Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  When these slights occurred he would generally not allow them to pass unchallenged. Skid Row drummer Noel Bridgeman remembers ‘Philip losing the head one time in the dressing room of the Club A Go Go, because someone called him a “spade”. He was very, very annoyed. He was very sensitive. Being black [in Ireland] was unheard of – and he was black, illegitimate and living with his granny.’

  He had a lifelong intolerance of mockery. ‘He couldn’t bear being slighted or laughed at,’ recalled Gale Claydon née Barber, Lynott’s long-term girlfriend in the early 1970s. ‘If you ever laughed at him, that was it: you were dead. He would turn away but you had wounded him.’5

  He was a black boy in an almost completely white country. He had no idea who his father was. His mother was over the water. At times it hurt, but it also meant he could be whatever he wanted.

  Established in 1939, the Christian Brothers’ School on Armagh Road was reaching its peak occupancy of 1,500 pupils in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among the more notorious boys in Lynott’s year was Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, a career criminal whose exploits were dramatized – some might say romanticized – in The General, the acclaimed film which won John Boorman the Best Director award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

  It was a tough environment and an imposing place. The old school building was generally reserved for older boys sitting their Leaving Certificates. The new school was for everyone else, augmented with five ‘sheds’ to cater for the overspill. These were great corrugated tin outbuildings, half-moon shaped, of the type often used for temporary military constructions. Each one housed fifty-two children, taught by one Christian Brother or lay teacher, and was insulated with wood panelling. Heating in these vast hangars was provided by a crude stove attached to a chimney going up through the ceiling.

  The war-like feel of ‘the sheds’ was apt. The Christian Brothers were a religious community within the Catholic Church, a lay order of unordained men dedicated to religion and charged with administering the education of boys from the age of eight to eighteen. Though it would be both unfair and inaccurate to apportion blanket blame, varying degrees of physical, emotional and sexual violence were routinely practised, a dark legacy that has subsequently become a notorious stain on the reputation of the Church as a whole. The cause of much belated soul-searching in Ireland and elsewhere, the actions of Christian Brothers from decades ago have led to ongoing criminal prosecutions.

  Even in the absence of the most heinous abuses, the schools could be harsh, unpleasant environments. Former pupils of Scoil Colm, immediate peers of Lynott, recall incidents of institutionalized corporal punishment and countless episodes of casual cruelty. The sight of boys vomiting with fear in the schoolyard immediately prior to entering the building was a common one. ‘The Christian Brothers were religious Nazis,’ says Martin Duffy. ‘We were indoctrinated by them. They were very ferocious, completely brutal people. They had a thing called a “leather”; it was part of their uniform, a leather strap which they had complete authority to whack you with.’ The ‘leather’ was administered to the hand and sometimes to the head – only five of the best if you were lucky.

  Entering CBS at Second Class, Lynott was taught by Mr McEvoy, a bespectacled, ruddy-faced, short-tempered lay brother. At first, ‘we thought we were great fellas because he had a broken arm so he never hit us,’ says classmate Kevin Horan. ‘But when he got the cast off he took his canes out. He had one of those canes with a hook at the end of it, and he wasn’t the worst by any means.’

  During his years at school Lynott came home with his fair share of bumps and bruises, but he escaped the worst of the brutality. His academic engagement was lacklustre and he was no more proficient in his studies than he had been in Moss Side, but he was bright, polite and had charm. ‘He was a very pleasant chap,’ says his schoolmate Hugh Feighery. ‘He always had a great charisma about him, even as a youngster. Even the school teachers took to him.’

  Even had he been more interested, CBS was not an environment particularly designed to encourage creativity or original thought. The school curriculum was defined by a through-line of religious doctrine and support for Irish nationalism. It was an age dominated by Éamon de Valera, whose dedication to creating a truly ‘Irish Ireland’ throughout his multiple terms as both Taoiseach and President never wavered. At CBS, the emphasis was on a one-sided appraisal of the country’s history, language and geography. ‘You had one teacher, and he was the font of all knowledge,’ says Liam O’Connor. ‘It wasn’t an academic environment. [Free-thinking] wasn’t encouraged, it was learning by rote. History was basically the history of wars in Ireland. The good guys were the Irish and the bad guys were the Brits. That was it. Geography was different Irish towns and their main produce.’ On the sports field, Gaelic football and hurling were played while football, or soccer, was firmly frowned upon as the pastime of English colonizers. Light relief came in the form of films shown in the school hall. These were usually religious epics dedicated to the life of Bernadette, or perhaps a showing of John Wayne in King of Kings, or, on special occasions, the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy.

