Watch Gary Moore Shred the Blues

In 1990, the most extraordinary thing happened. In the midst of the death throes of hair metal and the birth of grunge, former Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore released an album that caught everyone by surprise and took the charts by storm.

The album was Still Got the Blues, a glossy set of originals and covers and, as declared by the title, a very blues-based piece of work.

“I did Still Got the Blues when I was 37 years old, and I went back to the music that I always loved,” Moore explained to Classic Rock in 2007. “It wasn’t commercial, it wasn’t cool. And nobody in a million years could have predicted how successful it became.”

Moore was a guy from Belfast who had a couple of stints in Thin Lizzy but whose blues influences underpinned his playing rather than directly informed it.

He’d first come to attention in the 1970s with a blues-rock band called Skid Row, but it certainly wasn’t what was expected from him at the turn of the ’90s.

It’s not surprising Moore became fascinated with blues-based music. “There was a great blues scene in Belfast,” he said. “All these guitar players used to come up from Cork, like Rory Gallagher. And then we heard about British blues.”

Indeed, it wasn’t the post-war Mississippi Delta musicians who were influencing Moore’s guitar playing. “I mean, I’d heard the name Robert Johnson,” he said, “but the acoustic blues didn’t mean anything to me at all.

“It wasn’t even so much the song and lyrics at first; it was all about the emotion of the electric guitar.”