Gary Moore: From Thin Lizzy and Heavy Metal to Still Got the Blues

At the commercial peak of the late 1980s hard rock boom, Gary Moore sat down, listened to his own gold and platinum heavy metal albums, and was repulsed by what he heard. So he traded the leather for a tailored blue suit and recorded a stripped-down traditional blues album. Still Got the Blues sold more than three million copies and became the biggest success of his life. This episode traces how the Belfast-born guitarist got there, from a childhood spent watching live bands at his father's Queen's Hall ballroom, to teaching himself a right-handed guitar despite being naturally left-handed, to fleeing the Troubles for Dublin in 1968, where he joined the Irish band Skid Row and shared a cramped bed-sit with Phil Lynott.

Moore's revolving-door years with Thin Lizzy, including the 1979 album Black Rose and his mid-tour walkout that same year, sit alongside short-lived projects like G-Force and the power trio BBM with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, painting a picture of a perfectionist who admitted he was grumpy, demanding and uncompromising. A brutal glassing in a Camden bar in the mid-1970s left him permanently scarred and camera-shy just as the MTV era arrived. Through the 1980s he cycled through AOR on Corridors of Power, heavy metal on Victims of the Future and Celtic rock on Wild Frontier, scoring hits with Lynott like Parisian Walkways and Out in the Fields before Lynott's death in January 1986 triggered a creative reckoning. Moore died of a heart attack in his sleep in Spain in February 2011 at 58, but his out-of-phase 1959 Les Paul, Greeny, lives on in the hands of Metallica's Kirk Hammett.

• How fretting with his dominant left hand may explain his forceful vibrato and aggressive attack
• The Camden bar attack that scarred his face and, according to Eric Bell, changed his personality
• Why platinum records in the 1980s left him feeling like a fraud playing a character
• The wiring mistake behind Greeny, the Peter Green Les Paul with its thin, nasal out-of-phase tone
• Albert King's lesson that the blues lives in the space between the notes