Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  At the wedding of Brush and Margaret Shiels, January 1969, with Gary Moore also in attendance. (Courtesy of Michael O’Flanagan)

  Carole Stephen, late 1960s. (Courtesy of Carole Stephen)

  Macdaragh Lambe, aged three. (Courtesy of Carole Stephen)

  Portrait by Roy Esmonde, 1970.

  Moonlighting as a model for New Spotlight, with Niki Adrian, Dublin, 1971. (Roy Esmonde)

  Performing with Thin Lizzy at the disastrous Open Air Festival at Richmond Park, Dublin, 4 September 1970. (Roy Esmonde)

  ‘Tin Lissy’ are offered terms by Decca, November 1970. (Courtesy of Brian Tuite)

  Taking a break from recording Thin Lizzy’s debut album at Broadhurst Gardens, London, January 1971. Ted Carroll is pictured third from the left at the back. (Courtesy of Brian Tuite)

  Thin Lizzy at the time of ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. Left to right: Eric Bell, Philip Lynott, Brian Downey. (Courtesy of Ted Carroll)

  Tim Booth’s inventive ad for Thin Lizzy’s 1973 single, ‘Randolph’s Tango’. (Courtesy of Ted Carroll)

  With Jim Fitzpatrick (left) and Peter Fallon (right) in Neary’s, Dublin, August 1974, celebrating the publication of Songs for While I’m Away. (Tom Collins)

  Soldiers of Fortune: the classic Thin Lizzy line-up relax in customary fashion. Left to right: Lynott, Brian Downey, Brian Robertson, Scott Gorham. (Erica Echenberg/Redferns/Getty Images))

  Family life at Glen Corr, Dublin, in the early 1980s. (Courtesy of Jim Fitzpatrick and Caroline Taraskevics)

  With his daughters, Sarah and Cathleen, and Thin Lizzy keyboardist Darren Wharton, at Kew Road, 1980. (Courtesy of Caroline Taraskevics)

  Family life at Glen Corr, Dublin, in the early 1980s. (Courtesy of Jim Fitzpatrick and Caroline Taraskevics)

  Backstage at Slane Castle, 16 August 1981. (Courtesy of Sean O’Connor)

  With his daughters, Sarah and Cathleen. (Courtesy of Caroline Taraskevics)

  Lynott’s wife, mother, children and father-in-law, Leslie Crowther, attend his funeral in Howth, Dublin, 11 January 1986. (Photocall Ireland)

  A promotional poster for Lynott’s final gig in Marbella, 6 August 1985.

  10

  Thin Lizzy was two, arguably three different bands held together by a name, a drummer and a singer. Its first iteration lasted from early 1970 until the first day of 1974. Following Eric Bell’s departure Lynott had to build again. He very nearly opted not to bother. In the first few months of 1974 he and Brian Downey seriously contemplated returning to Ireland and setting up something new around the clubs of Dublin.

  ‘I thought that it was time to break up,’ he said in the winter of 1975. ‘Lizzy was over, finished … I wasn’t going to use the name. I really didn’t give a fuck. It could have been called Joe Soap for all I cared, but everybody wanted us to keep the name so that was it … I don’t look on Thin Lizzy as a band that’s been together for five years. I look on it as a band that’s been together a year and three months. Before that, there was another Thin Lizzy.’1

  New Year’s Eve was an ending, but what followed was not quite a new beginning. After cancelling two concerts, Thin Lizzy completed the remainder of the Irish tour in January using Gary Moore, who flew over to Ireland at short notice. Moore was a sufficiently gifted guitarist to cope with the lack of rehearsal. He learned some of the set, jammed the rest, and excelled on covers of things like the J. Geils Band’s ‘Hard Drivin’ Man’.

  If Lynott was personally irked by Bell’s abdication, it was largely a matter of its manner and its timing. The musical ramifications could be spun into a positive. ‘Philip was really philosophical about it,’ says Frank Murray. ‘He saw it as an opportunity. “Okay, Eric’s left. Watch this. I’m going to pull Gary Moore out of my hat.” We kind of knew that Gary was always there. We had a super sub.’

  Moore stayed on for the band’s UK tour in February and March, and for a scattering of dates in April. The new trio worked up a remarkable new song, ‘Sitamoia’, a derivation of the old Irish tune ‘Si Do Mhaimeo’ (‘Wealthy Widow’). It was a pulsing Afro-Celtic hybrid, unlike anything they had written before. Lynott free-associated Gaelic speaking-in-tongues and West African vocal chants over Downey’s extraordinary 6/8 drum figure, while Moore incorporated funk rhythms, power chords and jigs. He played on Thin Lizzy’s final single for Decca, ‘Little Darling’, and on a demo recording of the weeping blues tune, ‘Still in Love with You’, which in both style and mood owes an enormous amount to his contribution.

