Having caught the imagination of underground Dublin, Tara Telephone were hired for spots on local radio, and even appeared on The Late Late Show, Ireland’s most popular peak-time television chat show. ‘We got an attentive audience, because by the late 1960s something called “the sixties” was actually starting to happen in Ireland,’ says Peter Fallon. ‘Poetry was part of the cultural mix, and the audience were receptive to it.’
Lynott’s antenna twitched at this development. ‘We were mentioned in despatches quite a bit, and he was hip to that,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘He was aware that there was a thread from these deadbeat kids in Dublin to these Liverpool guys, and two steps from there to John Peel. In his mind, what we were doing had some validity in the rock school, and that was partly what he was tapping into. He was conscious of what was going on around him, he was so connected, and he was trying to find his place and his voice. So he was definitely curious as to what we were at.
‘It was a spirit of innocence and adventure, because none of us really knew what we were doing. It was partly about stardom for Philip, but a lot of it was about communication.’ When Lynott asked Carr and Fallon, ‘What’s the scene like, man?’ they told him to come along and perform. Eventually, he took them up on the offer. On Tuesday, 11 November 1969, he came to a Tara Telephone gathering at the rather grandly named Arts Society, in reality a scruffy room in a mews building at the back of Trinity College. He was accompanied by Brush Shiels and Gary Moore. ‘They had acoustic guitars, and I believe that was the first time he played his own songs in public,’ says Fallon. ‘He had aspirations towards the more poetic line, and he thought that this would be the kind of company that would be attentive, receptive and gentle.’
Lynott had been making concerted attempts to write for the past couple of years. Indeed, those who saw the Black Eagles in their later days recall an original song called ‘In an Institution’, long lost in the mists of time. While still a member of Skid Row, the band had performed the occasional original number, invariably written by Shiels, who hadn’t generally encouraged Lynott’s efforts to follow suit. ‘It was my band and I didn’t give a fuck what he was doing,’ he says. ‘We wrote one together, but that wasn’t great. We were just starting to get a feel for it.’ This was ‘The Photograph Man’, a derivative slice of psychedelia which Skid Row performed in concert a handful of times and even recorded, and which Michael O’Flanagan describes as ‘very pathetic all together. It was just a poor piece of writing.’ He insists that the fact that he believes the song to be an unflattering portrait of himself has not skewed his judgement.
By the end of Lynott’s tenure in Skid Row, it had become obvious that the group was not a comfortable place for a budding writer. He found a more nurturing environment among the bohemian circle of Dr Strangely Strange and Tara Telephone. ‘There was a kindred spirit, because he was taking his writing seriously and most of the bands around him weren’t,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘It was always very casual, but I think he might have been looking for validation and encouragement.’
Aware that the gauntlet had been thrown down by his contemporaries, Lynott had started, rather shyly, revealing some of his own work. Perhaps picking up on the accentuated feyness that characterized the lyrics Marc Bolan was writing with Tyrannosaurus Rex, and almost certainly trying to impress the more mature members of his social circle, his early efforts were a long way from ‘The Rocker’.
‘I often used to call down for him in the mornings, and we’d listen to a few records before we went into town,’ says Frank Murray. ‘One day I remember he said, “Hey, I’ve written this song.” He sang it to me, and it was one of those Incredible String Band-y kind of things – and bad! That was the first time I was aware he was writing.’
This may have been ‘The Death of a Faun’, an early composition which he also played to Tim Booth and Ivan Pawle. ‘Delightful!’ says Pawle. ‘It was a lovely little song. Very innocent, dripping in the poetic. I remember thinking it was somewhere between L’après-midi d’un faune [the nineteenth-century poem by French writer Stéphane Mallarmé] and Dave Davies’s “Death of a Clown”.’ More likely it was inspired by tales of Oisín, the great mythical poet of Ireland and son of Fionn MacCumhaill, who narrates much of the Fenian Cycle and whose name literally translates as ‘little fawn’ or ‘young deer’. ‘It was the first thing I’d heard him try to compose,’ says Pawle. ‘He had that very soft side to him, always, but he had to project the hard-rock image increasingly when he got into the machine of it.’
