Dublin was a drinking city, and much of its business was conducted in the pubs clustered around Grafton Street. The Bailey on Duke Street was always a favourite. Once frequented by the young James Joyce, it had more recently been the haunt of poets Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, often vociferously drunk and combative; both had only lately departed, ravaged and much diminished by their alcoholism. The Ginger Man author J. P. Donleavy was also a regular.
The Duke on Duke Street and Bruxelles on Harry Street, outside of which a statue of Lynott now stands, and the nearby pubs of McDaid’s and Kehoe’s were all regular meeting places. Neary’s was always a particular favourite of Lynott. It backs on to the stage door of the Gaiety Theatre, and over the years everyone from Phil Silvers to Peter O’Toole would roll in. Lynott’s tipple of choice was a pint of Smithwick’s, the creamy bronze ale brewed in Kilkenny. He disliked Guinness, though he related to the iconography of an Irish classic which, symbolically, it seemed to him, mixed black and white.
Pubs were for daytime and evenings. Nights were for the beat clubs. Dublin was a hive of live-music venues, dotted north and south of the river, among them the Countdown Club; the Club A Go Go; the Moulin Rouge; Flamingo; the 72 Club; Sound City; Eamonn Andrews’s TV Club and Dublin’s answer to the Cavern, Number Five. Most only had a ‘mineral bar’ – soft drinks only – though some circumnavigated the licensing laws by serving alcohol from teapots. The priority was music and social interaction. People came from across town to listen, see and be seen. Friendships were cultivated and scenes cross-fertilized.
To everyone involved, it was a time of great promise. ‘It was a very small clique of people in Dublin then,’ says Paul Scully. ‘All we wanted to do was be around music and musicians. There was a lovely warmth, like a naive painting. Great stuff comes out of naivety, because you haven’t got any value judgements.’
‘People were poverty stricken and religion stricken,’ says Noel Bridgeman. ‘Music was like another world. It was a great escape. A brilliant release.’
The presence of Carole Stephen at Skid Row shows would infuriate Brush Shiels. He was determined to present his lead singer as footloose and fancy-free. ‘I said to Phil, “I don’t want to see Carole at gigs,”’ he recalls. ‘I said, “If we ever see her at the gigs again we’re fucking you out.” His job was to look at all the women, click with the chicks and concentrate on them. We had more women in our gigs than we had fellas, which was very unusual. The women loved him, it was as simple as that. That’s why he got the job.’
Stephen laughs. ‘It didn’t bother me or Philip. He would come down to see me at the interval and dedicate songs and things like that, and I know Brush used to go mad.’
Their relationship was ongoing, but not without difficulties. It turned heads and challenged social prejudices. Stephen came from a middle-class family and had stayed on at Maryfield College to take her Leaving Certificate. On more than a couple of occasions Lynott was spotted lurking outside at the end of the school day, waiting to pick her up. ‘The nuns were giving out about it for weeks, this black boy waiting for Carole Stephen,’ she says. ‘I was kind of shocked. I think people were afraid.’ He very rarely ventured to her family home in Drumcondra. Stephen’s father was a colonel in the Irish Army – ‘he was a great father, we loved him and were all so proud of him, but he had a roar’ – and was unaware of the relationship. He may not have approved. ‘You would feel that Phil wouldn’t be the first person he’d want to see,’ says Shiels. ‘In a band and, well, all the rest of it …’
They were up and down, on and off, for a couple of years. ‘It was volatile with Carole after a while,’ says Frank Murray. ‘They were two volatile people.’
‘We split up a few times, definitely,’ says Stephen. ‘He was very jealous, and when you’re young you don’t want someone to be jealous of you when you’re not doing anything, just out dancing or having fun. One night we were out in Temple Oak, my friends and I would go there every Saturday, and Skid Row were playing that night. Somebody had asked me to dance, and Philip came down off the stage and interrupted.’ At another Skid Row concert, he kicked out at a Coca-Cola bottle which had been left on the edge of the stage. It smashed against the wall, narrowly missing a girl in the audience.
