As reinventions go, Gary Moore's swapping of leather jackets and hard rock for comfortable clothes and a Les Paul guitar has been one of the better recent success stories of the blues.
A fan of the genre from the early 1960s, when Skid Row, his then band, supported the Peter Green-led Fleetwood Mac, Moore couldn't be accused of jumping on bandwagons. His calling isn't necessarily for the blues, however, as his forays into hard rock, jazz fusion and AOR testify.
Yet here he is, playing his first gig in Dublin for more than 10 years, in a sold-out venue populated mostly by men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Moore is a confident, assertive, instinctive guitarist, adept at flicking out flurries of mercurial blues notes.
His manner on stage is gruff but gracious, a blue-collar musician with an efficient, if hardly choreographed, set of moves - a few verses of a song at the microphone, then it's centre stage for a guitar solo - his face reflecting the blues licks in a series of absurd, orgasmic gurnings.
The audience responds accordingly, empathising with Moore's blues groans of missing his baby, needing the love of a pretty baby and how, when he woke up one morning, his baby (her again!) had done him wrong.
It's simplistic, clichΘd and repetitious, even relentless. Yet Moore invests his work with an earnest passion, a seemingly honourable man churning out silver-winged approximations of Eric Clapton/Peter Green/Mick Taylor workouts. Ultimately, though, it's pastiche with knobs on, great moments mixed in with awful half-hours.
