London was a breath of fresh air, an unbuckling of the belt. For all that Lynott loved Dublin, in the 1970s the city was dour and downtrodden. Its physical beauty was in a state of disrepair, while its burgeoning bohemianism was battling centuries of ingrained inferiority, censure and prohibition. In Ireland, Lynott had been at the centre of something still in the process of being formed. That was why Skid Row and Thin Lizzy were able to make an impact so quickly. It was also why they had had to leave. In London, he felt plugged into the mains of a genuine movement. The days moved at a faster lick, and for the first time in his life he could walk down a street without everybody staring. He was excited by the challenge.
‘I’d always wanted to get to London – Carnaby Street and that,’ he said later. ‘The whole rock boom was still there in them days, ‘69 wasn’t so far away. I was so pleased to get over and have a run-around. It was a lot better than I thought it would be, and a lot different. Much freer. It was great to walk into a youth environment where young people seemed to control it. The whole youth culture seemed to be very big, much more so than in Ireland, where you had to wear a tie to get into a dance. It seemed to cater for people like me, and I didn’t feel as freaky as I used to. I could wear jeans and sit down on the ground and listen to music.’2
‘That’s what our life was,’ says Eric Bell. ‘Sauntering off to Hampstead Heath, walking about like hippies. I’d say about 80 per cent of all the people who walked past me in London had bell-bottom jeans, patchouli oil and velvet coats, and a big joint hanging out of their mouth. That was where the youth was at that moment in time. [It] seemed to be like a big revolution was starting, and we were part of that.’
Some London practices confused Lynott. He thought the Underground trains had to be hailed, like buses or taxi cabs. When he first arrived, ‘me and Brian put out our hands to stop the train. We nearly lost our hands. We were really untogether on things like that. There was a lot we didn’t know. But, at the same time, we were fairly cool. We weren’t dum-dums.’3
During his first year there, Lynott rented a single-room bedsitter on the third floor of a Victorian villa at 61 Hillfield Road in West Hampstead, an attractive tree-lined street of terraced houses which branched off from the main drag of West End Lane. Gale Barber lived there with him. ‘Ted Carroll found it incredibly difficult to find us a place,’ she recalled. ‘At that time nobody would rent to either black or Irish, so we had a double dose of not being wanted.’4 Lynott later described the difficulties he had finding somewhere to live in London as ‘the hardest time I ever had being black’.5
The house was owned by an Italian couple. Their rules were strict and the facilities were basic, but the rent was manageable, at £7 a week, and the area convenient for Decca studios and the M1 motorway. Lynott liked West Hampstead, and stuck close to West End Lane until 1978, when he moved further west to Kew.
He was surrounded by an Irish diaspora comprised of bands, roadies, friends, girlfriends and assorted hangers-on which had settled in Hampstead and nearby Belsize Park. Everyone back home thought they were living the high life in London. The reality was rather less glamorous.
Paul Scully and Frank Murray were now working with Skid Row and living in Belsize Avenue, alongside Gary Moore, in ‘one of those enormous old London houses,’ says Bell, who also moved in when Thin Lizzy landed. ‘There must have been about fifteen rooms, on three or four floors. Gary lived in the ground-floor flat with his girlfriend. Frank was upstairs with his wife, Ferga. Then I moved into this other room in the house with my girlfriend Eleanor, who was pregnant at the time.’ Ted Carroll lived next door, at 31 Belsize Avenue. Brian Downey shared a flat at nearby Greencroft Gardens. Soon they were joined by another Dublin friend, Peter Eustace, who started handling the sound and lighting for Thin Lizzy, and their roadie and driver, Mick Tarrant.
They were forever on the edge of penury, although Lynott fared better than most. Like the rest of the band, his accommodation was paid for and he was given £10 a week to live on, but he had access to other revenue streams. The songs on the first two Thin Lizzy albums were published by Decca’s in-house publishing company, for which Lynott received an advance of around £1,000. He would also, in the words of Frank Murray, ‘tap up his mother if he ran short’. When he needed a new bass, it was Philomena who signed the hire-purchase agreement. ‘He had more of a cushion than the rest of us, but we just accepted it,’ says Murray. ‘That was the way it was.’
