The only outside player involved was the respected musician and arranger Ivor Raymonde, brought in to add mellotron to ‘Honesty Is No Excuse’. Raymonde went away impressed. ‘Ivor said to me, “Who wrote that song?”’ says Tuite. ‘I told him it was Phil, and he said, “That fella has some talent, let’s hope he doesn’t spread himself out too much.” He said, “He’ll write something like ‘My Way’.”’
The symphonic, soulful pop of ‘Honesty Is No Excuse’ is Lynott at his most directly expressive, both proud and troubled by his own knockabout ways, and facing up to the end of youthful innocence. It has an uncharacteristic elegance and simplicity. Thin Lizzy is an engaging ragbag of material, much of which reflects the circumstances in which it was recorded. ‘We were permanently stoned,’ says Bell. ‘Scott English was this jovial American guy, a nice big bloke. He had this enormous bag of grass in one of the drawers in the studio. He brought it out, threw it on the table and said, “Help yourselves, boys!” That was it. I can’t actually remember recording the first album. I didn’t know anything until the end of the record, it was just a haze. Smoking a bit of dope and playing music went hand-in-hand for us. We were just that type of band at that point in time. It seemed to work for us, we got ideas. There was a lot of things on that album that were completely ad-libbed.’
The songs had been bedded in through a year of live performance. If the album has a defining characteristic, it’s of an early 1970s jam-band expressing their musicianship through a thick smog of reefer vapour. ‘The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle’ finds Lynott’s meandering cross-stitch of comic-book quotations and poetic melancholy set adrift. ‘Clifton Grange Hotel’, the starry-eyed portrait of his mother’s ‘refuge of mercy’ in the heart of Manchester’s red-light zone, is similarly lacking in form, while ‘Return of the Farmer’s Son’ is a workout rather than a song. Promising melodies flare up then fade, diverted by arrangements that are by turn overly busy and disjointed.
It’s a typically flawed first album from a band not yet sure how to get the best out of either their songs or their sound, and as a result attempting to do too much at once. Thin Lizzy were still in clear thrall to their idols. Jimi Hendrix is all over the derivative space-rock of ‘Ray-Gun’, written by Eric Bell, while there are echoes in Lynott’s vocals of many of the singers he admired, among them Hendrix, Rod Stewart, Van Morrison and Joe Cocker.
The record offers only glimpses of the honed power to come. ‘Look What the Wind Blew In’ is oddly sparse – the pitfalls of a trio laid bare – but still packs a punch, particularly when muscle and melody fuse on the ‘run boy, run’ section. ‘Eire’ is strong and original, Lynott’s tale of Celtic heroism elevated by Bell’s highly atmospheric guitar overdubs. He had initially sung the words in Irish, but Decca balked and asked him to re-record the vocal in English.
Throughout, a distinctive lyrical sensibility adds extra depth and dimension to the sometimes wayward music. The best of the songs on Thin Lizzy draw in the listener with their vivid characterizations, evocative street scenes and fragmented, secular confessionals. In the early days of the band, Lynott was striving to create a music that combined the dream-like lyricism of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, drawing powerfully on the pull of memory and place, and the open-ended, ambitious ebb and flow of progressive rock.
‘Remembering Part 1’ and ‘Diddy Levine’ are the most striking examples of this attempted fusion – epic in scale, with distinct musical sections. The latter is one of several domestic mini-dramas Lynott wrote between 1969 and 1972. The narrative is convoluted and at first appears tenuous, burdened with shifting time frames and apparently random characters. On closer inspection, the song directly questions the extent to which Lynott might have agonized over his childhood.
‘Diddy Levine’ begins in the ‘later Forties’ and spans twenty years. The titular female has a young child and is living with a man whom she then leaves – ‘and with the child in her arms she went looking for a fling’. She turns down two marriage proposals. ‘Through all her mother’s lovers’ the child keeps the maternal surname. ‘Inheritance, you see,’ Lynott concludes, ‘runs through every family.’
