Gary Moore

Of his ten planets, five sit in fire signs, three in water, two in air and not one in earth. Earth is the element that holds a thing to a fixed shape, and the chart of a guitarist the record calls among the most technically formidable Britain produced has none of it at all. Moore moved between hard rock and blues across forty years.

The Sun, Mercury and Jupiter sit inside ten degrees of Aries, a tight group in the sign that begins things and will not wait, and the Moon answers from Leo. Aries attacks and Leo performs, which for a player whose instrument was played at speed and at volume is about as direct a reading as this project offers. A T-square holds the Sun, Saturn and Uranus with no outlet, so identity is braced between limit and the break.

Five of the ten planets were retrograde at his birth, including Mercury and Mars, which turns both speech and drive inward while the Aries group runs forward. The Moon stands at a strained angle to Venus at under half a degree and makes an easy skill of its contact with Neptune at seven tenths. Saturn sits square Uranus at over a degree. For a player who crossed between two forms, that braced figure is the part of the chart that kept moving him on.

He died at Estepona on 6 February 2011, at fifty eight. Mars rules his Aries Sun, and that day it stood square its own birth position at under a degree while making easy contact with his natal Mercury at three fifths. Saturn stood directly opposite that same natal Mercury at four fifths. The Moon was new and ten per cent lit, a phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them, and it sat conjunct his natal Venus within a degree. The Sun had reached Aquarius, air, the element his chart never had.