Thin Lizzy were already coming to terms with the fact that Lynott possessed the kind of attributes that ensured he would be singled out as the main attraction.
‘I suppose he had started asserting himself as the leader,’ says Bell. ‘I can remember one of the first times I got an idea that that was going to happen. After we had recorded our first album, one of our managers came up to me and showed me a rough plan of the cover. On the back there were some small photographs of me, Philip and Brian, but there was a huge one of Philip on the left-hand side on his own, [running] the full length of the sleeve. Ted said, “I hope you don’t mind, Eric, it’s because it looks so long and lanky.” I suppose they were associating it with Thin Lizzy. I could see the sense in what he was saying, but a little part of me was going, hmm, Philip has got two photos on the cover, one of them huge, and Brian and I have one.’
He was not just the most charismatic, he was also the most engaged and hands-on. ‘Philip was very organized,’ says Ted Carroll. ‘Sometimes very talented musicians are so wrapped up in the music they find it difficult to deal with other things. Gary Moore would be a good example of that. Phil was very together, a good communicator, and he basically took care of everything. Things were joint decisions, they discussed them in rehearsals and in the van, but he was running the show.’
Following New Year dates in Ireland and a long and rather dispiriting college tour of England in the company of Arrival and Barabbas, on 10 March 1972, the second Thin Lizzy album was released. Shades of a Blue Orphanage, a title which blended the names of Lynott’s and Bell’s previous bands, had been recorded in a rush with Nick Tauber. They were in a new studio, De Lane Lea in Wembley, Lynott having found the old Decca building somewhat stuffy. ‘They were quite old-fashioned, it was a little bit like having Big Brother watching you,’ says Tauber. ‘They gave us a really tight budget. We were really up against it. We were doing fourteen-hour days, it was absolutely bonkers.’
Technical problems with the Cadac console left clicks all over the tapes and drove Lynott to distraction. More significantly, he found himself facing a perennial industry problem: following up a collection of songs that had taken years to write, with a second album written on the hoof. Thin Lizzy had little time to rehearse because they couldn’t afford to stop touring. They asked Decca for a £1,000 advance to tide them over, but were refused.
‘We ended up in the studio with really not much of a clue what we were going to do,’ says Eric Bell. ‘A lot of the second album was made up in the studio, there and then.’
The result was a regression. Older songs such as ‘Chatting Today’ were pressed into action, and several others – the meandering ‘The Rise and Dear Demise of the Funky Nomad Tribes’, the throwaway Elvis Presley pastiche ‘I Don’t Want to Forget How to Jive’, the time-marking ‘Call the Police’ – are filler. ‘Buffalo Gal’ has a smooth, soulful melodicism, and ‘Sarah’, the tribute to Lynott’s grandmother, offers further evidence that he would not be boxed in by genre, but even the better tracks were denied the opportunity to fulfil their potential. The 1977 version of ‘Brought Down’, on which Lynott added overdubs to the original 1972 recording, streamlines the song’s latent power and potential into something truly dynamic. On Shades of a Blue Orphanage it sounds like a demo. Much of the rest of the album is similarly underwritten and underpowered. ‘It sounds a bit naff, production wise,’ was Lynott’s later opinion.6 ‘A depressing time for the band. We just didn’t feel it sounded like us, it lacked the balls, the energy.’7
8
/> During Lynott’s first year in London, Thin Lizzy released two albums and an EP; twenty-three songs in total, of which eighteen were written solely by him, four were co-written with Eric Bell and Brian Downey, and one was written by Bell alone.
They form a body of work quite distinct from anything else he ever did. ‘There is a real poetic sensibility in those first two albums,’ says Eamon Carr, while Bob Geldof describes it as ‘convoluted and quite arty. The first album opens with a long spoken poem. It was kind of hippieish, groping towards hard rock.’
The standard is patchy, but there is a quality that only rarely reappears in the band’s later work. ‘Although it was rock music, it was very melodic, and incredibly well structured,’ says Midge Ure. The future Thin Lizzy guitarist and keyboard player was one of the few people who was impressed at the time by the first record. ‘It set them apart immediately from what was going on then. Songs like “Diddy Levine” and “Dublin” are stunning.’