Acute and irrational jealousy would be a recurring feature in all of his most significant relationships with women. He seemed wary of leaving himself emotionally exposed, and was capable of seeing rejection and betrayal even when it wasn’t there. As far as Stephen was concerned, when they were going out together it was an exclusive relationship.
‘It would be fair to say Philip was in love with Carole,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. ‘If we understood love in those days. They didn’t split up because he was having it off with other women. They split up because she was going to have a baby.’
In December 1967 Stephen became pregnant. Early in 1968 she told Lynott that he was going to be a father. ‘Philip wanted to run away to his mother,’ she says. ‘He said we could stay there. We hadn’t a fiver between us, it was out of the question, but that was his suggestion.’ Instead, she ‘gave the problem over to my father, and he took over. Our family doctor put my dad in touch with a Catholic association, and they organized everything. I was very thin, and I felt I was getting a bump very early on, so I went to a home for unmarried mothers.’
Stephen spent most of her pregnancy at the Manor House mother-and-baby home, part of a convent run by the Sacred Heart Sisters in Castlepollard in County Westmeath, some sixty miles north-west of Dublin. The convent was surrounded by acres of lawns and fields, a self-contained world. The young women in residence were not allowed outside of the grounds for the entirety of their stay.
The cover story for Stephen’s sudden absence was that she was on an extended visit to a school friend who had recently moved to Germany. Only her mother and father knew differently – and Lynott, although he had no further contact with his girlfriend or her family during that period, and indeed had no idea where she now was. ‘She disappeared off the scene suddenly, we didn’t see her again and nobody asked any questions,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. ‘It wasn’t common knowledge. The kind of place Ireland was then, you could be having quintuplets and nobody would ever find out. Everybody knew there would be more to it than what was being told, but you didn’t ask many more questions.’
The convents could be terrible places. The abuse meted out to young women and their children is now well-established, and Manor House was not exempt from these transgressions, but for Stephen ‘it wasn’t the worst place, and I didn’t have an awful time at all. I did not have an unhappy time down there. The unhappy time came when I had to give my baby away. I only had him for a couple of days. My sister was getting married and I had to be home.’
Macdaragh Lambe, as he is now known, was born in Castlepollard on 25 August 1968, five days after Lynott’s nineteenth birthday. His father’s name is listed on the birth certificate. In accompanying documents given to the adoption agency he is described as ‘studying for his exams and interested in singing and music’.
Five days after the birth, the baby was handed over to the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland (CPRSI) in Dublin. During the period when the CPRSI was attempting to arrange an adoption, the infant was looked after at a mother-and-baby home in Blackrock, and was also temporarily cared for by two foster families. He was formally adopted into the Lambe family at the age of eleven months and grew up in Newbridge in County Kildare, twenty-five miles outside Dublin.
Mother and son would not see each other for some thirty years. Lambe sought out his true parentage in 2000 following the death of his adoptive parents and has been reconciled with his birth mother for more than a decade. ‘We clicked very quickly, and we have built a good relationship,’ he says.
Lambe now lives in Headford, twenty miles outside Galway, and works in the music events industry. He has two young children. Although he and his father would never meet, as he grew into adulthood the
physical resemblance was so acute that Lambe became accustomed to ‘people pointing in the local pub or wherever. Most people mentioned it. When I found out it all made sense, it answered a lot of questions in my head very quickly.’
A matter of days after the birth, in late August 1968 Carole Stephen returned to her home in Dublin. The relationship with Lynott was over. Contact had ceased completely, until one day she spotted him by chance in town, hanging out with Eric Bell and Gary Moore. When he saw Stephen he walked over. ‘The two of us went to the cartoon cinema, and I told him everything,’ she says. ‘We sat at the back of the cinema and sobbed. It was a really sad time. We were in bits, we had to wait till it was dark until we came out. In terms of our relationship, there was no going back. I had to knock it on the head. We met up [again] a couple of times, but there was no mention of the baby. I blocked a lot of this out for a long time.’
Lynott told no one about the child. ‘He never said anything to me, which was unusual, because at that time he told me everything,’ says Frank Murray. ‘I remember Brian Downey saying to me, much later on, that he reckoned Phil had had a child with Carole. This was in the mid-1970s. I said, “Nah, you’re joking me, he would have said something.” But he never did.’