‘He was intrigued by what we were doing, and we were kind of intrigued by his early songs,’ says Tim Booth. ‘You could see there was something there, but they weren’t great.’
Life experience also played its part in his evolution. He felt he had things he wanted to get off his chest. The break-up with Carole Stephen was a catalyst for delving further into his own emotions. ‘Naturally the first thing that inspired me to write was being blown out,’ he said later. ‘My ego was hurt and I thought, “I must write and tell the world what has happened to me. I owe the world this story.” That was it and I got really carried away at one stage. I even started thinking “I’m a genius, this is art! I must get it out.” I found that the more I worked on the lyrics as poetry, they became a better craft for the songs.’5
A serious point lay beneath the self-deprecation. He realized that everyday thoughts and ordinary experiences could be alchemized into the poetic and universal, a trick he turned with great success on a new song, ‘Dublin’, which cast a richly melancholy spell over his hometown. In ‘Chatting Today’, reminiscent of Bang-era Van Morrison, he left behind his deadening day-job at the Tonge & Taggart foundry – ‘man, my mind it nearly drowned’ – and found freedom on the railway. On the even more directly personal ‘Saga of the Ageing Orphan’, the archetypal orphan observes his closest family members (Uncle Peter and his ‘mama’, Sarah) growing older and drifting further away from him.
He played his songs on acoustic guitar to Brian Downey, who was impressed. ‘They sounded really great. A couple of them ended up on the first Thin Lizzy albums.’
At the Arts Society, Lynott was touchingly nervous, pacing around outside the building as though weighing up whether to hit or run. ‘What is it like?’ he asked Carr, who replied, ‘It’s just a bunch of people sitting around; nobody is going to eat you.’
The crowd consisted mainly of students, dressed in torn jeans and tatty pullovers. In their midst, Lynott cut a remarkable figure. ‘It was as if Sly Stone was about to go on stage at Woodstock or something,’ says Carr. ‘Scarves and all of that. It wasn’t a backroom pub vibe at all! When he came in, all the heads turned. I can’t remember the repertoire, he did three or four things [very likely including ‘Dublin’ and ‘Chatting Today’] and people hung on his words. He made a huge impression on everybody, it was brilliant. The next day he was in the bar, telling everyone, “Oh yer, I was reading poetry in Trinity College last night.” It was like, I’ve ticked that box.’ He ticked it at least one more time, returning to the Arts Society in May 1970, accompanied by Eric Bell, to play a few more of his own song-poems.
He was learning the ground rules of being a star. Number one: act like one, even in a shabby room full of arts students with a potter’s wheel in the corner. Lynott made a similar fuss over his entrance on another night in 1969, after arranging in advance to sit-in on a couple of songs at the Club A Go Go as the guest of local soul singer Ditch Cassidy. The venue had no dressing room. Instead of standing at the bar and waiting to be called up to sing, Lynott insisted on hiding out of sight under the serving hatch in the tiny cloakroom closet, his knees around his ears, before springing out to make his entrance.
‘There was always the swagger, even walking into a coffee shop on Grafton Street,’ says Peter Fallon, ‘But there was always this wry, knowing smile, too, as though he were saying, “I know I’m not fooling you, I’m not even fooling myself, but I have to do it.” But it worked, and it was brilliant. The best of him w
as brilliant.’
Only a few years later in the hard-rocking 1970s, keen to disassociate Thin Lizzy from what he regarded as the trad-rock millstone of ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, Lynott downplayed the significance of this period. ‘The folk circuit … was a great thing to get into on your day off. Take out the acoustic guitar. You’d get free booze, crisps and plenty of chicks.’6
At the time he wasn’t so off-hand. ‘Philip was very, very drawn to the Dublin arts and creative scene,’ says Tim Booth. ‘He didn’t necessarily understand what people were trying to do, but he knew that it was a territory where he could go, and we could path-find for him to an extent.’ He was fighting on several fronts at once, hoping one of them would provide a breakthrough. Lynott stitched himself into a rich cultural tapestry that mixed music and poetry, art and literature, the traditional and the contemporary, old and new Dublin. In doing so, he was part of something quietly revolutionary.
