The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (406 page)

Thursday 27

Henrik Ostergaard

(Denmark, 11 December 1963)

Dirty Looks

(Crossfire)

Dirty Looks were a popular sleaze-rock outfit founded in late 1984 in Erie, Pennsylvania, by Danish-born singer/guitarist Henrik Ostergaard and bassist Jimmy Chartley, both previously members of Crossfire. Ostergaard and Chartley promptly took Dirty Looks to San Francisco, where they felt that the band – which tended to operate with a revolving-door policy in regard to the employment of its members – were to stand a better chance of making themselves heard. Following a series of well-received independent releases, Atlantic signed the AC/DC-styled band in 1987 and released the familiar-sounding but Billboard-charting debut
Cool From the Wire
(1988).

Dirty Looks enjoyed moderate commercial success, but suffered from repeated upheaval over the next decade or so. The band broke up and reformed several times between 1993 and 2009, somehow surviving an alcohol-related close call for Ostergaard in 2007, and then the horrific manslaughter-by-stabbing of 36-year-old bass player Greg Pianka at an Erie bar in February of 2010. Unbeknown to many of his fans, Henrik Ostergaard had been under hospice care in Pennsylvania when he passed away from liver failure.

Monday 31

Mark Ryan

(Tottenham, London, 2 March 1959)

Adam & The Ants

(Various acts)

Known affectionately as ‘The Kid’, Mark Ryan initially flummoxed his academic father by dropping out of school at sixteen to take factory jobs and concentrate on forging a career in music. Guitarist Ryan was enticed by punk’s exciting buzz, making his way through a number of bands before meeting Adam Ant (Stuart Goddard) in 1977. His time with Adam & The Ants was brief but eventful: Ryan (performing under the name Mark Gaumont) arrived in time to appear with Ant in Derek Jarman’s punk film
Jubilee
(1977), though he wasn’t in the band long enough to share in their enormous commercial success.

Disagreements with the group’s management resulted in the guitarist moving on the following year, although ‘The Kid’ was shortly picked up by the controversial Moors Murderers, an ill-named band that was nonetheless the first home for Steve Strange (Steven Harrington – later of futurist pop act, Visage), Nick ‘Topper’ Headon (The Clash) and, most notably, Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders). Ryan then moved with Strange to The Photons, before a spell with Captain Sensible (Ray Burns – later of The Damned) in the band King. The guitarist eventually fulfilled his studies, majoring in music on his way to a successful second career as a playwright in Wales.

Mark Ryan had suffered for some years from ill-health before his premature death in Cardiff from liver damage.

FEBRUARY

Sunday 6

Gary Moore

(Belfast, Northern Ireland, 4 April 1952)

Thin Lizzy

(Skid Row)

(Colosseum)

Perhaps he wasn’t an innovator in the mould of a Hendrix or even a Clapton, but Gary Moore was without doubt a technically gifted guitarist whose understanding of the genres he mastered has been matched by few over the past three decades. When learning his craft, Moore paid close attention to both of the aforementioned, but was most fascinated by the work of Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green.

Gary Moore: He was one cool cat–as, by the looks of things, was his guitar .

His approximation of this bluesy style encouraged the members of Belfast rockers Skid Row (one of many groups to employ this name) to give the teenage prodigy a shot in 1968. Moore therefore replaced lead guitarist Bernard Cheevers to line up alongside Brendan ‘Brush’ Shiels (bass), Noel Bridgeman (percussion) and a then-unknown singer named Phil Lynott. This version of the band issued the single, ‘New Places, Old Faces’ (Song, 1968), which was to remain Lynott’s only recorded contribution before he left to start Thin Lizzy. (Lynott and Moore had, however, formed an invaluable bond by now.) With Skid Row, Moore enjoyed the privilege of opening for his hero, Green, who, impressed with the young guitarist, sold him his treasured 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard. (In the way of rock folklore, this thereafter became Moore’s instrument of choice.) And equally importantly, Green’s connections secured Skid Row a deal with CBS.

Still only eighteen, Gary Moore staked his claim as Skid Row’s prize commodity by playing on and co-producing the band’s albums
Skid
(1970) and
34 Hours
(1971), but by early 1972, no breakthrough had been made and the guitarist was ready to move on. Moore’s first solo record,
Grinding Stone
(Cosmos, 1973 – credited to The Gary Moore Band), once again pulled in the plaudits, but didn’t bother the statisticians.

On the back of this disappointment, Moore’s onoff membership of Thin Lizzy was to commence. Lynott (vox/bass) and Brian Downey (drums) wanted Moore to complete the line-up of the fledgling Thin Lizzy. The Irish rockers were at that time reaping a sizeable hit with ‘Whisky in the Jar’ (1973, UK Top Ten) – but it became apparent from early on, however, that the shaggy-haired musician’s playing was perhaps going to prove too ‘flamboyant’ to be contained within a band environment for too long. True, Moore’s time with Lizzy was fitful to say the least: he left in 1974, returned for a tour and then joined again briefly during 1978–79. (America was never especially kind to Moore, although Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ was enjoying major hit status at the time of the shows he played in 1976.) Simultaneously, Moore played in the British rock/fusion group, Colosseum, with whom he recorded three albums – for the first time offering solo vocals.

Gary Moore’s association with Lynott and Lizzy was now exposing his work to a wider audience, and at last elevating the guitarist to the standing of ‘hard rock god’ among young axe fans. His solo career finally caught fire via his highly memorable playing on British Top Ten hit ‘Parisienne Walkways’ (1979), for which Lynott once more added vocals: this appeared on Moore’s first solo album in six years,
Back on the Streets.
Moore then formed a group called G-Force (effectively his backing band) and travelled with them to California; unfortunately, the US climate remained alien to his magic, the thick-set guitarist admittedly perhaps not as photogenic as the majority of hair-metallers that cavorted about him in Los Angeles.

The onoff rift with Lynott was, thankfully, put to bed just before the Thin Lizzy front man’s death (
January 1986
), the pair having created both his and Moore’s biggest-ever British hit with the driving ‘Out in the Fields’ (1985, UK Top Five). There were further Top Forty outings in ‘Empty Rooms’ (1985) and ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ (1986), but it was in a live environment that Moore was always going to be most worshipped. This was proven by the man’s phenomenally popular concerts which consistently sold out months in advance of performance. During the nineties, however, the virtuoso moved away from the rock arena into more traditional blues, accompanying the likes of Albert King and Albert Collins.

Gary Moore was vacationing with his girlfriend in Estepona, Spain at the time of his sudden passing. Moore – who suffered a massive heart attack while he slept at his luxury hotel – had consumed enough alcohol to have put him five times over the limit had he been driving. Tributes were paid to the guitarist from all across the world of music, among them homages from Thin Lizzy’s Brian Downey and Scott Gorham, Ozzy Osbourne, Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen and Sir Bob Geldof.

Friday 11

Bad News Brown

(Paul Frappier - Haiti, 8 May 1977)