  It was a narrow and oppressive curriculum. ‘It was propaganda,’ says Martin Duffy. ‘Philip received Irish history as heroic tales: English rule was evil, and the Irish were the heroes for breaking free from that. He would have been completely indoctrinated in all that.’

  The CBS’s preoccupations most certainly left their mark but the fall-out was not necessarily negative. The impact of Catholicism stayed with Lynott. In his early years he was attracted to the Church, and even considered becoming a Passionist priest. He went regularly to confession and attended the Crusaders, a religious youth organization, at nearby Mount Argus seminary. As the inevitable distractions of adolescence kicked in, his interest waned. He stopped attending Mass in London in the 1970s, but when he became a father and moved back to Dublin in the early 1980s, Lynott would regularly take his two daughters to the Church of the Assumption on a Sunday morning. ‘I was born Catholic, reared Catholic, churched … everything,’ he recalled. ‘All this stuff that’s been beaten into you just comes out. It just catches you when you’re a kid. So now I look on it as a basic set of ground rules that are really important. I can say, “I’m breaking this rule here”, but at least I have a set of rules to work off.’6

  He jumped into the great pool of Irishness with greater enthusiasm than most, displaying the zeal of the convert. ‘Irish history and mythology made a big impact on him,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘I know he had a huge interest in it, and that seeped into his psyche and became part of him. He wanted to be Irish. Perhaps because he was black, he emphasized that as much as he could to fit in. He became steeped in the tradition.’

  Lynott was forever susceptible to the romantic allure of heroic struggle. Stories from the epic Ulster Cycle – a series of medieval sagas and legends woven together to provide a creation myth for the whole of Ireland – were ingrained from school, but also featured in more contemporary forms of entertainment. He loved comics and cartoons. Aged nine Lynott drew his own eight-page Superman strip: pictures and story. In Crumlin, there was a little shop on the Old County Road that sold Marvel and DC comics. He would snap up the latest editions, read them eagerly, and then swap with friends like Martin Duffy.

  It was a passion that endured into adulthood. ‘We used to love those Marvel comics,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Sometimes when we were coming home to his house late from clubs, we’d share his bed, and he’d get out a bunch of comics and we’d read.’ A song from the first Thin Lizzy album, ‘The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle’, took its title from the local landmark at the end of Castle Avenue, but its lyrics were partly inspired by a comic strip. ‘That whole piece – “I’m damned”; “indeed, dear comrade”; “I’m being bombed”; scooping up all the beans and spreading them like stars – he got that from a DC comic,’ says Thin Lizzy’s original guitarist Eric Bell. ‘He just borrowed it. He used to get Batman, Green Lantern, Superman, all th
ose fabulous American comics characters. When we were on the road, we’d stop at a garage and he’d buy a handful of them.’

  During his schooldays, Lynott was in the target audience for the CBS’s own comic paper, Our Boys. An Irish alternative to the British Boy’s Own, in its pages the great figures of Celtic nationhood were brought to life as comic-strip heroes. There were captivating tales of Fionn MacCumhaill, the mythic hunter-warrior, and Cúchulainn, the revered Irish mythological prodigal who cut a swathe through entire armies and his fiercest foes. He had no biological father and died young. Irish astronauts rocketed into space and Irish detectives rivalled Sherlock Holmes for cunning and ingenuity. The 1916 uprising and de Valera’s Fianna Fáil were eulogized. Much of the material was written in Irish.