The seven-minute title track of Shades of a Blue Orphanage is another of Lynott’s vivid Dublin vignettes, which surrenders to the bittersweet drag of nostalgia for the old town. He recalls the cinema where he watched Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy, returns to St Stephen’s Green, toasts old flames and absent friends. These are not happy, sun-kissed memories; they are ‘true blue, Irish blue.’
His early songs of and about Ireland are his most nuanced on the subject. Many of them were written while he was still living in the country. Once he left – although he was never far away, and it was unusual for more than six months to pass without him returning to Dublin – Lynott looked back with an increasingly romantic eye, falling upon often clichéd representations of Irish archetypes. James Joyce viewed his homeland from a distance with a vivid ambivalence; Lynott, particularly as time wore on, was happy to view it through the prism of rose-tinted spectacles. His Ireland was a fond fairy-tale, a shamelessly sentimental construct full of doughty working-class characters, gypsy lovers, mythical heroes, warriors, outlaws and wild women. He painted in the broadest of brush strokes.
The avoidance of complexity was not an accident. It was the entire point. Lynott wanted these songs to stand as bold assertions of Ireland’s historic power and unique character. Like Van Morrison, he had no interest in offering contemporary social critique or explicitly political sloganeering. Comparing ‘Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend’ and ‘Emerald’ with other depictions of Ireland in the 1970s, be they the Boomtown Rats’s ‘Banana Republic’ or Stiff Little Fingers’s ‘Alternative Ulster’, it’s clear the extent to which Lynott ducked the issue of modern Irish identity. Even when the issue came up in interviews, he offered cosy platitudes. ‘I’d like Ireland to become one nation, but then, we are,’ he said. ‘We seem to be all Irish when we’re away from Ireland.’1
Gale Barber had grown up in Belfast, which in 1969 descended into the sectarian Troubles that would rip the city and the country apart for the next thirty years. She struggled to see the romance of it all. ‘It used to annoy the life out of me,’ she said. ‘I’m from the north and, to me, it’s a country full of idiots who really ought to have their heads banged together. But he just thought of everything as being wonderful.’2
‘He avoided modern Ireland like the plague,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘Philip was a traditionalist, his version of Ireland was the idealized version. I remember when Bobby Sands died [an imprisoned member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Sands died on hunger strike in 1981], we had a really serious conversation and I took the piss out of him. He had a romanticized view of the Provos being the continuation of the great Irish struggle – whereas I saw them as being in the way.’ On Chinatown, released in 1980, the back cover included the slogan ‘Smash H Block’, pledging solidarity to the campaign supporting the hunger strikers.
He was a product of his upbringing and his education. ‘[At school] we were only forty years away from the 1916 Easter Rising, and they were all heroes,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘Philip kept that, and when he went away he became a lot more wistful, a lot more nostalgic. He read a lot of Irish history and a lot of books about Ireland. He was educated about how Ireland fitted into the whole of European history, but his idea of Ireland was more the idea of this romantic struggle against Britain.’
This approach also became a means of affirming his own identity. ‘Irishness became very important to him, something he could hook on to,’ says Tim Booth. ‘It allowed him to have much deeper Irish roots than people might initially perceive from just looking at him. I think he was very glad to discover all of that, and learn about it, and be able to bring it up if anyone was to challenge his roots in any way.’
There was suss in everything Lynott did, and the way he packaged and presented his Irishness was no different. The hokey puns, the Celtic art, the ripe romance, the sentiment, the poetry, the creaky stage patter – ‘Is there anybody here with any Irish in them? Is there any of the girls who’d like a bit more Irish in them?’ – and the off-hand literary allusions combined, in time, to create an identity for Thin Lizzy that was distinct from any other band. ‘He had a shining ambition, a very clear pathway that he wanted to take,’ says Booth. ‘He needed certain accoutrements to allow him to progress down that route, and the Celtic thing was part of it. He used it very well to brand Thin Lizzy. It was pure Celtic branding, done very cleverly, before anyone was really aware of the concept of branding. Philip got all that.’
