Gary Moore

“A lot of guitar players, in every genre, are afraid to leave space. They're afraid to leave a hole, afraid they'll fall down it or something.”

“Irish music makes you want to get up and jump around.”

“I mean, if you go to a rock gig and someone plays a ballad it can still really come across, even though there's a hundred thousand people there.”

“At some point the label 'hard-rocker' began to get on my nerves, and I decided to break those chains. My music definitely doesn't sound like AC/DC or the Scorpions - nothing against either of these bands, they're okay. But I was fed up with that image.”

“We're losing the whole point: music is not to impress people, music has to stand up on its own and guitar solos are nothing to do with it.”

“I wasn't really worrying too much about what anybody thought: if you do that you shut yourself down.”

“I came in touch with music at an early age. My father was a show band promoter, who took me along as a little nipper of five and put me up on the stage with the musicians to sing.”

“Heavy metal to me is this cartoon idiom where people have their hair stuck-up all over the place dyed blonde with black roots showing through and Spandex trousers and chains around their neck, eating raw meat on stage. It just doesn't mean anything to me.”

“I think all my albums have concentrated on songs, I've never taken the typical Van Halen route to try and become a guitar hero.”

“I'm not one of those people who get emotional.”

“I've been listening to a lot of dance, hip-hop, drum-and-bass, reggae, R&B - very rhythmical music.”