The word ‘father’ crops up in four of the album’s ten tracks. ‘Saga of the Ageing Orphan’ is another patchwork of images pulled from the family scrapbook. It’s very beautiful, an overt expression of Lynott’s gentler folk side. His voice is pitched low, the music is empathetic and almost subliminal, with Bell’s fluid acoustic guitar work recalling Jay Berliner’s quasi-classical guitar lines on Van Morrison’s ‘Beside You’. The sadness is allowed the space it deserves, and flows through. ‘We had come in search of one who evades us all,’ he sings, slowly, softly and precisely. ‘Never heeds the call.’
It is this quality that snags the listener almost half a century later: the ache of nostalgia and acute sense of loss, astonishingly keenly felt for one so young. ‘I keep on remembering the old days,’ sings Lynott on ‘Remembering Part 1’, lending the album its theme. If he is not remembering the lost girl in the ‘pretty dress with the zip up the back’, he is recalling days at the old picture house; ‘a happy home, a hand to hold’; or ‘father and I waving goodbye’. He was still only twenty-one, and yet seemed to pine for an age that had not yet even passed. It’s the same quality evoked in Seamus Heaney’s poem, ‘Glanmore Revisited’: ‘It felt remembered even then / an old rightness half-imagined or foretold.’
PART TWO
Are You Out There?
7
Tin Lizzy. Tin Lizzie. Thin Lizzie. Tin Lissy. No matter how it was spelled, with a record deal and an album awaiting release, Thin Lizzy were now routinely billed as ‘Ireland’s top group’. They returned home immediately after recording the album in London. Gigging in Dublin and further afield between mid-January and mid-March, Lynott was already possessed of the giddy feeling that his horizons had been forever broadened.
These months were the last time he lived in Ireland for a decade. In the final weeks he stayed at 10 Eglington Terrace, in Donnybrook, the family home of Brian Tuite, which had been put up for sale and was sitting empty. He moved into the bedroom that had belonged to Tuite’s infant son, adorned with teddy-bear wallpaper. ‘Phil told me one day that after he’d taken some of the old magic grass, he woke up in the middle of the night and started talking to the little bears,’ says Tuite.
The decision had already been taken to move to London permanently to coincide with the release of the Thin Lizzy album in April. That great Irish cultural cliché – exile – awaited him. He was ambivalent about it. ‘To do what I wanted to do I had to leave Ireland,’ he said later. ‘It was a catch-22. I didn’t want to leave.’1
‘He liked London, but he felt that as a band they had been forced to go to England, which he thought was wrong,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘[As such], he felt there should be a huge Irish input into every part of Thin Lizzy.’
Gale Barber was moving to London with Lynott. Former Skid Row manager Ted Carroll was also making the trip. Carroll had resolved to stop working with rock bands, planning instead to set up his own record shop, Rock On, in west London. After returning to Dublin in late 1970, however, he had been wooed into a change of heart by Brian Tuite and Peter Bardon. The pair had more pressing day-to-day business interests in Ireland, which prevented them moving to England to oversee the band. They needed somebody to manage Thin Lizzy in London. Carroll wasn’t keen, but the offer of a partnership in the management company clinched it. That, and the music.
‘They invited me to dinner and played me a test pressing of the first album and I was impressed with it,’ says Carroll. ‘I always liked Phil’s singing, but I didn’t know he could write songs, and I was very impressed with his lyrics. I thought he was very talented: great wordsmith, good singer, good melody writer. That’s why I got involved with Thin Lizzy. In March 1971 I went into rehearsals and began working out an act, a mixture of original songs from the new album and some covers, just trying to get a running order, presentatio
n, all of that.’
In the few weeks before they all left for London, Carroll observed the group dynamic. ‘Brian was a superb drummer, and Eric was a great guitarist. They were the two really accomplished musicians in the band. Phil wasn’t an outstanding bass player, he was getting by and improving all the time, but it was perfectly adequate and suited the band. His vocals, I think, were the strongest part of what he did. On a musical level they all worked together. Eric contributed a lot in terms of riffs and intros, but Phil mostly wrote the songs on his acoustic guitar. The lyrics were all his. Phil was the leader. It was his band, but he had the greatest respect for Eric and Brian.’