Shades of a Blue Orphanage was released into a vacuum of indifference. ‘Same old story,’ says Bell. ‘We’re all wondering, “What the fuck are we doing? There’s nothing happening.”’ Lynott was frustrated. Ted Carroll sent a terse memo to Decca, detailing a long list of complaints and bemoaning the company’s lack of belief and threadbare support for the first two albums. Rather desperately, he pointed out the success they had had on the Luxembourg album chart. The truth was, neither record was strong enough to take the band to the next stage.
Succour of sorts was offered by touring. ‘Gradually Thin Lizzy began to get more polished and gain more confidence,’ says Carroll. ‘They would get rebooked in the clubs; most of the promoters liked them. It took a while to build up a following … but gradually it started to happen.’
In 1972 they played their first European dates, performing in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. Life had slipped into a pattern, which continued, with only minimal evolution, until 1974, by which time Frank Murray had become Thin Lizzy tour manager, and a big, blond Scot called Charlie McLennan had been hired as their roadie.
They grew accustomed to vast amounts of travelling, followed by a short gig, often on a multi-band bill. Sometimes they drove back to London, sometimes they stayed overnight. A few drinks, a club, perhaps a girl, and to bed at three or four o’clock in the morning. In the hotels, B & Bs and boarding houses, they slept two to a room, at best. Then up again at eight to make last orders for breakfast. Miss breakfast, and they might not eat until the evening. Such was the fineness of their financial margins. Then back in the van, or the leased second-hand Ford Granada – prone to breaking down – and on to the next stop on the schedule. Repeat. It was the life Lynott had chosen, and it was better than working, but it was far from glamorous.
‘We seemed to be constantly touring,’ says Murray. ‘There were never many breaks, we had to work in order to get wages. It wasn’t like you could take three or four months off; it wasn’t like there was a big kitty there to keep paying everybody. We spent most of our lives in a car. We had some dreadful drives between places. Getting from one gig to the other really sapped the energy out of us, but when you’re younger it’s fun. Nothing really bothers you. Actually, Philip loved touring.’
The lack of responsibility suited him. Pulling into town, playing his songs and heading off again at sunrise had a cowpoke romance into which he could easily buy. He loved the freshness of each day, he loved meeting new people, and he had the metabolism for it. He smoked dope more or less constantly, rolling joints in th
e front of the car on the road and passing them to Bell and Downey in the back. After the gig, it was time to go out carousing.
‘Philip was the kind of guy who would drink and drink and drink,’ says Frank Murray. ‘He was a guy who liked to keep up with people. On the continent in those days you could drink later than you could in London. We used to go out clubbing, most of the time we’d drink local beer or vodka and orange. One night we went into a drinking competition deep in the sticks, somewhere in Germany. They took out this plastic bucket from underneath the bar. It seemed to be made of slops and fish, the smell off of it was dreadful. We had to take a mouthful each, which we did, then they had to take a mouthful. Then they said, “Again.” So we did it twice. Silly stuff like that.’
Such escapades left no discernible mark. ‘Philip would get up the next morning for breakfast and he looked like a million dollars,’ says Eric Bell. ‘Absolutely fresh. Showered, shaved, hair washed, clothes pressed. I don’t know how he did it. Brian and I were crawling out of the bed, eyes out on stalks, and Philip’s downstairs having a coffee. He had an incredible constitution, he just kept going.’
In their first eighteen months in Britain, any sense of ennui came not from the effects meted out by the lifestyle, but from the sense that he was banging his head against a brick wall. On 3 June 1972, Thin Lizzy played Peterborough and Liverpool on the same day. Even the normally upbeat Lynott began to despair. ‘We’d finished the gig, and Philip walked into the changing room, threw his bass on the floor and just sat down, his hands between his knees,’ says Bell. ‘One of the roadies came in and saw this, and he says, “Philip, was it the sound? Was the sound no good tonight?” Philip said, “No man, for fuck’s sake. How do you get off this fucking circuit?” The roadie went, “Oh, you need a hit record, mate.” He walked out and Philip went, “Ah.” We sort of knew that was the answer. Regardless of how good you were musically, or how brilliant your stage act was, if you had a hit record, you were seen by millions of people on TV. Overnight success. Until that happened we were just forever going round in this transit van, playing any club, any pub, any town, anywhere.’
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