  There is no question that, in 1974, a settled Thin Lizzy line-up featuring Gary Moore would have been a force to be reckoned with. ‘They came on stage and exploded,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘They were amazing. I said to Chris Morrison and Ted Carroll, “We could take on the world with this band.” But you never got the sense that Gary was actually in Thin Lizzy ever. We always knew that he was fragile and there wasn’t 100 per cent commitment. It was always a conduit to something else.’

  Moore could be mercurial and unfathomable. ‘I was a little frightened of the man that was inside Gary Moore,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘I thought, there’s something troubled inside you. He was very complex and quite difficult, because everything came out in the music.’

  As well as an instinctive musical empathy, there was a fraternal bond and mutual respect between Lynott and Moore, but their interaction involved strategic games of power and status, which stretched back to when they had first met. Moore had made it out of Ireland first with Skid Row and was much the better musician; Lynott was the more charismatic and a superior songwriter. Both were sticklers for detail; both had their demons but where Lynott pushed his down deep, Moore’s tended to be written all over his face. The top-dog sparring could turn personal. Following a concert in the north of England, this interim incarnation of Thin Lizzy stayed at the Clifton Grange Hotel. Moore was accompanied by his girlfriend of the time.

  ‘I wouldn’t ever trust Phil with my girlfriend, because he tried to get her into bed with him one night,’ Moore told me. ‘She was sitting on the end of the bed and he said, “Ah, come on now, get in and we’ll do this and we’ll do that.” He was lethal like that. You couldn’t leave him alone with a girl. He had two sides to him, a very soft side and a very hard side. He loved his Irish poetry and music and all that stuff, but on the other hand he could be as tough as fuck. If you went around his house and you dropped a £20 note, he would just scoop it up and that would be it.’

  Shortly afterwards, Moore informed the management that he was leaving. ‘Gary came to see me in April 1974,’ says Ted Carroll. ‘People from record companies were coming to the gigs and seeing Gary play. He said, “I don’t want to sign as part of the band, I want to get my own deal. I think it would be better if I left now.” We’d already recorded “Still in Love with You” down at Pebble Beach Studios in Worthing; it was one of the songs we’d been playing to record companies to show what the new band was like. It made sense for Gary, but it immediately left us in deep shit.’

  ‘It was a very high-pressure situation,’ said Moore. ‘I was taking a lot of Valium, I was having panic attacks, and the band were watching me all the time. “What’s wrong with you, Gary, what’s wrong with you?” There was a lot of drugs around by that time. It had kicked in. I also wanted to join another band. [Drummer] Jon Hiseman was looking for musicians for his latest venture [Colosseum II], so I called him.’

  With a German tour booked in May, Lynott patched together a group with two new guitarists: John Cann from Atomic Rooster, and Andy Gee, a German musician whom Lynott and Downey had met at a party. Shortly afterwards they were all on the overnight ferry to Hamburg, travelling in hope rather than expectation. ‘We tried to solve the problem really quick,’ said Lynott. ‘We went to Germany and it was really bad. Brian Downey said one night, “Let’s forget it. Let’s go home.” So we did.’2

  Thin Lizzy ground to a halt in the no-man’s-land between the old and the new. The makeshift line-up did not gel on stage. Off stage, Downey
didn’t much care for Cann, whom he regarded as starry and grand; in Thin Lizzy, at least at this point, everyone carried their own cases into the hotel. Any other expectation was liable to put noses out of joint. The shabby venues were the same ones they had played the last time they had visited Germany. The autobahn ground them down. The entire enterprise seemed suddenly aimless and dispiriting. Thin Lizzy, the ultimate road band, ended up cancelling a handful of dates, including a festival in the Netherlands, and coming home. Back in London, Downey told Ted Carroll he was leaving. ‘I said, “If you leave now that’s the end of it,”’ says Carroll. ‘“Just stay until we get the band back together and then let’s see what happens.”’

  It was an ending of sorts, all the same. With Bell and Moore leaving in quick succession, the folk-tinged, progressive blues-rock band that had its roots in the loose, vaguely bohemian milieu of late-1960s Dublin was over. The group that recorded ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ and ‘Don’t Believe a Word’ was a very different entity – not only in terms of personnel, but in outlook, aim, image and sensibility. ‘Brand new,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Brand new approach, brand new style of song-writing. Brand new band.’

  Certain qualities were lost in the change. There was a tenderness, a starry-eyed innocence and adventurism that did not wholly survive. In time, Lynott realized that something quite different was required. For now, the brief period spent carrying John Cann and Andy Gee clarified his vision for his new group. The idea of having two guitarists began as a belt-and-braces safeguard but, more importantly, it enabled Thin Lizzy to reproduce on stage what they were trying to do in the studio. Songs like ‘Little Girl in Bloom’ pointed towards a layered style that a trio could not replicate live.

