Gary Moore: from Belfast to Parisienne Walkways | Ultimate Guitarist Reunion

Why fans still care

GARY MOORE played hard rock with Thin Lizzy and had two UK hit singles with Phil Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon). Then, in 1990, he turned round and made a blues record. Still Got the Blues went to number 13 in the UK. The follow-up, After Hours, with B.B. King, Who’s Who number 2, and Albert Collins as guests, got to number 4, his highest album in Britain.

He also owned Peter Green’s 1959 Les Paul, the guitar people call Greeny. Ask a blues player about Moore and that’s often where the talk starts.

Early life and training

Moore was born in Belfast on 4 April 1952. He was left-handed, but he learned on a right-handed guitar. Premier Guitar says he found the instrument at eight, and other accounts say ten.

In the mid-1960s he saw Jimi Hendrix, Who’s Who number 6, and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers play in Belfast.

At 16 he moved to Dublin to join a blues-rock band called Skid Row. The singer was Phil Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon). The band signed to CBS in 1970.

Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon) didn’t last long. He was out within months of Moore arriving, and Skid Row carried on as a trio with bassist Brush Shiels and drummer Noel Bridgeman. That line-up made two albums, Skid and 34 Hours.

Career chapters

1. Late 1960sMoved to Dublin, aged 16, to join Skid Row
2. 1970Skid Row signed to CBS; Peter Green’s Les Paul passed to Moore
3. 1973Joined Thin Lizzy, the first of three stints in the 1970s
4. 1979Parisienne Walkways, UK number 8; left Thin Lizzy in the middle of a US tour
5. 1985Out in the Fields, UK number 5
6. 1987Wild Frontier, dedicated to Phil Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon)
7. 1990Still Got the Blues
8. 1992After Hours, UK number 4
9. 1994BBM, with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker
10. 1995Blues for Greeny
11. 2011Died 6 February, Estepona, Spain, aged 58

Peter Green and Greeny 1970

Peter Green inspired Moore and helped him get started. According to Guitar Player, Green sold Moore his 1959 Les Paul in 1970, though the year is disputed. That guitar, Greeny, became one of the most talked-about Les Pauls in rock.

Moore sold it in 2006. In 2014 it went to Kirk Hammett, Who’s Who number 10, who still plays it with Metallica.

Thin Lizzy 1973 to 1979

In 1973 Moore joined Thin Lizzy, taking over from Eric Bell. Some accounts say early 1974. It was the first of three spells with the band in the 1970s.

After that first spell, he wanted more discipline and found it in Jon Hiseman’s jazz-rock band Colosseum II, making three albums with them. In 1977 he was back in Thin Lizzy for a US tour supporting Queen, standing in for Brian Robertson, who had hurt his hand. He rejoined in 1978 and played on the 1979 album Black Rose. Then, in 1979, he walked out in the middle of another American tour. He set up in Los Angeles and formed G-Force, which made one album, in 1980.

Parisienne Walkways 1979

In 1979 Moore and Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon) made Parisienne Walkways, with Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon) singing. It reached number 8 in the UK and spent 11 weeks on the chart. For plenty of people it’s the first Gary Moore record they heard.

Out in the Fields 1985

Six years later the two of them were back together for Out in the Fields. It went to number 5 in the UK and spent 10 weeks on the chart.

The song was on Run for Cover, his third hard rock album of the decade after Corridors of Power in 1982 and Victims of the Future in 1983. It was also his last record with Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon), who died in January 1986. Moore’s next album, Wild Frontier, came out in 1987, with a nod to Irish traditional music, and he dedicated it to his friend. “I see the whole album as a tribute to Phil,” he told Guitar World. After the War followed in 1989.

Still Got the Blues 1990

Bassist Bob Daisley kept at Moore to make a blues album. In a 2003 interview, published by Guitar Player in 2026, Moore said they’d both laughed when Daisley first suggested it, but that Daisley was right. He was tired of the rock scene anyway. “I was getting really sick of the whole rock metal scene,” he said.

Still Got the Blues came out on Virgin on 26 March 1990 and reached number 13 in the UK.

After Hours 1992

The next blues record, After Hours, had B.B. King, Who’s Who number 2 and Albert Collins as guests. It went to number 4, the highest any of his albums reached in Britain.

BBM and Blues for Greeny 1994 to 1995

In 1994 he formed BBM with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, both from Cream, with Moore in the guitar role. They made one album, Around the Next Dream.

A year later came Blues for Greeny, his tribute to Peter Green, the man whose guitar he owned.

Craft, sound and style

Moore was a rock guitarist who kept coming back to the blues. The players he saw as a teenager in Belfast, Hendrix, Who’s Who number 6 and the Bluesbreakers, played blues-rock, and Peter Green was his model.