Both Paul Scully and Noel Bridgeman echo James Joyce’s description of Ireland as a ‘priest-ridden’ country. ‘It was,’ adds Bridgeman, for the avoidance of doubt, ‘a fucking nightmare.’
‘It’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t live through it how imbued the Catholic Church was in every single thing we did, from the government down,’ says Scully. ‘They had so much power. The whole sixties thing was a huge revolution in hindsight. People were really coming out of their shells. There was no arrogance in it. We were just teenagers fighting against whatever was in front of us. It was never articulated, but we had a sense that we were a group of like-minded people. We all felt part of something that was going on.’
They harboured a genuine respect for much of Ireland’s traditions, for the legacy of the writers and artists who had come before them, but it ran parallel with a passionate desire to move the story forward, to give expression to a more modern voice. The old orders which shaped outdated attitudes to sex, work, family and religion were up for question. Without being explicitly political, Lynott and his circle were questioning the orthodoxies of the time with every show they played, every song they wrote, every poem they produced.
It was not easy on the margins, but it fostered a sense of solidarity. ‘It was a difficult time to try to forge any type of alternative career, which was why we all stuck together,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘We instinctively knew that in order to do anything we had to do it en masse. The writers had to work with the musicians, who had to work with the poets and the artists. We were all very like-minded.’
It was all a long way from Crumlin, and only made possible by the unique configuration of the times. A greater degree of class migration was suddenly possible in Ireland, or at the very least in Dublin. People were mixing outside of their allotted zones.
Lynott was certainly moving in interesting circles. One minute he might be chatting intimately to some hard case working on the door of the Green Rooster café in O’Connell Street; the next, he would be hanging out with Eimear Haughey, the daughter of Charles Haughey, at the time the Minister of Finance and later the leader of Fianna Fáil and three-time Taoiseach. For a black, working-class boy to be exchanging artistic concepts with some of the brightest minds of Trinity College – the most prestigious and exclusive university in Ireland, and renowned throughout the world – was indicative of a significant shift in the social tectonics.
‘Music broke down barriers,’ says Paul Scully. ‘We would never have met students with degrees like Dr Strangely Strange otherwise. Even Philip moving from Crumlin to live in Clontarf [in 1970], going from a modern housing estate to these beautiful red-brick Georgian houses overlooking the sea, is part of the same thing. In a way the music drove him to do that, and the whole social mish-mash influenced the music as well.’
It was a life-changing period, and it illuminated the musical path Lynott chose to take after leaving Skid Row. His next band was called Orphanage – a name freighted with obvious significance. As well as casting back to his own childhood and its echo in more recent events, the name acknowledged the influence of Dr Strangely Strange and their coterie on Lynott’s progression. It was also a dry joke on his current circumstances. Formed in the autumn of 1969, Orphanage consisted of Lynott, ex-Black Eagles drummer Brian Downey, Pat Quigley and guitarist Joe Staunton, formerly of local band Macbeth. They were all musical outcasts.
‘Brush had thrown Philip out of Skid Row, said he couldn’t sing,’ says Pat Quigley. ‘My band, the Movement, had broken up. Brian Downey had been in a band called Sugar Shack, they’d broken up. We were all sitting in the pub, and Phil said, “Why don’t us guys get together? We’re a gang of bloody orphans!” It was the name of the Strangelys place, but it also worked for us.’
