43. Gary Moore / After The War. 1989. 4/5.

It is well known that Gary Moore’s career as a musician is in two fairly distinct halves - the first as a hard rock musician and the second as a blues musician. There is some fan crossover between the two halves of his career and the enjoyment of both genres that he writes and plays, but in general you are either a fan of Moore’s up until 1989 or a fan from 1990 onwards. And it is this album, “After the War”, his 7th solo album that capped off a decade of some of the best guitar driven hard rock you could hope to listen to, that became the last of that genre from Moore.
This album follows on in style and substance from his previous album, “Wild Frontier” that had come almost two years previously, and is the subject of an episode on Season 2 of this podcast. It retains the excellent trio of Moore on guitar, his longtime collaborator Neil Carter on keys and rhythm guitar, and Bob Daisley on bass guitar. Added in here for good measure is Cozy Powell on drums. So from the outset the musicianship was never going to be in question. The style of music does again contain some of his celtic roots, but overall is the hard rock – and in places bordering on heavy metal – that he had made his own over the past decade. By this stage of his career, Gary had perfected his own lead vocal such that he didn’t feel it necessary to have any guest vocalists come on as he had done in places in the past, and he had surrounded himself with artists of the highest calibre. Some people consider “Wild Frontier” his high water mark when it comes to albums, but for me all of them had moments that would make me consider them the best. With such a wonderful catalogue behind him, with albums like “Corridors of Power”, “Dirty Fingers”, “Victims of the Future”, “Run for Cover” and of course “Wild Frontier”, just how do you go about producing an album to equal those, especially towards the end of the 1980’s decade where hard rock was being pulled and twisted in so many ways? I don’t know, but when you produce an album like this in the face of that, to me it shows true greatness.

“After the War” is one of the great Gary Moore songs. Back on the album “Run for Cover”, Gary wrote a song that he involved his great friend Phil Lynott on, called “Out in the Fields”, which had Phil both playing bass guitar but also singing lead vocals on selected sections of the song. It was, and is, a great song, and on the back of that Gary composed another song in exactly the same vibe, with the same sections of lyrics set aside for Lynott to sing. With Lynott’s unfortunate passing in 1986 the song was put on the backburner, but for this album, Moore revitalised the song, and its composition moves along the same framework put in place for “Out in the Fields”, with Moore singing the whole song, but with a noticeable alteration to how he is singing the pieces that would have been performed by Lynott. It’s a great follow up to “Out on the Fields” and acts as a terrific tribute to his fallen friend.
“Speak for Yourself” is top shelf Gary Moore, one of the fastest songs he had ever composed, based around his hard riffing guitar, Daisley’s rumbling bassline and Cozy’s perfect hard hitting drums. Neil Carter’s fingers are also all over this, switching from rhythm to keys, and the kind of song he always seemed to balance perfectly from a writing perspective as well. This blazes along for the entirety of the song, and is an absolute triumph from start to finish. One of Moore’s most underrated songs, and for me easily in the top ten of his best. “Livin’ on Dreams” dials that speed back and re-enters a more typical Moore kind of song, with the jaunty bass and drums and Gary singing about the world around him more closely. It brings the album back from the very heavy album it appeared to be heading in, to the more hard rock element he is (or was) more comfortable in at this stage of his career. It’s a lighter song that still showcases all the great things about this foursome.
Side One ends with the amazing “Led Clones”, written by Moore and Carter as a backlash against the style of bands that were appearing at the end of the 1980’s, bands whose music quite clearly was trying to become a carbon copy of the sound that Led Zeppelin had created, and make their own way in the music world on the back of it. Kingdom Come was the band most pointedly at the time who was doing this, almost shamelessly. This song is a cracker. It could honestly be a Led Zeppelin song, so cleverly do they utilise every little trick and musical ledge that Led Zeppelin created, and put it into one song, with lyrics that hammer those bands mercilessly. Better yet, Ozzy Osbourne sings the lead vocal on the track, which just improves it even more. Take a hard listen to the track, and pick up every Led Zeppelin musical nuance that they use. It is a masterclass, and better than anything that Kingdom Come and those other bands ever produced.
Side Two opens with “Running from the Storm”, another typically excellent Moore track pushed along by Daisley’s fast running bass again alongside Cozy’s drums, and the great interaction with Carter’s keys and rhythm guitar. Gary’s vocals soar over the top in the chorus, injecting his amazing guitar throughout. This is another of those songs that is severely underrated in his solo catalogue. It is another beauty. “This Thing Called Love” actually has a very Van Halen feel to it, both musically and vocally and lyrically. I don’t know if it was something he was trying to achieve, but you could easily take this song and drop it onto a Van Halen album in those first albums and not miss a beat. I think it’s fantastic. Others feel it is a deliberate copy of the band but I choose to believe that, if anything, it is a tribute to the sound Van Halen created, in a GOOD way. “Ready for Love” sounds like Gary’s attempt to make a foray into the pop rock scene again, with lyrics and musical composition to match. It’s fine, it’s a Gary Moore song, but it does miss a beat considering what has come before it. The female backing vocals throw a bit of a curve ball as well. If it was up to me, I’d have done something else.
The album then concludes with the epic “Blood of Emeralds”, a song written as Moore’s tribute to Phil Lynott. The celtic taste is strong here, in the same way as it was on the previous album’s hit song “Over the Hills and Far Away”, and it does act as a wonderful way to honour the memory of his great friend. It is an epic, and Gary has a way of writing great songs to finish off albums. This is no exception.

