Not Davy Crockett, GARY MOORE, King Of The WildFrontier

Not Davy Crockett, GARY MOORE, King Of The WildFrontier

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Sylvie Simmons

“I don’t consider myself part of the socalled heavy metal movement that’s going on right now. I’m just playing the music I want to play. I’m not singing about the devil, and going up there in leather and studs and everything. It’s a joke! I look at those bands and I think, well, you could really get heavy music across to a lot more people if you didn’t stand around looking like a bunch of prats!”

That’s Gary Moore, sitting, beaming, opposite me in a long black trench-coat, like some Franciscan friar playing Bond. You’ve known him as a supreme axeman for eons now, but for the past couple of years he’s been Gary Moore, Solo Star. Hit singles, the whole caboodle. His latest and greatest album, Wild Frontier, sounds like just about anything he’s ever had his hand in transported into some perfect metal future—old Irish folkies, spacey Fairlight, ’60s pop, slashing axework— “A gentle record,” Kerrang reviewed it, ‘‘ravaged by savage guitar.. .Lizzy circa their classic LPs Jail break or Johnny The Fox.”

What Thin Lizzy would be doing if they were still up and kicking today—that’s how Moore describes the album. It started out as a tribute to the late Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, who died of a heroin overdose before he and Gary could record the title track together, as they’d planned, and ended up as a celebration of Gary’s Irish background.

Born in Belfast—‘‘A good place to grow up; it’s so sad that those kids who’ve just grown up since the troubles started haven’t known anything different than a war zone”—he didn’t exactly pop home much to check if the roots were still showing until he was asked to appear last year at Self Aid, a Band-Aid style benefit concert for Ireland’s young unemployed.

‘‘For the first time,” says Gary, ‘‘I saw this collection of the wealth of talent that had come out of Ireland, from Van Morrison to Thin Lizzy to U2 to Bob Geldof, and it was great!” He grins. ‘‘We were all onstage together singing ‘Whiskey In The Jar,’ and afterwards I thought about it, and how it would be really nice to acknowledge your own roots and stop sounding like every other band in the world who wants to sound like Americans. It was a nice way of going about gaining my own identity.”

Something he’s the first to admit he’s lacked. Stick him in a backstage room with a roadie and—until the hit singles and the TV exposure—most people couldn’t pass the taste test. There’s always been that lack of identification—not just because he never went in for highheels and codpieces (‘‘I’ll leave that to David Lee Roth! That’s not me at all. I’ve always been a bit more serious, I think, as a musician, which is probably why it’s taken me so long to get to this point!”) but because his musical style hasn’t exactly been consistent. Take a quick look at the history: Skid Row in the early 70s, dropped that just when it was getting noticed, went solo then joined Thin Lizzy. Left the whole thing for a couple of years and turned up in jazz-rock band Colosseum II, then Lizzy again and G. Force, and back on his own once more.

‘‘I've always liked different kinds of things,” shrugs Gary. ‘‘Every time I try and make an album of all one thing, it never seems to come out that way. As the year wears on, especially if you’re writing by yourself as I did on this album, locked in a room at home insulated from everything else means you get very close to the songs and you don’t see how it’s going to stand up as an album at all.

“But I think it worked out OK this time. It’s not a radical departure. It’s still rock. Everything on the album has got my stamp on it, whereas in the past it could have been almost anybody playing Gary Moore music now.”

Who better then, to give METAL a track-by-track rundown of his fave album ever?

“OVER THE HILLS”—The big British single, with little old green men The Chieftans plucking and puffing away on strings and Uillean pipes. Must have given a few fans a bit of shock when they heard it?

“Me too!” Gary chuckles. “It was almost the last song I wrote, and everybody was hopping around when they heard it! What happened was that half way through the record I got into this thing of wanting to go in a very Celtic direction— partly for selfish reasons, and also this thing of doing a tribute to Phil Lynott. It’s kind of a throwback to some of the things we did with Lizzy. The song itself doesn’t have any real meaning. It’s just like an Irish folk tale about a guy who’s arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and he can’t come up with an alibi because he was with his best friend’s wife when the crime was committed!