Lynott could have walked into any number of successful local bands or taken an easy ride for good money on the showband circuit, although more than one person has suggested that his colour may have barred him from taking that route. Instead he wanted to form a group that not only accentuated his own gifts as a more melodic writer and singer, but fused all the elements in the air around him, uniting the rockers, the poets and the traditional musicians. ‘The whole idea of the band was that there was always a nucleus of four members and we’d have three other musicians travelling with us,’ Lynott later remembered. ‘It was a musical orphanage … a nice idea.’7
Terry Woods, the mandolin player in Sweeney’s Men and later a member of the Pogues, joined the band at several concerts. Gary Moore and Dr Strangely Strange were often involved. Local guitarist Joe Alexander would be on the fringes. Fran Quigley recalls the Chieftains’s Paddy Moloney taking part at one Orphanage show at the Trinity Ball. ‘The object was that people could come and have a blow with us and not have to be in the band,’ said Lynott. ‘At that time, a lot of folk artists were getting interested in electronics, and we thought we were the band that could help them out in that respect. It didn’t work out that way.’8
Orphanage didn’t quite click, but it was an imaginative idea. They would swing from Chuck Berry classics to Bob Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’ and ‘I Shall Be Released’; the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Daydream’ to Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock on Wood’; traditional folk to early Free; Sam and Dave’s ‘Soul Man’ to the Beatles’s ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
‘The Orphanage period was an experimental one for him,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘They were quite distinct from Skid Row. It would have been [more like] the softer side of Lizzy. West Coast and dreamy, that’s how I remember it. It was very loose, slightly whimsical and meandering, with a pastoral feel. Almost like early Fairport Convention. There was a fluidity to it, it didn’t have a rock and roll edge, or the great, sharp focus of early Lizzy. It didn’t actually make a huge impression.’
‘It was a strange band,’ says Pat Quigley. ‘It was a mixture of rock, heavy metal and hippie stuff. A real mixed bag.’
For Lynott, Orphanage felt like a more natural, satisfying fit after Skid Row. He could dial down the decibels, add more light and shade. Pat Quigley was a more direct bass player, and his style was as much of an influence on Lynott’s development on the instrument as Shiels’s. ‘When Brush took off on the bass he didn’t know how to come back,’ says Quigley. ‘He was all over the place, like a lead guitar player. I played melody. Simple playing. Once you got the right leg pumping on the floor you couldn’t lose. I taught Philip how to play bass. I’d say, play what you’re singing, and that’s what Thin Lizzy songs did.’
Orphanage were together through the end of 1969 and into early 1970, doing the rounds, playing most days of the week in Dublin and further afield: Limerick, Cork, Kerry, Connemara. ‘At a few places we might stay overnight,’ says Pat Quigley. ‘We were after anything in a skirt. The craic was great. Philip was always laughing, always looking forward to gigging. We were all young mad bastards.’ When they performed at a history-themed banquet at Bunratty Castle in County Clare, they ended up dressed in medieval costume, fencing around the venue.
Orphanage were paid up to £50 for some shows, pennies for o
thers. They made some recordings at Dominick Street studios, a mixture of covers and originals, including ‘Chatting Today’ and ‘The Friendly Ranger’, a blues called ‘You Fool, You’, and another new song called ‘St Stephen’s Green’.
It was a step down in status after Skid Row. His former band were going from strength to strength without him. They had released two more singles, and had fallen in with Fleetwood Mac manager Clifford Davis. After staging a ‘farewell’ Dublin show in October 1969, at which Lynott showed up with Orphanage to perform and, according to Smiley Bolger, ‘blew them off the stage’, Skid Row moved to London. They released their debut album Skid, on Columbia in 1970.
Although Orphanage had no such success story to tell, the band were significant beyond their immediate impact and relatively short lifespan. It was the first time Lynott began to play an instrument on stage, strumming an acoustic guitar on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. At the age of twenty, he was finally performing some of his own original material. Both developments became non-negotiable red lines in the formation of his next band, which was called Thin Lizzy.
6
Eric Bell was an East Belfast boy who, at twenty-two, had already played the field. He had been a member of numerous bands, including the Deltones, Shades of Blue and the Bluebeats. For a short while in 1966 he had played guitar in Van Morrison’s Them, not long before Morrison left Britain for the United States.
Another blues aficionado in thrall to Jimi Hendrix, by the summer of 1969 Bell’s freak flag was barely fluttering at half-mast. He had left Belfast and its raw R&B scene and moved south to Dublin, earning a decent living playing polite pop and restrained rock and roll in the Dreams, an eight-piece Dublin showband fronted by John Farrell, the former singer in Pat Quigley’s old group, the Movement. The Dreams had scored several Irish top-twenty hit singles – among them ‘I’ll See You There’, ‘Baby, I’m Your Man’ and ‘The Casatchok’ – in 1968 and 1969.
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