Will Wallner receives Gary Moore’s historic Les Paul Junior from Steve Jones

Will Wallner has shared photos and footage of Gary Moore’s 1955 Les Paul Junior, a guitar with one of the sharper provenance trails in rock. The instrument moved from Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols to Gary Moore, and its path now folds punk, Thin Lizzy and Moore’s solo years into one battered slab of mahogany history.

Gibson introduced the Les Paul Junior in 1954 as an affordable student model, but the design soon outgrew its budget roots. Stripped down and no-frills, the Junior became a rock staple precisely because it did less and sounded like more, the sort of guitar that rewards a hard right hand and does not hide behind ornament.

This particular Junior matters because its paper trail is unusually clear. Bonhams records say Steve Jones left it at Gary Moore’s Hampstead flat for several months before Moore bought it. Moore later said in 1987, “I gave him 250 pounds for it...” That same guitar was first seen with Moore on Thin Lizzy’s 1979 Black Rose tour, where it slotted into the blues-rock precision and volume that defined that run.

The story does not stop there. Moore kept using the guitar into his solo era, including on 1984’s Victims of the Future. Bonhams also ties the Junior to Moore’s comments about Wild Frontier, where he said it contributed to the harmonies on “Wild Frontier.” That gives the guitar a rare double life: it was a stage tool on Black Rose and a studio voice in Moore’s mid-1980s solo catalog.

The provenance also connects Moore and Jones through Phil Lynott’s short-lived 1978 ad-hoc lineup, the Greedy Bastards, later known as The Greedies. That detail gives the guitar an extra layer of London scene DNA, linking Sex Pistols fallout to the Thin Lizzy orbit and the wider hard-rock crossover that followed. For collectors, that kind of chain of custody is not a footnote. It is the whole point.

Wallner’s posts suggest he gets that. He described the guitar as having “a real aura,” and treated it less like a trophy than a living piece of Gary Moore history. That is why this Les Paul Junior still lands so hard: it is not just an old guitar changing hands, but a specific object that helped make records, hit stages and carry two very different corners of British rock in the same case.