I bought this album as soon as I possibly could when it was released, no doubt with saved Xmas money as I was at that time a very poor university student. I still remember bringing home the vinyl from the local record store, “The Rock Factory” at Shellharbour Square, and taking it to my room and putting it on, and loving it from the very opening strains of “After the War”. And to be honest, I couldn’t believe just how good this album was. I loved most of it, played it a lot… and then it got lost on the racks. That was mainly from the fact that six months later I had left uni and gotten my first job, and with a real income coming in I finally had money with which to buy any and all albums that I could ever want, and this I began doing, meaning that many albums that I had got lost in the crush. More fool me.
Flash forward a few years from that time, and I am living in Sydney, and whatever the next Gary Moore blues album that was being released at that time comes out, which I hear, and not for the first time at that time I wonder aloud WHY Gary Moore had cast aside his hard rock brilliance in order to follow the blues path. That then leads me to my Gary Moore collection, and I start going back through those great albums of the 1980’s. And then I come back to “After the War”. And I am inspired all over again by how good it is. Then comes the flood of January 2001, where all of my vinyl albums were destroyed… and I had lost it forever. Well, not forever, but again I didn’t have a copy of it for 20 years, until covid strikes, and my wife encourages me to rebuild my vinyl collection. Which I duly do. And one of my first re-purchases? A ridiculously cheap brand new copy of Gary Moore’s “After the War” ($15 at JB Hi-Fi. Why?!?! I don’t care). And I put it on… and I am in love all over again.
This is an immensely underrated album in Gary Moore’s catalogue. Criminally so in fact. How is it that people have missed this along the way? My guess is that because the previous album “Wild Frontier” had had hit singles such as “Over the Hills and Far Away”, and the title track and the cover of the Easybeats “Friday on My Mind”, that when this came out and didn’t have that kind of song being released, people just missed it. And yet for all intents and purposes, this is a better album, a heavier album, a more relatable album. At least, to my ears, it always has been. I love all of those albums from the 1980’s, each for their own parts and styles. And if I listen to Moore’s albums together, my preference will probably always change. But this is truly one of his best. Everything about it is remarkable. Which, to me, has always been a mystery as to why he then made the significant change to become an exclusively blues rock musician following this album. There were reasons – which no doubt we’ll discuss on the review of those initial blues albums down the track – but every time I listen to this album, I struggle to conceive why he left behind writing songs as brilliant as these in order to move to the blues. And yes, the onset of grunge may well have knocked him around if he had remained with his hard rock music, but we will never actually know.