Chart entered : 21 April 1979
Chart peak : 8 ( 32 in a live version in 1993 )
Number of hits : 20
We say a proper hello to another guitar hero here although he has already featured in a couple of other stories here.
Gary Moore was born in Belfast in 1952. In 1968 as the Troubles were starting his parents split up and Gary relocated to Dublin. As we know he joined Skid Row at 16 and stayed in the band after Phil Lynott was bumped and the band became a power trio with Brush Shiels singing. They released a second single " Saturday Morning Man" in 1969 with Gary on lead vocal somewhere between Jack Bruce and Steve Winwood. The folky influences are gone but it's an overlong single with uneasy shifts between Cream blues rock and a jaunty piano tune.
Nevertheless the band's fortunes were on the up. At the beginning of the decade they supported Fleetwood Mac. Peter Green was impressed with the young guitarist and helped them get signed up with CBS. Their first single for the new label was "Sandie's Gone" , a country-tinged blues ballad spread over both sides of the single. Despite an impressive and lengthy guitar solo it's rather dreary. It wasn't included on their debut album "Skid" which is an uninteresting mix of Hendrix, Cream, Canned Heat and Green-era Fleetwood Mac ( whose manager Clifford Davis was responsible for the basic production ). 1971's "34 Hours" saw a move to lengthier , more ambitious compositions like the nine minute "Night of the Warm Witch" , an edited version of which was released as a single in April that year. The album is mostly second rate Cream interspersed with plodding country rock ditties like "Lonesome Still " and "Mar". "Go I'm Never Gonna Let You" has some good ideas but not nine minutes' worth.
Gary played on another album which wasn't released until twenty years later then in December 1971 he quit the band, wanting to record more of his own compositions. He got a band together to record a solo LP "Grinding Stone" released in 1973. This eclectic album goes in more of a prog rock direction particularly on lengthy tracks like "Spirit" ( 17+ minutes ) where Gary's voice sounds very like Roger Chapman and "The Energy Dance " a Wakeman-esque Moog workout. There were no singles.
Gary then accepted an invitation to re-join Phil Lynott in Thin Lizzy to replace Eric Bell who quit mid-tour at the end of 1973 . Gary only stayed until the following April but recorded "Still In Love With You" the lachrymose ballad that was the highlight of their next album "Nightlife". His now-recognisable blues guitar was the perfect complement to Lynott's doleful vocal.
In November 1974 he teamed up with drummer Jon Hiseman in the jazz fusion outfit Colosseum II and helped him audition the other members. We've covered their first LP in the Whitesnake post due to the presence of Neil Murray. Gary briefly returned to Thin Lizzy to do a US tour in early 1977 in place of the temporarily sacked Brian Robertson but declined a request to stay on . Colosseum II's second album "Electric Savage" came out in April 1977. This mainly instrumental album is more listenable than I expected with some tuneful interludes amidst the noodling. In September that year they backed Julian Lloyd-Webber in a performance of his Variations at his brother Andrew's private Sydmonton Festival . They recorded the album with him although it wasn't released until after Gary had left the band. Their third album "War Dance" came out in November 1977 and was more of the same.
At the height of punk Colosseum II just weren't getting heard. By contrast Thin Lizzy had risen to the challenge and were racking up the hits. When Lynott sacked Robertson for the final time in July 1978 Gary accepted the invitation to replace him after Lynott and Brian Downey had helped him out on his solo LP "Back On The Streets". The title track came out as his first single in October 1978 and is an uncompromising four and a half minutes of hard rock bluster that unsurprisingly didn't chart despite Lynott's audible presence on backing vocals. Gary hung back on releasing another single while he worked on his only full album with Lizzy "Black Rose : A Rock Legend". The trailer single "Waiting For An Alibi " isn't perhaps their most memorable song, a rather lumpy account of a hustler's activities on which Gary shares the guitar duties with Scott Gorham , but it did make the Top 10 and saw Gary on Top of the Pops for the first time.
Once it started slipping in the charts Gary released the final track from "Back on the Streets" , "Parisienne Walkways " as a single. The song was co-written with Phil Lynott who does the lead vocal as a guest. The melody was based on a jazz standard Blue Bossa re-worked as a blues lament. Lynott adopts the persona of an old man looking back to a love affair in Paris thirty years before with Gary joining in on the second verse. The chorus is instrumental with Gary playing an aching solo with notable sustain particularly after the false ending two minutes in. Mention should also be made of Don Airey's keyboards which contribute to the lush, romantic feel of the song. Its success was certainly a factor in Gary's decision to quit Lizzy not long afterwards but he and Lynott remained friends and would collaborate again.
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