GARY MOORE - Blues With Bite!
By Martin Popoff

Legendary UK axeman Gary Moore has seen much in his days, beginning life with a hard-ass Cream dream trio called Skid Row, dancing in the dark with Thin Lizzy, progging foggy with Colosseum II before launching a successful hard rock solo career. And then when he was just about to hang up his skates, all of a sudden he's a mini Clapton powerplant, a huge blues star when there isn't supposed to be such an animal. 1990's Still Got The Blues was the improbable launching pad and Gary's never looked back, sustaining for a decade a vibrant career overseas, even if the US fame and fortune was fleeting.

And none of that will change of course with Scars, out late last year on Sanctuary (see www.sanctuaryrecordsgroup.com for more). But those of us in the know can climb into our closets and rock hard with Gary as he blazes power trio terrain again. Scars is still a blues album, but it's ferocious down the fretboard. And as a bonus, well, Gary's got one of the liveliest, most interesting and inspirational vocal attacks in all of blues rock. Quite simply, he's a great singer, and I practically get more out of his voice than his smashing guitar work.

Here's the glassed one (long story) on how the fist-fighting line-up for Scars came about. "Well, I was on the Back To The Blues tour last year, yeah? And I was working with Darrin Mooney who's our drummer now and we basically talked about putting a three-piece band together. And the musical ideas I was coming up with at that time were very much more geared towards that. 'World Of Confusion', I had that riff in my head and I was playing around with it at soundcheck and jamming on certain things. I really wanted to try a three-piece format again and give the guitar a lot more freedom and make the whole thing a lot wilder and more aggressive. Darrin and I already played that way but we were kind of constrained by the four-piece thing with the keyboards and everything. So basically, we just wanted to break out and have much more of a free environment to play in."

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