Blues for Gary

Here's a well-loved copy of the 'Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton' album, an original 1966 pressing that has been played to the end of its functioning life. But no matter, because this particular copy was worn out by the teenage Gary Moore.

It's a seminal record of course, with Clapton on the rebound from the Yardbirds, while John Mayall, John McVie and Hughie Flint all did their best to enhance the tremendous zeal of the sessions. The album actually belonged to Gary's friend from east Belfast, Graham McFarlane, but possession was negotiable, and a future blues legend was the beneficiary.

I was loaned the record on what would have been Gary's 60th birthday. A big thanks to Harry Lamb from the Woodstock Blues Festival. An hour after this lovely gesture and I was in the company of Bobby Moore, father of the guitarist, who had come to visit a Gary exhibition in town. He told me a little about his son's prodigious development and about Phil Lynott's stopovers on Castleview Road, just across the road from Stormont.

This album has another connection to the Belfast blues story in that the cover image, showing Eric Clapton reading a copy of the Beano, made comics cool. So it was perfectly acceptable for guitarist Eric Bell to namecheck a robotic character from The Dandy. This cyborg maid was called Tin Lizzie. But if you called your band Thin Lizzy, then the Dubliners would pronounce it as "Tin" anyway. So it was a Belfast joke, and it has lasted for a good 40 years.