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Fender Stratocaster 1963 Gary Moore
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Gary Moore may be known for the famous Les Paul he bought from Peter Green, but the Irish giant was also into great Stratocasters. His superb Fiesta Red 1961 is quite known and has been replicated by the Fender Custom Shop, but he also had a 1963 whose paint, most likely a three tone sunburst, has been stripped for a natural look. That modification made thit Strat not unlike the one Moore used in his Thin Lizzy days in the seventies.
This beautiful L series was gifted to Gary Moore by Claude Nobs in 1998. Nobs, the famous “Funky Claude” from the lyrics to Smoke On The Water, is none other than the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival. Claude’s respect for Gary’s music is such that Moore has been invited seven times to play the festival between 1990 and 2010. Also he gave him a vintage Strat.
Not only did Moore remove the paint, he also changed the tuners, the vibrato, the frets and replaced the pickups with a Kinman AVN set. Kinman is an Australian manufacturer, famous for his single pickups that don’t hum like a regular Strat would. Thus equipped, this 63 became Moore’s spare Strat, the one he would always take on tour in case the 61 would have some kind of issue. That 63 has a place of choice on the live DVD Blues For Jimi, Moore’s tribute to Hendrix that he recorded in 2007, especially on a spellbinding version of the slow blues Red House.
Five years after Moore’s tragic passing in 2010, this true relic was sold at an auction in London, at Bonhams. It is now part of Matt’s collection, a true jewel among guitars from Moore’s vast arsenal.
Gary Moore
(1952 - 2011)
Band: Thin Lizzy
Main guitar: Gibson Les Paul Standard 1959
Compulsory listening: Parisienne Walkways
Irish guitar hero Gary Moore is the proof that an artist can reinvent himself, even if he is a guitarist who has already experienced a fair amount of success. Gary Moore has gone through very different musical decades and has never stopped evolving in the process. His professional career started in 1968 in the band Skid Row (the Irish band of the 60s, not to be confused with the LA band of the eighties of the same name) when he was only sixteen. He then joined Thin Lizzy in 1974, the result of a lasting musical friendship with singer / bassist Phil Lynott.
Moore’s playing was already a mixture of rock and blues, under the influence of his hero Peter Green, from whom he bought the famous Fleetwood Mac Les Paul, the Burst with out-of-phase pickups that can be heard on Albatross. Green’s influence can be heard in Moore’s lyrical approach, a side of him that is particularly important when he plays ballads. That finesse made Parisienne Walkways a smash hit in 1978 on his second album Back In The Streets. A year earlier, Moore had been part of the album Electric Savage by the prog rock band Colosseum II. Eclectic indeed!
Moore left Thin Lizzy in 1979 to concentrate on his solo production, starting with the G-Force project and then a series of heavy metal albums with Dirty Fingers, Corridors Of Power and Victims Of The Future. Early on, Moore gave up on the idea of finding a singer that would correspond to his vision and took to singing himself. Wild Frontier in 1987 is the beginning of Moore’s fascination for traditional celtic music, and the real revolution came in 1990 with Still Got The Blues. The title gives it away: Moore plays long, slow songs in a blues style that he would never fully embrace before that.
The following albums further explored this new direction, until Dark Days In Paradise in 1997 that integrated techno. But as the name of the Back To Blues clearly indicated in 2001, that new musical adventure was short-lived. Since then, he kept the blues power trio formula going until his death in 2008, but his influence and heritage go way beyond that. Indeed, every period from his discography has touched thousands of musicians.
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