  It all played a wonderful kind of havoc with Lynott’s imagination, and eventually drip-fed into his writing. A song on the first album, Thin Lizzy, ‘Eire’ recounts first the exploits of the ‘high king’ Brian Boru, who vanquished some 10,000 Viking invaders at Clontarf in 1014. In its final two verses, ‘Eire’ turns to the heroism of Red Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill, two Irish lords fighting against the English in the Nine Years War at the end of the 1500s. Both events would have been taught by the Christian Brothers, offered up uncritically as heroic examples of the Irish ridding themselves of foreign domination. At the end of the song, Lynott concludes dramatically, ‘The land is Eireann / the land is free.’ The original lyric was written in Irish.

  ‘Emerald’, on Jailbreak, explores a similar theme of terrible but righteous vengeance. On ‘Fool’s Gold’, Lynott told the story of another historical injustice, the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, and the desperate stream of migration that ensued. The title track of Thin Lizzy’s 1979 album, Black Rose: A Rock Legend, not only stitched together some of Ireland’s best-loved traditional songs, it tapped into the potency of Róisín Dubh (‘black rose’) as a nationalist symbol of resistance dating back to the sixteenth century.

  Eamon Carr co-founded Tara Telephone, the influential poetry-and-music collective of the late 1960s, with Peter Fallon, and later formed the groundbreaking Celtic-rock group Horslips. ‘Philip’s grasp on [Irish history] wasn’t academic,’ says Carr. ‘He was dragging in comic book sources as well as mythological sources. It was essentially school-book stuff, but he could tell a bloody good yarn.’

  Lynott’s grasp of the scale and storytelling power of these legends and fables infiltrated every part of his own writing. His best songs are defined by a combination of the romantic and the dramatic, which feels truly mythic. The blend of yearning, machismo and bravado throws back to oral histories handed down through the centuries, stories designed to be embroidered and embellished each time they are told. The characters are vivid, the sense of place palpable.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to write contemporary Irish songs,’ he told Hot Press in 1983. ‘I want it so that when you look back and ask “What was Irish music in the 1970s and 1980s?”, the answer will be, “Well, there was this geezer Phil Lynott”.’7

  His aim became to write fresh myths, mint new legends. According to the tenets of this philosophy, in its essence ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ is as much a song of Ireland as ‘Emerald’.

  3

  The Black Eagles was not Lynott’s group, at least not initially.

  The origins of his first band dated back to 1962 and the house of Mr Fox in Crumlin’s Sundrive Road, where twelve-year-old Frankie Smith and thirteen-year-old Hugh Feighery were taking guitar lessons. It was the dawn of the beat boom. Pop stardom seemed within the grasp, or at least the imagining, of every working-class teen. Even in Ireland. Smith and Feighery lived nearby on Leighlin Road and were both pupils at CBS. Having struck up a musical friendship, they decided to form a band, recruiting Frankie’s brother Danny on bass and Mick Higgins, from nearby Dolphin’s Barn, on drums.

  The traditional line regarding Lynott’s involvement in the Black Eagles is that he was deployed as bait. The band’s primary aim was to lure Peter Lynott – older, good-looking, and already singing and playing in local bands called things like the Zyn and the Mortals – into their ranks and Philip was recruited simply to sell the idea to his uncle. Feighery insists it happened very differently. Peter joined first as singer; Philip came later.

  The five-piece called themselves the Eagles and began rehearsing in the back bedroom at 15 Leighlin Road, the family home of Frankie and Danny Smith. A former Army sergeant who duly ran the band like a military operation, the boys’ father Joe Smith started managing the group. He built a box on the roof rack of his Simca 1000 to transport their gear to shows at the Apollo cinema in Walkinstown and the Oriel in Chapelizod. He also fostered a relationship with Joe Mac Productions, a local variety group which played in nursing homes and institutions on a charitable basis, and invited the Eagles to perform regularly around the area.

  They quickly became reasonably proficient, but Mr Smith was ambitious for his boys. Every street in Dublin in 1963 and 1964 seemed to be spawning almost identical beat groups playing hits by the popular artists of the age, ranging from Elvis Presley to the Shadows, the Bachelors to the Beatles. How could the Eagles make a mark? At a brainstorming session after rehearsals one night, Smith said, ‘We need an identity. There are too many groups around here, people don’t really know who we are.’

