gary’s guitar tech
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left the scene, he took a big part of that whole thing with him, as far as I’m concerned. There’s a whole dimension that’s been missing from British guitar playing since then. It was approached from a very British point of view, even though he was emulating BB King, Freddie King, people like that, but he did it his own way and he kind of made that his own: his own voice, which is the hardest thing to do, really.
“There were other guitarists, obviously – after that you had Mick Taylor and everything – but Peter had the toughest job: to walk in after that Blues Breakers album and to shine the way he did was an amazing achievement and he got a lot of respect for that. When you listen to Peter’s playing – the kind of sound that he went for and everything – it wasn’t in any way fashionable. It wasn’t such a radical departure as Eric’s sound. Eric used a lot more distortion and everything.
Peter’s sound has not dated, it’s become a classic in its
own right and today, when you listen to it, it’s still as valid as ever. And it teaches people. I think if young guitarists could listen to that, they would learn so much about where they’re going wrong – because he’s the opposite end of the scale to what’s going on today.”
Gary had very strong opinions about the direction that guitar playing was headed in the mid-1990s.
“I think that a lot of people are going so wrong by analysing music too much and learning from a totally different perspective from the way I learned. I mean, I just learned by listening to people. People I learned from learned by listening to people. The generation above me was Eric and Jeff and all those guys, so there wasn’t anything like the information that is available today. These guitar institutes and things like that, I think they take away people’s identity and they’re actually encouraging a lot of people to play who are not naturally good players anyway, but they’re telling
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people that anyone can learn to play. And anyone can probably learn to play, but that doesn’t make them a good player and, at the end of the day, they’re turning out a generic generation of guitarists who are coming out the other end of this sort of conveyer belt sounding pretty much the same. I mean, I can’t name one of these people who amount to anything special. Who’s actually become a voice? Who’s actually had anything of any real depth to say? Who has written good music? To listen to these guys talk, you’d think they were the most amazing musicians on Earth and you hear what they come up with and it just doesn’t follow through for me. In fact, they do kind of play like they talk, because they talk too much and they play too much and they just kind of miss the point. It’s not their fault. You’re just overloaded with information: ‘How shall I learn? Which guitar should I play? Which pedal should I use?’ And everyone’s bombarding you.”
In the years leading up to our interview, there had been an obsession with speed, with technique appearing to obliterate content in some cases.
“I think it’s going away a little bit, but I’m probably not the right person to ask because I was as guilty of that as anybody, in my own way, in the 70s, playing all that fusion stuff. But that’s why I can see it now because I’ve been through that. I can see a lot of these young guys are going nowhere with that whole attitude, it’s so wrong.
They’re more interested in impressing each other than playing music. We’re losing the whole point: music is not to impress people, music has to stand up on its own and guitar solos are nothing to do with it. If you hear a great song and you hear a really great guitar solo, that’s a nice embellishment. But they’re just so into the athletic side, the competitive side, and they’re missing the point.
But that’s fine, because at least there’s room for people who do want to play music.”
Gary was also aware of the influence his return to the blues was having on other players.
“When I made Still Got The Blues, you had all these guys who’d never heard of blues going out to promote blues albums – these LA guys. It was quite laughable.
From my point of view, it was a complete turnaround because there I was, setting a trend and influencing the wrong people to play the wrong music for them. It was arrogant for me to think I could go and make a blues
album as simply as that – I hadn’t played that music professionally for so long. It was very successful, but the way I did it was totally wrong: ‘Oh, I’m a rock guitarist and I can play the blues…’ and these guys followed suit and they were even further removed from it because they had no background of the blues. At least I’d grown up with it. I knew something about it, but these guys were like widdly-widdly playing that Albert King stuff.
“For me, making this record was like going back and relearning everything that I’d forgotten over the past few years. I know I did a blues album in 1990, but this was going back to where I started off. It’s given me another chance to get back to that point and not fuck it up this time because I think, in many ways, I did fuck it up, musically speaking. I went off on a tangent and got too far away from the whole truth of what we were trying to do. This record sounds like the rehearsals for what Still Got The Blues became. That’s what it was like;
that’s how we played together and it’s nice to be able to get that sound down on record. It’s given me another chance, really.
“People will disagree and say, ‘No, After Hours and Still Got The Blues were blues albums,’ but they weren’t really, in all honesty. They were still rock albums because of the sound and the production.
“This, to me, is my first real blues album because it’s a blues record: it’s stripped right down, it’s gone back to what the blues is about and I’m playing in a style that I can play. I’m not trying to be anybody I’m not. I’m not trying to play in a way that is very alien to me. It’s been like a revision course. This music is so fucking hard to play and people don’t realise; they think they have to just pick up a guitar and play three chords and that’s the blues. It’s a lot more than people realise – constantly refining, taking away all the stuff you don’t need until all that’s left is the bare bones and what’s there is totally necessary, and that’s the hardest way to play.
“It’s just very honest. It’s like you’re almost in the room, I feel, anyway. You can hear there’s lots of mistakes and everything – really fucking sloppy playing for me, especially on a couple of tracks, but I didn’t want to change it. I didn’t want to drop things in and fix it;
I wanted people to hear it the way it was done. I think it’s a lot more honest to do that. Anybody can fix things in the studio, but if you can you get a performance out in one go, that means something. All the records I like have got mistakes in them, anyway.”
At the end of our conversation, Gary hinted that there might be some unreleased material, which, 20 years later, still hasn’t seen the light of day.
“I also did a sort of unplugged version of about eight songs as well, a whole load of acoustic versions for B-sides and stuff. We did Need Your Love So Bad acoustically and The World Keeps Turning from the first Fleetwood Mac album. It was the first acoustic one Peter did. So, I’ve got a load of stuff and it’s actually gone straight to DAT so you don’t need to mix it or anything.
It’s very different from anything I’ve done before, it’s much more a vocal performance, because you’re just sort of strumming most of the time. So, we just banged about eight different songs out in a couple of hours and I’ve got all those at home.”
“[In blues playing], you’re constantly refining, taking away all the stuff you don’t need until all that’s left is the bare bones and what’s there is totally necessary, and that’s the hardest way to play”
GARY MOORE
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“GARY used this Les Paul and reissue JTM45 amp – 1989, serial number RI000011 – on the track Still Got The Blues,” Graham recalls, through a Marshall Guv’nor pedal, and Alesis Quadraverb in the headphone mix.
It was a one-take, first-take solo, too