London was the inevitable next step. In Ireland, the glass ceiling for creative rock groups barely rose above the vault of the Five Club. Although Thin Lizzy had recently broken through to the more lucrative ballroom circuit, ending the monopoly of showbands by virtue of their sheer popularity, they were still viewed as poor relations. There was no industry infrastructure to support a group with ambition. ‘There was a very limited “cool” audience,’ says Peter Bardon. ‘If you wanted to make any headway you had to leave.’
Taking the boat from Dún Laoghaire had become a familiar rite of passage for the bigger Irish acts. In 1968, Limerick’s Granny’s Intentions had left for London, signing to Deram and later recording their sole album, Honest Injun, a record widely regarded as having some of the worst cover art in rock history. The People – featuring Henry McCullough – followed in their wake and became Eire Apparent, persuading Jimi Hendrix to both play on and produce their debut album. Gary Moore’s old band the Method was in London, as was Skid Row, now plugging their debut album and setting their sights on America.
It was not an easy transition, as Thin Lizzy discovered. In the time between leaving Dublin and arriving in London, creased and crumpled from being crammed in the back of the van for eight hours, they went from being a group that mattered to a band that might as well have formed that morning. In effect, they had to start all over again. ‘Nobody knew who we were,’ says Bell. ‘Before we left Dublin we were probably in the top three, if not the biggest band in Ireland. We left and went to London, and nobody cared. We were expecting VIP treatment, and instead it was, “Fin ‘oo?”’
They started playing immediately. One might reasonably claim that they didn’t stop for the next twelve-and-a-half years.
If life was lived on the road, then it must follow that home was the red Avis transit van that Brian Tuite hired for £175 a month and was, he says, ‘doing a million miles a week’. Lynott sat in the front passenger seat, a position he maintained – even as the drivers changed and the vehicles progressed from vans to Fords, station wagons, limousines and Daimlers – for the rest of his life. ‘Philip would never sit in the back, he was always up front,’ says the photographer Chalkie Davies, who lived with Lynott in the late 1970s. ‘He used the excuse of the length of his legs, but I think there was more to it than that. I don’t ever remember him sitting in the back of a car.’ Lynott never learned to drive.
They travelled the first of Tuite’s metaphorical million miles on 23 March 1971, making their London debut upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s Soho jazz club, and were paid £6 for the privilege. Fran Quigley had made the trip over with the band as a ‘humper and hauler’. ‘There couldn’t have been more than twenty people in the room,’ he says. ‘I said, “Fuck it, I can’t do this.” I told Philip that night I had to leave. I could see it was going to be drudgery, poverty, struggling.’
So it began. Thin Lizzy were, as Lynott boldly declared in a press release the following year, ‘a truckin’ band. We always have been, and we always will be.’ Over the next eighteen months they supported anyone and everyone, from the Faces, Status Quo, David Bowie, Eddie Floyd, Canned Heat and Uriah Heep to scores of long-forgotten bands and singers. Life became a blur of one-night stands conducted in pubs, clubs, hotels and college halls from Redruth, Cornwall, to the Isle of Arran. They played three or four times a week, zig-zagging across the country on ‘dartboard’ tours, which followed no conventional geographical logic, and rehearsed at least a day each week in between. Crowds varied from 20 to 120 people. They were rarely paid more than £10, and sometimes nothing at all. On more than a few nights they all slept in the van.
There was nowhere Thin Lizzy wouldn’t go. They played a prison chapel, only realizing as they drove through the gates that ‘the smell of dope in the van would have knocked you out,’ says Eric Bell. ‘We were all scurrying about trying to hide the dope in various parts of the van. We played on the altar. Philip looked at me, and I looked at Brian. It was like a fucking Laurel and Hardy movie. These 200 guys walked in, blue denim shirts and black slacks, and just sat there. No noise, total silence. We started playing, and we went down really well. Then they all walked out again, and that was it. We played all these crummy gigs for next to nothing. Our management had us out everywhere. We would be on with another five bands, bottom of the bill. Treated like Paddies from the boat. A lot of guys just looked at us like we were three idiots. I felt very insecure in England and London at that point. It got to me a little bit.’
