“His words made us both chuckle — but he was spot on.” Gary Moore discusses how Bob Daisley guided his blues transformation.]

Gary Moore didn’t set out to become a blues guitarist. In the late 1980s, he was still operating inside the hard rock machinery that had defined much of his career. But a shift was already forming that would take him toward his solo breakthrough album, Still Got the Blues and, eventually, toward a very different legacy.

The idea, Moore recalled in a 2003 interview with this writer, didn’t arrive as a grand revelation. It came instead through a series of small, repeated suggestions from an unlikely source: bass guitarist Bob Daisley.

It was Daisley who had already helped shape another major career turn with his support for Randy Rhoads as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist in 1980. In 1986, after joining Thin Lizzy very briefly, Daisley was working alongside Moore and continuing to make similar kinds of quiet interventions.

“Every time I was in the dressing room,” Moore recalled, “I’d be on my own playing some blues and Bob Daisley would come in and go, ‘You know, you should make a blues album, as it would probably be the biggest thing you ever did.’