‘His son was never talked about,’ says Paul Scully, but Lynott dropped hints and left clues in interviews and songs over the years, brief and cryptic though they were. In a short and otherwise banal 1969 chat for the ‘Beat Up’ column in the Irish magazine, Woman’s Way, amid the usual fluff about his taste in females and his favourite bands, Lynott suddenly lets his guard down. ‘Do you know what else I’d like to do?’ he says. ‘Adopt a kid. Now why can’t single people do that? I’d like a kid and I’d be good to him and look after him and give him a good life – better than he’d have in an orphanage and no pun intended!’5 The child is not abstract; he has a gender. Lynott couldn’t help but be aware that he was reprising, at least in basic outline, the patterns of his own upbringing. Much later, he told Thin Lizzy manager Chris Morrison: ‘My father left when I was two weeks old. Sounds like my kind of fella.’
On ‘Brought Down’, from Thin Lizzy’s 1972 album Shades of a Blue Orphanage, Lynott sings that ‘my baby had a baby by me’ and – as though time-stamping the emotion to the late 1960s – namechecks Irish freak-folk band Dr Strangely Strange on the outro. The following year, he wrote ‘Little Girl in Bloom’ for Vagabonds of the Western World.
Little girl in bloom
Carries a secret
The child she carries in her womb
She feels something sacred
She’s gonna be a mammy soon
When your daddy comes home
Don’t tell him till alone
When your daddy comes back
Go tell him the facts
Just relax and see how he’s gonna react
It’s a wonderful song, and when it was released in 1973 it intrigued everyone who knew him well. ‘There’s no other song [of his] like that,’ says Frank Murray. ‘I always thought it had something to do with him and fatherhood, even though it’s about a woman.’ Though refraining from outright revelation, it draws heavily on personal experience. The pregnant girl could be Carole Stephen, but it could also be his mother. Caught in the middle is Lynott, both child and man; abandoned baby and absent father. ‘I just wept when I read the lyrics,’ says Macdaragh Lambe. ‘It’s a very poignant one for me.’
It was ‘Little Girl in Bloom’ that finally forced Lynott’s hand, prompting him to confide his secret. By 1974, Jim Fitzpatrick was not only working with Lynott designing Thin Lizzy album covers, he was also illustrating, alongside Tim Booth, Lynott’s first volume of poetry, Songs for While I’m Away, essentially a collection of his earliest lyrics. Fitzpatrick asked his friend to describe the girl in ‘Little Girl in Bloom’ in order that his simple line drawing of a nude, pregnant female figure would be accurate. ‘I remember saying, “Has she long hair?”’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘And he told me about sitting in the back of the cinema, crying with the girl, and that he had a kid. That’s why the girl has long hair in the book. But he didn’t tell me anything more. I didn’t even know her name. If he didn’t tell anyone [else], it wasn’t because of secrecy. It was pain.’
5
‘Philip struck me as a guy who had an eye for the main chance,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘He was a bit of a hustler, in the best possible way. He was as smart as Bowie was at that age.’ Even while gaining recognition with Skid Row, Lynott was acutely aware that there was more out there, a whole city of ideas to be accessed and absorbed. His wandering eye remained vigilant. He struck up relationships with some of the most vibrant creative enclaves around Dublin.
There was more than a degree of calculation in this: Lynott would always weigh his enthusiasms against an awareness of how to play the angles and ride the streams. Yet he was also driven by an innocent curiosity and a genuine desire to learn. Above all, he wanted to do everything.
One of the most important friendships he cultivated during this period was with the psychedelic folk band Dr Strangely Strange and its benignly bohemian circle of associates. Ireland’s answer to the Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange formed in 1967 around the nucleus of Tim Booth, Ivan Pawle and Tim Goulding, a group of arts graduates in their early twenties. Pawle, an Englishman, had achieved considerable kudos in his social circle thanks to the dubious honour of having a glass of vodka hurled at his head by Brendan Behan in the Bailey, not long before the rampaging Dubliner expired.