Lynott, too, seemed inhibited. He had not yet overcome his natural shyness on stage. In Ireland, where he felt more assured of his place in the pecking order, this sense of reserve communicated itself to the audience as a rather stately confidence. ‘Mr Cool,’ says Brian Tuite, ‘standing there lifting an eyelid.’ In England, this apparently supreme detachment calcified into a chronic lack of self-belief, which undermined his stage presence. He was restricted by his bass, a difficult instrument to play while singing, let alone posing, but even between songs he seemed awkward and tongue-tied. He ummed, aahed and mumbled. Ted Carroll went so far as to prepare rehearsed lines for him to say to the crowd, which only seemed to make things worse. In the end, Eric Bell undertook the majority of the talking. ‘He’d just stand there, play the bass and sing,’ says Bell. ‘None of his dramatic, legs apart type thing. It was all very laid-back – a poetic, serious musicianship vibe.’
His inability to meet the crowd’s collective gaze made their shows an awkward experience. ‘He was a shoe-gazer before his time, he would look down at his feet and only look up to sing,’ says Ted Carroll. ‘I kept on at the band about the importance of communicating. Find somebody and catch their eye and connect with them. It’s important that you make contact with the audience.’
Their audience proved elusive. The debut album, Thin Lizzy, was released on 30 April 1971, having been remixed by a young engineer called Nick Tauber after Frank Rodgers had objected to the job Scott English had done. The album was not widely reviewed and was not a commercial success. Ted Carroll’s notes from the time record that Thin Lizzy sold a total of 2,499 copies in the first five months. Of these, just over 1,800 were sold in Britain and Ireland, and the remainder in mainland Europe.
The only obvious inroads came courtesy of Radio Luxembourg. Canadian DJ David ‘Kid’ Jensen instantly fell in love with the record and played it continually. ‘We would listen to his late-night show as we were coming back from gigs and he was playing a couple of tracks every night,’ says Brian Downey. ‘It became number one in his best albums of the year list.’
They followed it up in August with the New Day EP, four tracks recorded with Nick Tauber at Broadhurst Gardens. It comprised a punchy reworking of ‘Remembering’ from the first album, the stoned, rambling ‘Old Moon Madness’, and the rocking ‘Things Ain’t Working Out Down at the Farm’, on which Lynott, memorably, somehow contrived to turn ‘out’ into ‘ow-ee-ah-yeet’.
Significantly, New Day found a home for ‘Dublin’, Lynott’s beautiful, sad and conflicted reflection on the city that formed him. ‘Dublin’ is short but captures the essence of the place: the pull of exile and the dragging counterweight of memory; the sentimentality and sweet sadness; the lack of money and opportunity; the fondly recalled local landmarks. It was written as a poem, and there is a charming recording of Lynott reading it as such, but it
resonates more strongly when it is sung to music.
After our affair, I swore that I’d leave Dublin
And in that line I’d left behind
The years, the tears, the memories
And you in Dublin
At the Quays, friends come and say farewell
We’d laugh and joke and smoke
And later on the boat
I’d cry over you
How can I leave the town that brings me down
That has no jobs, is blessed by God
And makes me cry?
Dublin
And at sea with flowing hair
I’d think of Dublin
Of Grafton Street and Derby Square
And those for whom I care
And you, in Dublin
It’s an important song, not just for Lynott but for Ireland. ‘A lot of people at the time would think, why would you want to write about that?’ says Brian Tuite. ‘But that was the way he lived Dublin. That was the way he felt it. Everything he did had a personal touch to it.’
‘Aside from things like “Molly Malone” and “The Auld Triangle”, nobody really said straight up in a lyric: Dublin,’ says Paul Scully. ‘It was quite a revelation, and quite an intimate thing. We suddenly heard Dublin mentioned in a song with a strong Dublin accent, as opposed to Ray Davies singing about London. It was ours. Ireland always had an inferiority complex about England, we were always held down, so when Philip sang proudly and poetically about Dublin, that was quite an amazing moment.’
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