"We used the Chieftans on it, so that overall it’s a marriage of the two things: the rock thing and the Irish thing. You get the hi-tech on one side and the ethnic on the other.”

“WILD FRONTIER”—There’s a line in there that goes: “I remember a friend of mine. ” Phil Lynott?

“That’s right. I originally wrote the song to be recorded by both of us and I added that line later. It's the first song I've written specifically about the troubles in Northern Ireland. I thought I should wait until I felt comfortable with the subject. I wanted to write it as an outsider remembering what it was like in Belfast before all the problems came along, and to go back and see the soldiers and all the changes that have taken place.

“It’s not a million miles from what Lizzy were doing—just using new technology and produced in a more modern way. Plus, there’s the twin guitar thing which is something I don’t normally do, because when I left Lizzy I sort of stayed away from that on purpose.”

I’m surprised, I tell him, that he wanted to bring Lizzy back to life at all, as I seem to recall they didn’t exactly part as friends. Phil kicked him out of the band.

“Yes,” says Gary, “but that was a long time ago. What happened between me and Phil was incidental. Lizzy was a great band, a really original band, not just another heavy rock band. I wanted to carry on a bit of that tradition as well as make it a tribute to Phil.”

Wasn’t Gary ever tempted down the same road Lynott took—the drugs and the drinking and the whole rockstar lifestyle?

“No—I was lucky really. Because Phil made it at a time when you weren’t allowed to be a human being if you were a rock star. It was that whole 70s thing of being the gods, the untouchable Drug Fiends, and Phil succumbed to that pressure. I never had those pressures because at that time I was in Colosseum II and working with very straight musicians who were more interested in music than the party after the show.

“And now, I think, it’s a lot easier for musicians to be treated as human beings. You don’t have to be put on some kind of silly pedestal.”

“TAKE A LITTLE TIME”—“That’s my Billy Idol side coming out! It goes back to the days when the new wave thing happened, and Lizzy was kind of dabbling in all that stuff, with the Greedy Bastards and the Sex Pistols and that real frantic rhythm. So it’s in my blood now and comes out every now and then!”

“THE LONER”—A bit of a surprise that the one instrumental is a relaxed, romantic piece, and not some crotch-thrusting, diddle-diddle fast-finger flash guitar-hero wank. Gary nods. “I always liked that melody. Cozy Powell recorded a version about six years ago on the Over The Top album. The guy who wrote it used to work with Jeff Beck, and wrote it for Beck, but he never used it. The way they did it was sort of jazzy, and I wanted to make it a bit more like a “Parisienne Walkways” kind of thing. A bit more romantic. So I changed the whole rhythm and write this little middle section.

“I love the sound of it. It’s all Fairlight, that track—a guy called Andy Richards who does all the Frankie Goes To Hollywood stuff did it.”

Strange too, listening to an instrumental, to recall that it wasn’t that long ago that Gary didn’t sing at all. “I just thought that I couldn’t sing, and I thought I was going to find this wonderful singer one day that was going to walk out of the wall somewhere and it was all going to fall into place. And, of course, that never happened.” Mostly they just walked out.

“So I resigned myself to singing. I thought, ‘Just do the best you can, and if you haven’t got the best voice in the world at least try and do it with conviction and show people that the songs you’re singing mean something to you.’ I think the good side of me singing is, because I write the songs, I can probably convey them better than someone who’s singing somebody else’s words.”

As for the guitar playing: ‘‘I listen to everybody—but I don’t try to play like anyone else. I don’t adapt my style to whatever is the fashionable guitar sound at the moment. The Van Halen thing: when that came along with all the twohand playing, everybody else started to do that and still do. I think I sound a bit different to those guys because I stayed away from that—except maybe onstage, for a joke, I’ll throw in a bit!

‘‘It’s great to listen to but so many of those guys sound like clones. There’s not a lot of original players out there at the moment.”

