Gary Moore: Rock Guitarist, Dead at 58...

Robert William Gary Moore

(4 April 1952 – 6 February 2011)

Gary Moore was a renowned rock guitarist and musician from Belfast, Ireland, best recognized as a blues rock guitarist and singer.

Moore was a former member of the legendary Irish group Thin Lizzy.

Moore was originally drafted into Thin Lizzy by its late frontman Phil Lynott. He later gained acclaim for his solo work and was a former member of the Irish group Skid Row.

He was only 16 when he moved from Belfast to Dublin in 1969, to join Skid Row, which featured Lynott as lead vocalist. He was later brought into Thin Lizzy by Lynott to replace the departing Eric Bell, another guitarist from Northern Ireland.

The lead guitarist received critical acclaim for his work on the 1974 Thin Lizzy album, Nightlife, but would never be constrained by the music group format. A year earlier, he had released his first solo album Grinding Stone and his virtuoso playing was to make him a recognised artist in his own right. Although returning to Thin Lizzy briefly in the late 1970s, his solo work continued to garner interest and he also enjoyed UK chart success with Lynott, via singles Parisienne Walkways and Out In The Fields.

Throughout his career, Moore was to embrace a range of genres including blues, metal and hard rock. He performed on stage with a range of major artists and released 20 studio albums.

Despite a tough image that was his legacy from his days with Thin Lizzy, Moore was a gently-spoken character with few rock star traits who generally shied away from publicity, living quietly in Brighton, England.

Moore died in his sleep of a heart attack in his hotel room while on holiday in Estepona, Spain.

Gary is survived by four children; daughters Saoirse and Lily and sons Jack and Gus. He is also survived by by his partner, Jo.

RIP

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John Barry: Film Composer, Dead at 77...

John Barry Prendergast, OBE
(3 November 1933 – 30 January 2011)

John Barry was an Oscar winning English film score composer. He was one of the most successful of all film composers; he won five Oscars for scores that included Born Free, Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves, but wrote his best-known and most enduring music for the James Bond films.

He was born John Barry Prendergast in York, England, the son of an Irish man, was raised in and around cinemas in the north of England. His father was a projectionist in the silent movie era and ended up owning a small chain of cinemas, which Barry Snr and Jnr regularly visited.

In his teens, Barry soaked up the soundtrack work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann, spent a couple of national service years in the British army and graduated towards the burgeoning post-war youth pop market with an outfit called the John Barry Seven.

From there, he moved to television, including BBC's Drumbeat and to youth cult movies such as Beat Girl, his music informed as much by soundtrack composers as by Duane Eddy and Dizzy Gillespie.

Barry’s most fertile creative period was the mid-1960s. The success of his scores for the Bond films led to commissions for numerous other spy films, such as The Ipcress File (1965) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966) and later for the television series The Persuaders.  Among Barry’s other scores of this period were those for Zulu (1963), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and the two which brought him his first Oscars: The Lion in Winter (1968), with Peter O’Toole as the ailing King Henry II; and Born Free (1966), the syrupy theme for which also gained him an Oscar for best song.

In 1970 he moved to California and became a tax exile. Although he was still used for Bond films, Barry’s tax problems coincided with a general dip in his fortunes, and his stock did not recover until he was asked to score a Bruce Lee film, Game of Death, in the late 1970s. Thereafter Barry became one of the most sought-after, and richest, film composers in Hollywood. He also won two more Oscars, with the lush yet sophisticated scores for Out of Africa (1985) and Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western, Dances With Wolves (1990).

Beyond the Bond genre he dabbled from time to time with films based on historical events, earning Oscar nominations for the music for both Mary Queen of Scots (1971) and Chaplin (1992).  Barry’s last Bond film was The Living Daylights (1987), creating a Top 10 hit for the pop group A-Ha.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1998. He won a Bafta Fellowship Award in 2005 and a Max Steiner Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the city of Vienna, in 2009.

Barry was married four times. He married Barbara Pickard in 1958, with whom he had a daughter. He married secondly, in 1965, the actress Jane Birkin; they had a daughter. He married thirdly, in 1969, Jane Sidey. He is survived by his fourth wife, Laurie, whom he married in 1976, and by his four children.

Barry died of a heart attack at his Oyster Bay home, in New York.

RIP

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