Top 55 Quotes & Sayings by Gary Moore
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish musician Gary Moore.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
We're losing the whole point: music is not to impress people, music has to stand up on its own and guitar solos are nothing to do with it.
Whatever I do, whether it sells or not, at least I mean it at the time and I'm honest about it. Which I think is the only way to be.
I found reading musical notation frightfully boring.
I drove my Mum crazy, because I wouldn't go out and play football or join the Boy Scouts, I'd just sit at home and play the guitar.
At some point the label 'hard-rocker' began to get on my nerves, and I decided to break those chains. My music definitely doesn't sound like AC/DC or the Scorpions - nothing against either of these bands, they're okay. But I was fed up with that image.
Songs that are just a vehicle for a guitar solo are very empty, just an excuse for a guitarist to show what scales he practiced last month.
I remember seeing The Who at the Top Hat.
My father was responsible for me starting in music. He's always stood behind me.
Heavy metal to me is this cartoon idiom where people have their hair stuck-up all over the place dyed blonde with black roots showing through and Spandex trousers and chains around their neck, eating raw meat on stage. It just doesn't mean anything to me.
A lot of guitar players, in every genre, are afraid to leave space. They're afraid to leave a hole, afraid they'll fall down it or something.
The rhythmic feel of 'Dark Days In Paradise' is completely different to anything I've ever done before. There's a lot of drum loops on there, but used in conjunction with real drums: a lot of influence from hip-hop and dance music, with the keyboard sound and sequencing.
When I'm playing I get completely lost in it and I'm not even aware of what I'm doing with my face - I'm just playing.
These guitar institutes and things like that, I think they take away people's identity and they're actually encouraging a lot of people to play who are not naturally good players anyway, but they're telling people that anyone can learn to play.
I've always thought of music in the long term. I've always tried to write songs that people could listen to a couple of years later and maybe longer.
I've been listening to a lot of dance, hip-hop, drum-and-bass, reggae, R&B - very rhythmical music.
I came in touch with music at an early age. My father was a show band promoter, who took me along as a little nipper of five and put me up on the stage with the musicians to sing.
Like a lot of the newer bands, like the more poppy kinda bands, although they make really good records and they produce them really great and everything, they don't really deliver onstage. And I think that's where like the heavier bands kinda score.
Most of the bands that come out of L.A. now have singers that all sound like Daffy Duck.
There was a great blues scene in Belfast during the late '60s.
I didn't actually start to play till I was about 10. My father came home from work a Friday and he said: 'Would you like to learn to play the guitar?' I said: 'Yeah! I'd love to try!' But I didn't think for one moment that I'd be able to do it.
As time has gone on I've felt less and less need to play too many notes. That's something you do when you're younger, you play far too much and too fast.
I'm not one of those people who get emotional.
When I was about 14, I went to see Cream play. I thought they were the best band in the world.
I learnt fairly quickly that that was what I wanted to be - a guitarist - because it was the first thing I ever done in my life that really felt like it was something that I belonged to. I don't know... from the moment I picked it up it felt right.
I always loved the Yardbirds when I was a kid, you know; I was always into Jeff Beck and everything.
I don't like concert-halls where everyone is sitting down and it's all very formal.
I wasn't really worrying too much about what anybody thought: if you do that you shut yourself down.
I mean, if you go to a rock gig and someone plays a ballad it can still really come across, even though there's a hundred thousand people there.
I always think it would be great to play clubs again, and then when I do I don't like it because I just feel sometimes it's a bit too intimate.
The first time I saw Peter Green play was at the Club Rado, which was a very rough club in Belfast, and at that time he'd just replaced Eric in the Bluesbreakers. I'd gone up there to sort of hang out and see if I could meet this guy Peter Green, because I'd read about him and everything.
If you take a long time over a record, you end up making something different from what you intended.
I did play with Dr. Strangely Strange a couple of years ago - that difficult third album, 'Alternative Medicine,' 1997. It was great to see them all. They're very special people and they were very good to me in Dublin in the 1960s.
When you get into the habit of leaving a space, you become a much better player for it. If you've got an expressive style, and can express your emotions through your guitar, and you've got a great tone, it creates a lot of tension for the audience. It's all down to the feel thing.
I don't wanna play like that anymore: Widdle, widdle, widdle, up and down the neck as fast as possible.
The blues needs to be everything to you, otherwise it's not going to come across. That's what I think.
I'm not as a studied, technically, as you might think. My technique has really evolved naturally over the years from watching other guitarists and trying to develop my own style.
I sang a song called 'Sugar Time.' That was it. I had the bug.
I really want to concentrate of the blues again and do it properly, which is something I feel I didn't do before.
I think all my albums have concentrated on songs, I've never taken the typical Van Halen route to try and become a guitar hero.
I usually don't go into record stores to buy folk music.
I think that a lot of people are going so wrong by analysing music too much and learning from a totally different perspective from the way I learned. I mean, I just learned by listening to people. People I learned from learned by listening to people.
Obviously I don't play the same way as Peter, but I could do a passable imitation of Peter Green; if you gave me a guitar I could sit here and probably get closer than anybody else.
I think a good guitar solo sounds so much better within the context of a good song.
Whenever I was in the dressing room on my own, I'd start playing blues to myself. One night, Bob Daisley, the bass player, came in and said, 'You know, Gary, you should make a blues album next. It might be the biggest thing you ever did.' I laughed. He laughed, too. But I did, and he was right, and it was.
The idea of being 45 years old and wearing spandex just doesn't happen for me, you know?
Most musicians make the same record every time, and that's fine. But the people I respected when I was growing up, like Jeff Beck - they weren't afraid to try something new.
When we came to America before, we opened shows in arenas for groups like Rush. It's always been a case of playing for 45 minutes for someone else's audience.
I didn't want to end up in Hollywood having facelifts and my hair dyed blond so I could appear on my own album cover.
Irish music makes you want to get up and jump around.
This is very much becoming a reality in churches across the country.
If you put a Mars bar in one of Glenn Hughes’ hands and a bass in the other, he’ll choose the Mars bar.
If you are an expressive player, people can feel that. It is an emotional thing and becomes an extension of yourself.
A friend is someone who walks into a room when everyone else is walking out.
Lots of kids when they get their first instrument hammer away at it but they don't realise there are so many levels of dynamics with a guitar. You can play one note on a guitar and it really gets to people if it is the right note in the right place played by the right person.
Well, I have been playing electric guitar all these years and acoustic was something new to me.
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