1286. Gary Moore / Still Got the Blues. 1990. 3.5/5

Gary Moore’s had a long and illustrious career leading up to the start of the 1990’s. His style of guitar oriented hard rock had built its audience on hard work, great live shows and solid performing albums. He occasionally made it into the mainstream as well, most noticeably with his cover of The Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind” from his “Wild Frontier” album. However, despite his popularity in the UK, Japan and even Australia, he was unable to break into the US charts. His 1989 release “After the War” had even utilised Ozzy Osbourne as a guest vocalist on the song “Led Clones”, but even this failed to raise his profile in North America.
While on tour promoting the “After the War” album, bass guitarist Bob Daisley implanted an idea with Moore that would eventually see him rearrange and reinterpret the direction of his music career. As Daisley write in his excellent autobiography “For Facts Sake”, “Before shows, Gary and I would jam together in the tune-up room, playing various bits ‘n’ pieces which included some old Blues standards. One night after we’d messed around with some songs from the “John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton” album, I said, “Ya know, we should do a Blues album, even if it’s a one off”. My idea appealed to Gary, and he began to give it some serious thought”.
With the tour over, Moore had allowed the initial thought to mull over in his mind and had come to the conclusion that he was going to give the blues album a run. It was to be a combination of blues covers and original tracks written by Moore himself. Suggestions came from band members. Daisley offered the selection of his favourite blues song “Oh Pretty Woman” by A.C. Williams, which was taken on board. There were nine songs that made the original release of the album and three more that made the CD version of the album. Of those 12 songs, Moore composed five of the nine that made the vinyl version of the album.
Recording a blues album required more personnel than a rock band. It required players who could add the brass of trumpet and saxophones, and Moore obviously decided that he needed musicians away from his band who were more specialised in the blues, which left some of his bandmates in a quandary. Daisley write in his autobiography, “Bassist Andy Pye had been a good friend of Gary’s for quite some time and was probably considered more of a Blues player than I was. I wasn’t surprised when Andy not only got to play on more of the new album than I did, he was asked to do the promotional tours as well. Neil Carter and I stood on the sidelines for a good while, wondering how long Gary’s blues phase would last”.
The album that resulted from this was titled “Still Got the Blues”. The answer to the question posed by Daisley and Carter as to how long Gary’s blues phase would last was... to the end of his days.

Whether you are a fan of the blues or not, the opening of the album is still energetic enough to grab your attention and to enjoy. Moore’s own “Moving On” has enough similarities to his own rock music that makes it a good opening track for his new venture. With only the bass, piano, drums and guitar alongside his vocal it is the closest you can get to his earlier rock formation, with that real lean into the bass rhythm and style certainly audible. The second track on the album ramps things up blues style with the aforementioned favourite blues song of Bob Daisley, “Oh Pretty Woman”, which Moore somewhat coldly asked Andy Pyle to play bass on rather than Daisley himself. From the outside it seems like a strange decision. Despite this, it is a terrific version of this song, complete with a guest appearance from blues legend Albert King on guitar, and it sounds like the band is excited to have him there while they are playing it, the joy comes across out of the speakers. “Walking By Myself” is a cover of the original written by Jimmy Rogers and has the prominent use of harmonica throughout the song, played here by Frank Mead. The strut of the guitar and rhythm is the highlight of the song alongside Gary’s great guitar work again. The second of Moore’s compositions follows this, with the title track “Still Got the Blues (For You)”, where Gary has made deliberate change in energy and pace, giving it an opportunity to make its mark on the charts when it was released as a single, which it duly was as the second from the album following “Oh Pretty Woman”. The single release had two minutes cut out of it from the album version, which was basically the long solo that takes us from the middle of the track through to the end. The single is fine at a little over four minutes, while the album version clocks in a just over 6 minutes in length. Moore does a great job on his emotional work on this song, something he has always been terrific at. “Texas Strut” is also a Moore composed track, with the tempo dialled back up again and a more rock-oriented feel, probably coming from the fact that Daisley appears on bass as does Moore’s former bandmate in Thin Lizzy Brian Downey on drums. There’s a bit of John Lee Hooker about the song, including the ‘how how how how’ spoken in the back half of the song. It ends the first side of the LP with five songs that have lost little in comparison to Moore’s earlier rock albums.
The second half of the album opens up with “Too Tired”, a true blues standard along with trumpet and saxophones all combining with Moore soling his guitar over the top, and also another blues legend Albert Collins joining in for fun. “King of the Blues” is a Gary Moore composed song that mirrors the blues feel of the previous track. The second side of the album has moved to a different style of the blues, one that is set in a mid-tempo and pushes harder on the vocal and horns in the middle before Gary and his guitar take over for their long patch. “As the Years Go Passing By” is a cover of a song written by Deadric Malone, and this a is a true molasses stretching slow tempo blues song, Time almost stands still on occasions through the song, in a true byplay on the title of the song. 7 minutes and 46 seconds is a long time at the best of times, but it really plays out longer while sitting through this track. And if you thought that track was a song stuck in quicksand, much the same can be said about the final one on the album “Midnight Blues”, this one composed by Moore himself. He follows a cover tune of a song that slinks along in slow motion with a song he wrote.... that follows the same template and benchmark. This is only 5 minutes long rather than almost 8, and while it is heartfelt lyrically and vocally it is a quiet and slow and sleep-inducing track to finish what was released on the vinyl album.
The CD does contain three extra tracks, all cover songs. The first is “That Kind of Woman” written by George Harrison, who also guests on the song on guitars and backing vocals. This partnership worked so well that Harrison asked Moore to play a guitar solo on the first single from the Travelling Wilbury’s second album that was released not long after this album. Withe mix of guitars and piano and brass it holds its own on the album without having made the original cut. “All Your Love” is an Otis Rush cover, a song that harks back to Moore’s rock roots with the main base just guitar, bass, drums and organ, and takes this song and really gives it a modern kick. You can hear a lot of what made the blues popular at the time it was written in the song, and it is given a proper tribute here. The CD then concludes with “Stop Messin’ Around”, a Fleetwood Mac cover from their earliest formation, and with songwriter Peter Green being one of Moore’s major influences as he moved further into the blues machine, the song is an indicator of that going forward.