On After Hours he stood next to B.B. King, Who’s Who number 2 and Albert Collins. On Blues for Greeny he played Green’s songs on Green’s old guitar.

Other players took bits of him home. Kirk Hammett, Who’s Who number 10, who now owns Greeny, told Rolling Stone in February 2011 that the opening lick of his Master of Puppets solo is “a variation of a lick that Gary Moore played a lot”. Blabbermouth carried the same words on 9 February 2011.

Greeny and Stripe

Guitar Player describes Greeny as the “out-of-phase” 1959 Les Paul that became his main guitar for years. He played it with Thin Lizzy and on Parisienne Walkways. By 2007 he was calling it “a big old battle axe”, and he told Vintage Guitar he’d sold it, mainly for money after an insurance claim fell through.

The Les Paul on Still Got the Blues was another 1959 Standard, one he’d owned since 1989, with its original pickups. Bonhams, which sold his collection in 2025 and calls the guitar “Stripe”, says it was his most-recorded guitar, and links it to After the War, Oh Pretty Woman and Walking by Myself as well.

The red Strat

In about 1981 he found a 1960 Fender Stratocaster, Fiesta Red but faded, at Jon King Sounds in Kingston. He was shopping with Greg Lake, who passed on it because of the scratches. Late in 1982 he told Tony Bacon it was the best Strat he’d ever played. A Strat, he said, has a “definite physical punch”, and he wanted a “clangy” sound with an edge.

Bonhams says you can hear it on Corridors of Power in 1982, the intro to End of the World especially, then Too Tired and Moving On in 1990, and Montreux that year. In September 2004 he played Red House on it at Fender’s 50th anniversary concert. It got bigger Dunlop 6100 frets after he bought it, and his former tech Graham Lilley says Seymour Duncan rewound the neck pickup in 1998. It sold at Bonhams on 20 November 2025 for £254,400.

The later records

For Close As You Get in 2007 he used a 1968 Telecaster tuned to open E and dropped to D for slide, a mid-1960s Gibson ES-335 he thought was a ’64, a 1960s Burns Artist for the whammy parts on Hard Times, and an Ozark resonator in open G. He recorded it to 24-track tape, not Pro Tools.

The amps on that record were a 1960s Vox AC30, a Fender Vibroverb reissue, and an Orange Tiny Terror into a hand-wired Marshall 2x12. A year later, on Bad for You Baby, he went to a Fender Dual Showman head, the kind of amp Peter Green used, into a Marshall 4x12. That record also has a red Gibson Firebird he bought in Finland, and a German-built solidbody with Bare Knuckle pickups wired “kind of out of phase” for a Peter Green feel.

Marshalls on stage

For about ten years from around 1996, Marshall DSL heads were his main live amps. In 2008 he moved to two hand-wired Marshall 1959HW heads, which he said had more presence and a rawer sound, with a DigiTech reverb pedal because the amps had none. The pedals were simple: a T-Rex Moller with a clean boost on one side and overdrive on the other, which he used live on Oh Pretty Woman, and a Roger Mayer Stone Fuzz on the opening track of Bad for You Baby.

Strings, picks and phrasing

In 2007 his strings were .009 to .048, down from .010 to .052. He used Gibson extra heavy picks, and before that grey Hercos for years, all through Thin Lizzy.

Albert King, Who’s Who number 1 once told him, “Gary, play every other lick.” Moore told Vintage Guitar that it changed how he thought about phrasing. After Still Got the Blues, he worried that playing quietly would sound like “faking it”, so he kept more of his rock sound in the blues. He described the goal as “a modern, less high-gain version” of the natural sound Eric Clapton, Who’s Who number 3 had in the 1960s.

In 2013 Gibson made a Gary Moore Les Paul Standard in lemonburst, with BurstBucker Pro pickups and the neck pickup mounted reversed, for that out-of-phase sound.

Stories people still tell

1. The left-handed kid.

   He learned on a right-handed guitar and never switched.

2. Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon), again and again.

   Skid Row, Thin Lizzy, Parisienne Walkways and Out in the Fields. In August 2005 Moore played a one-off concert in Dublin in honour of Lynott, Who’s Who number 2 in · Ultimate Queen Reunion (story coming soon), filmed for a DVD released in 2006.

Legacy

Belfast hasn’t forgotten him. In January 2025 a Belfast City Council committee approved a check of sites in the Cathedral Quarter for a privately funded statue, proposed by Councillor Brian Smyth for the Wild Frontier Memorial Project. The statue itself hasn’t been approved, but the idea is on the table.