What about this much-lauded new wave of guitar heroes then?

“You mean Yngwie Malmsteen? He leaves me cold! OK, he’s very fast, but anybody can play very fast if they wanted to sit down and work out all the stuff. It’s a very clinical approach to playing. Plus,

I haven’t heard him write a good song yet!

“People will go, ‘Oh, he’s jealous of somebody playing faster than him,’ but it’s not that at all. I’ve done all that and I’m just not interested anymore. It’s just a lot of notes. When I was growing up, I listened to Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Hendrix, and—between the four of those guys—my style kind of grew out of that. But that was a very particular time to British music: the blues boom. My guitar playing roots are definitely in the blues. When I listen to the new guitarists today, they’ve missed out on all that and that’s why a lot of it sounds so cold.

“But I know what it’s like, because when / was 15, I didn’t want to listen to some old black guy sitting on a porch playing his guitar; I wanted to hear Jeff Beck play with all the feedback and everything! If he’d told me, ‘Go listen to Big Bill Broonzy’ or something, I’d have gone ‘Bollocks! You’re good enough for me!’ So it’s the same if I was to tell a kid to go back and listen to Peter Green: it holds no interest for them. But it’s their loss because they’re leaving a dimension out of guitar playing which was at the roots of heavy guitar as we know it now.”

“FRIDAY ON MY MIND”—The Easybeats’ ’60s hit with a few word changes. “I had to! I couldn’t sing a line like, ‘Gonna spend my bread’] I changed it to ‘Paint it red’. It’s amazing though, how many people know that song and like it. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time. We made it very techno-pop.”

“STRANGERS IN THE DARKNESS”— “It’s about heroin: kids who come to London and get involved in drugs and become prostitutes and all that. The chorus sounds poppy, but in the way that a Sting song would: If you listen to it closely there’s a little more thought in it.”

Does having a string of hit singles in a row land him with two separate audiences: the pop crowd and the serious guitar fans?

“Yes,” Gary nods, “You notice it at the gigs—a bigger range of ages, the people who buy the singles and the hardcore guitar fans.

“I don’t think they particularly alienate each other. They’re going to have to learn to live together,” he laughs. “The thing I don’t like about being a musician is the barriers people put up around the music. I think you should be able to appreciate all kinds—the most interesting bands to me have always been the ones who do everything, the Beatles, the Stones, Zeppelin. They were never afraid to experiment with different sounds, different instruments, different types of music. The last bands I can think of who’ve done that sort of thing are the Eurythmics and the Police. I think if you keep on repeating yourself you get stale very quickly.”

“THUNDER RISING”—“That’s a Lizzy-sounding track as well. It’s based on old Celtic legends, and mentions different characters from Irish mythology. As for the sound, I just wanted a super-heavy track towards the end of the album."

“JOHNNY BOY”—A complete contrast with the track before. It reminds me of the old folk song, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme,’ Gary smiles. “It was meant to be like an Irish ballad. We did it live in the studio. We got Paddy Maloney from the Chieftans to play pipes, Don Airey played keyboards and I played acoustic guitar. The only cop-out was we used a string synthesizer in the end!”

“You can’t play it as a guitar; that’s the trouble. When you sit down and play, if you’ve got to change your style so much to express yourself it’s like learning to talk with a golf ball in your mouth! You’ve got to compensate for its deficiencies all the time.”

Back to the last track—nice to hear an album ending with something other than the standard soppy love ballad you hear on every heavy rock album these days. “Including mine!” chortles Gary. “But I tried to stay away from them this time. If we did a ballad we tried to give it some depth so that it wasn’t, as you said, a soppy love song. I thought if I’m going to do a slow track then it’s going to be bluesy, or something completely different.”

So there you have it. The Indispensible, Pretty Damn Cheap Gary Moore personal guide to Wild Frontier. If you had to write a review of the album as a whole, Gary, what would you say?

“I’d say it’s a fantastic album full of taste and subtlety and wonderful musicianship and songs. That’s all.”

That’s all. B