  It was at this point that Peter Lynott mentioned his nephew Philip. He was already a local star – tall, skinny, legs like drainpipes. He was growing into the long, doleful face, with its sleepy smile and big, heavy-lidded eyes peering out from under his brow, a melting look practised and perfected in front of the mirror at Leighlin Road and later unleashed to devastating effect at the dances and discos of south Dublin. There was something wonderfully cartoonish about Lynott, an air of Dennis the Menace mischievousness that stuck with him. The low, shoulder-shaking hur hur hur of a laugh deserved its own cartoon bubble over his head.

  He couldn’t play a musical instrument or write songs, but he could hold a tune and he loved music. He and Peter would listen to the top twenty on Radio Luxembourg every Sunday night in bed on the transistor radio that his mother had bought for him.

  At Christmastime and family parties he needed little encouragement to perform a turn, despite being an essentially shy boy. He spoke softly, and scrunched up his long frame to make himself appear less tall, less conspicuous. ‘He could be self-conscious about things,’ says Frank Murray. ‘That continued into Thin Lizzy. You can walk out on stage and look at a crowd of 5,000, or 20,000 people, and you can still be shy. I can watch film of Philip and point out his shy body language. I can see certain stage traits he had and where they came from. Paradoxically, he had a lot of confidence about a lot of other things. You have to have that to get up and sing in the first place, and it takes a certain amount of self-confidence to start working, and to get through the bad stuff in order to get to the good stuff.’

  He was a popular boy. Interesting and unusual things tended to happen around him. Martin Duffy recalls that on one rare summer day when the streets of Crumlin were hazy with heat and promise, Lynott peeled a strip of sticky tarmac from the surface of Leighlin Road and rolled it into his mouth. He had a naturally egalitarian streak which ensured that his friendships were always diverse. ‘He didn’t look down his nose at anyone,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. ‘He was a bit like Cassius Clay – “I’m the greatest, but that doesn’t mean you’re a pygmy.”’

  He seemed to offer something for everyone: a laugh and a dirty joke for friends at school; a touch of swagger for the tough lads; exotic good looks for the more adventurous girls; talent, knowledge and enthusiasm for the musos; a quiet, soulful side for the poets and introverts. ‘He was three years older than me, but there was only a year between us in school,’ says Martin Duffy. ‘He was in the lower grade, and I was a bright nerd. Somehow we made friends, and there was mutual respect. There was something sensitive in there that I could relate to. He was a very open guy. I liked him a lot.’

&n
bsp; And the girls already loved him. Why on earth wouldn’t you want him in your band?

  With Lynott’s arrival, the group decided on a change of name. They were now the Black Eagles. ‘You wouldn’t have to be a genius to work out where “black” came from,’ says Feighery, although in partial mitigation he points out that there was a popular DC comic book series at the time called Blackhawk, about a squadron of shadowy fighter pilots, which may have played a part. There were practical considerations, too. Long before the Californian Eagles of Hotel California renown entered the music scene in the early 1970s, there were at least two other bands with the same name: a US vocal group and a British band, active between 1958 and the mid-1960s.

  For a brief period the Black Eagles had the unusual selling point of a nephew and uncle sharing lead vocals, with both Philip and Peter as frontmen. It wasn’t an arrangement built to last. There was the space issue – six boys and their instruments crammed into the Smiths’s back bedroom. More significantly, there was the financial aspect. When it came to dividing up the handful of shillings they got for each gig, they began to feel not everybody was strictly necessary to requirements. They also felt that Peter wasn’t entirely committed to the cause. After a short time, Philip was the sole lead singer of the Black Eagles.

  As the band developed, rehearsals moved from the bedroom of 15 Leighlin Road to the Feighery residence at 117 Leighlin Road. There were two tin sheds in the garden to accommodate the overspill of a family of twelve. The smaller shed, a cosy 12 x 12 foot, was cleared out to create a practice space. This caused a minor stir locally. Crumlin kids would come down to listen to the music, ‘fluting around’ outside the door as the sound of the Mersey, the Hudson and the Thames leaked out. ‘I’d knock on their bell on the way back from the boxing club because it was very enjoyable to listen to,’ says Kevin Horan. ‘There was always a few kids hanging around, and usually some girls.’