The Strangelys and their coterie of artists, musicians and arts students congregated in a quasi-communal house at 55 Lower Mount Street, directly east of Merrion Square in central Dublin, near the Grand Canal. The woman who rented the property, Patricia Mohan, was known as Orphan Annie, and so the artistic flophouse at no. 55 was christened the Orphanage. As the name suggests, it was both home and ad hoc HQ to a floating band of waifs and strays.
There was food and heat, and a bed for those who needed one. Some tenants were permanent, many were transient. ‘She was a very generous hostess, shall we say?’ says Robert Ballagh, who drifted in the same circles. ‘There were many parties. For anyone who either hadn’t a place to go after the pub or felt too tired to make it home, there was always a bed for them in Mount Street. Philip laid his head down a good few times in the Orphanage.’
The kitchen, dominated by a huge fireplace, served as a communal sitting room, and became yet another of Dublin’s many de facto culture cafés. Lynott sniffed it out early on, becoming a regular and welcome presence. One of the Orphanage mainstays was Annie Christmas, a young woman who harboured a tenderness for Lynott, which was reciprocated. She may have been the reason that the boy from Crumlin first came calling. ‘I have an image of Phil and Annie dancing together,’ says Tim Booth. ‘She was a great, vivacious, big-built woman. A very good cook, very maternal, and she took Philip under her wing to an extent. She looked after him. She would always sigh when his name was mentioned.’
‘He and Annie Christmas together was a lovely thing,’ says Ivan Pawle. ‘It was like yin and yang, but they were briefly an item. It was beautiful, really. He was still a teenager and she was in her early twenties.’ It was not an exclusive deal. ‘He was a very attractive man,’ says Booth. ‘Ladies would be in and around all the time, usually different ones.’
His effect on the opposite sex was immediate and reliable, although there was a sense that after the raised emotional stakes of his relationship with Carole Stephen, and the drastic fallout, Lynott steered clear of close attachments. ‘He kind of stayed loose after that,’ says Frank Murray. There was no shortage of girls, but they were not serious relationships. ‘Oh my God!’ says Paul Scully. ‘If shagging was a sport then he would have been Ronaldo. God almighty, from day one he was a magnet for the ladies.’ Later, there was a darker edge to Lynott’s womanizing; it became compulsive. For now, it seemed a joyful expression of youth, opportunity and freedom. ‘In those very repressed days, with young Ca
tholic girls coming out of their first experience of sexuality, it was a really exciting time,’ says Scully.
‘Women adored him,’ says Noel Bridgeman. ‘Those dark eyes, tall, skinny legs, and that semi-lost look. He brought out their maternal instincts. He was very shy and defenceless, you had the feeling that he was very, very vulnerable, and he had to develop some kind of armour to protect himself.’ It was, perhaps, easier for an incurable romantic with a thin skin to swagger through a field of willing ‘chicks’ (as Lynott invariably called women until the very last) than contemplate an alternative path of greater emotional risk. ‘I’m very bad at saying what I mean,’ he later acknowledged. ‘I used to be very honest when I was young. I’d crack up and say “I love you”, but it didn’t hold the chicks … When I saw it didn’t work, it made me very hard on the outside.’1 Or, as he later sang in ‘A Song for While I’m Away’, ‘I swore when I was younger / No one would win my heart.’
Beneath the bravado, he could be easily wounded. ‘Phil was very insecure,’ Gary Moore told me in 2010, only a few months before his sudden death at the age of fifty-eight. ‘Nothing like a chip on each shoulder for balance.’
Dr Strangely Strange were working on material that would end up on their 1969 debut album, Kip of the Serenes, produced by Joe Boyd. In these slightly more rarefied circles, Lynott’s limited musical experience was not considered top of the list of his attributes, at least not at first. They just liked him.
‘He was diffident,’ says Booth. ‘A nice young man. He had started playing the guitar a little bit, but not in the same way that we did. He played chords, we were more finger-pickers, much more folky. We used to just have a laugh and hang out. He was only young, and he was nice looking, and intriguing, because he was very Dublin and yet, if not black, then certainly coffee coloured. Yet it didn’t seem to make a hair of difference to him, and it certainly didn’t make a hair of difference to us.’
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