Tony Moore reflect on varied career in Shoreham show

Award-winning singer-songwriter and entertainer Tony Moore looks back on a remarkably-varied career in a special night at Shoreham's Ropetackle on Thursday, April 5 at 8pm.
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Tony

From being an early member of Iron Maiden, through playing keyboards with Cutting Crew (I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight) to helping the early careers of artists like KT Tunstall, Ed Sheeran, James Morrison, James Bay and hundreds more, Tony has done it all.

A qualified pilot, promoter, producer, writer and actor, he will reminisce in Shoreham.

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“The evening is going to be a blend of a lot of different things. Over the last 40 years, crazily enough, I have been involved with an enormous number of different things. I will be a one-man band on the night, though there will be a guest, and it will be a journey through the things I have done. It will be a very informal show, an evening of two halves. The first half will be a little bit more acoustic, and the second half will be a little bit more raucous! It’s something that I have been doing in different places over the past few years, and I just enjoy the freedom of it, sometimes playing something spontaneously that I hadn’t planned to play but that just feels right in the moment.

“I grew up in Bristol and when I was about 17, I realised that playing in Bristol in school bands and so on was OK, but I was more ambitious to have success, and so I thought that London was the place to go. I looked through a magazine called Melody Maker which was like the internet for music back in the day. Everything you needed you could find in the one newspaper, and I saw an advert and drove to London and had an audition.

“The rehearsal was very, very loud, and then they went off to talk about it and then they came back and offered me the job. The band was Iron Maiden, and I stayed for six months. I left after the first gig because I didn’t feel that the keyboards were right in the band. Sometimes you just have to follow your instinct, and Iron Maiden never had another keyboard player after me. But it got me to London, and then I was in a band with Brian James who had been the guitarist with The Damned. This was the height of New Wave, and it was a really exciting time to be in London. I thought I had made the right move, and we were doing some really exciting tours. We opened for Black Sabbath. Mind you, the audience hated us. We were New Wave and Black Sabbath were heavy metal, and in those days, you couldn’t get away with that. You probably could now. We had one single and that lasted a year. We were called Tanz der Youth.

“And then I left that band and for a few years I lived in the country working with a progressive rock band called England that never quite took off – before moving back to London. I had no money, nothing, and I started to get some work as a juggler and a free-lance court jester, and that led to some TV work. I ended up being in The Young Ones. It was so exciting to be on the set. You could see that the programme was doing something that had never been done on TV before. It was amazing programme.”

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