I have been a fan of Gary Moore’s almost from the moment I first heard him on Rage back in the mid-1980's. The first album I owned was passed on by my heavy metal music dealer, it being the “Rocking Every Night – Live in Japan” album. And on the back of that it wasn’t long until I had every one of his solo albums, and I loved every single one of them.
The release of Gary’s blues album had been widely publicised up until its release date. It was an interesting time. Hot Metal magazine had been pumping it up prior to it reaching the shelves, and I couldn’t work out why. I mean, what was wrong with his hard rock albums?! The albums where he sang and played awesome riffs on guitar? I couldn’t understand why he had decided to do this album, and much like Bob Daisley and Neil Carter, I was already trying to work out whether this was going to be a one off project or whether it was going to bloom into something permanent.
I bought the album in the first week of release, sound unheard as was the way in those days, and brought the vinyl home to place on my turntable. And what I heard on that first side of the album was a surprise to me. I remember enjoying those first three tracks immediately, the guitar the rhythm the energy. All of that was excellent. Even the title track, which delved into a different atmosphere, was still enjoyable. Then I turned that album over, and it lost me completely. That second side of the album went deeper into a style of the blues that didn’t grab me at all. “King of the Blues”, “As the Years Go Passing By” and “Midnight Blues” are slow and rambling, something I’m sure blues fans enjoy but I did not. After a couple of listens, it made my job easy while this still found its way to my turntable. Play the first side of the album, and then either play it again or change it for the next album in rotation. It went into the crates when I finally moved out of home, and then it was destroyed in the flood of 2001. And to be fair, I was probably less upset about that vinyl than I was of all the others.
Some years later I did finally replace it with a CD version of the album, in the name of having my Gary Moore collection complete (though it isn’t because I don’t own any albums after the one released after this one “After Hours”). And I have very occasionally had it out to listen to since then. But rarely if ever the whole album. Until... this week. Yes, it was time to dust it off, pull it off the shelves and see how it would sound to the ears some 35 years after its release. And that in itself was a shock – 35 years! It brought back that it was recently the 14th anniversary of Gary’s passing, and just how long 35 years is when you think back about certain albums. And on revisiting this album over the past few days, it again has not been unpleasant. The same feelings I had about the album are still there. The first half is still fun and uplifting, it sounds like everyone is having a great time playing these songs, and that makes it enjoyable to listen to. The second half to me is still dull and frankly boring. Sure, I can appreciate the music as played and the musicians for their talents, but it doesn’t do anything for me. And that is simply a genre taste for me.
In ranking all of Gary Moore’s 17 studio albums – a ridiculous ten of which are blues albums from 1990 through to his passing – I rank this as #8. And if you are keeping tally, it shouldn’t be too difficult to work out which albums rank above this and which rank below.
As you will have surmised, Bob and Neil – and me – all waited for Gary’s blues exploration to come to its natural conclusion so he could return to his hard rock roots, all in vain. That’s a shame, but it does keep those hard rock albums as very special because of his abandonment of the genre. As for his blues albums? Well, let’s just say that the continuing story and reviews of THOSE albums going forward should make for entertaining listening, more so than the albums themselves...