  ‘In the studio we found we were putting down overdubs of rhythm guitars and really we were writing a fourth line,’ Lynott said in 1977. ‘I was writing the songs as a rhythm guitarist and as [part of] a three-piece. The guitarist was approaching it as a lead guitarist would, so the rhythm line got lost. So I went for two lead guitarists that could sort of divide everything equally and have the taste to know when to lay back because the other guy’s taking a solo, when to step forward, and when to do cross harmonies and get into the sort of ideas where there’s two lead lines crossing, whether that be a voice and guitar or two guitars crossing. It seemed far wiser than to just have somebody that could play rhythm and one lead guitarist with a huge ego.’3 The execution of this theory would revolutionize their studio sound, and transform them as a live band.

  Having resolved to continue, in late May and into June, Downey and Lynott held auditions for guitarists at the Iroko Country Club on Haverstock Hill, west London. They hired Brian Robertson, an eighteen-year-old from the suburban sprawl of Greater Glasgow. His father was a jazz musician, and from an early age Robertson had displayed remarkable proficiency. He could read music, he studied cello and classical piano to a high level, and by his early teens he was not only an excellent guitar player, but a decent drummer. Before joining Thin Lizzy, Robertson played with Hamish Stuart in Dream Police, which went on to become the Average White Band.

  Robertson had an existing connection to the band. He knew Lynott’s roadie Charlie McLennan, and had joined the aftershow festivities following a concert at the University of Glasgow on 9 February 1974, playing blues with Brian Downey in the hotel room. Peter Fallon, on a visit from Dublin, was sitting in on the auditions at the Iroko when Robertson was given the job. ‘He played great, but I remember saying to Philip, “Are you sure you want to be with that guy?” Immediately, I thought, he’s not my kind of company to tour the world with.’

  ‘Listen, I was a fucking uppity little git, right?’ says Robertson. ‘Very sure of myself, except I wasn’t really. I was never really that sure of myself, but I’d always come across that way, which points towards a bit of insecurity really. A few drinks and a bit of a jam brought [my aggression] to the fore, but I think Phil quite liked that. Nobody else would argue with him. It was his band, always was and always would be. He was great big black Irishman, and he sang from that position of strength.’

  Robertson joined and clicked immediately. Several more days of auditions failed to find him a partner until the arrival of Scott Gorham. Raised in comfort in Glendale, west California, Gorham had spent years playing in garage groups and bar bands. By 1973 he was embroiled in petty crime and hard drugs. Finding himself at a dead end, at the age of twenty-two he left California for Britain on the advice of his brother-in-law, Bob Siebenberg, the drummer in Supertramp. Though he had cleaned up his act, his musical career remained in stasis. Gorham was playing in pubs for £12 a week and was considering returning to the States before his visa expired the following month, when a friend on the circuit, Bees Make Honey saxophonist Ruan O’Lochlainn, informed him that a band called Thin Lizzy were looking for a guitar player.

  ‘I had never even heard of these guys,’ says Gorham. ‘They weren’t being played or written about, so I had no chance to hear them. I walked in that day to a place called the Iroko in Hampstead, which was an African dinner club, of all things. There were all these African waiters laying out the tables, and when I first saw Phil I actually thought he was one of the waiters. I know that sounds horribly racist, but nobody had told me he was black. He turned his head, said, “Are you Scott?” and introduced himself, and all I thought was, “Wow, a black rock and roller!” That just didn’t happen back in 1974.

  ‘I was intrigued right off the bat, and after the third song I desperately wanted into this thing. I’m watching how Brian Downey is playing the drums, there’s this kid on the other guitar firing out these guitar lines; he’d been there for two weeks, and acting like he’d been there for years. And I was watching this Phil guy in front of me. Even in rehearsal he was already taking command. He dominated right from the moment I met him. When Phil spoke, the two Brians looked up and paid attention.’

  Lynott called late that night to offer him a place in the band. Gorham delivered when it came to image. Tall, slender and laid-back, he was quintessentially American, with fine, straight hair falling down to his sternum. Though his playing was not as technically proficient or as forceful as Robertson’s, he possessed a fluid and distinctive guitar style.

  The first appearance of what most observers would regard as the classic Thin Lizzy line-up took place early in July 1974, in the Lafayette club in Wolverhampton. A handful of people witnessed the show. Within ten days they were touring Ireland, a visit deliberately intended as both a trial and a baptism. With a Scotsman and an American in the band, Thin Lizzy were now an international group, but Ireland would always be the ultimate proving ground.

  While back in Dublin, Lynott took receipt of a copy of his first book. Songs for While I’m Away was a compendium of lyrics to twenty-one Thin Lizzy compositions, plus an unpublished songpoem. ‘A Holy Encounter’ recounted a street meeting with two friends in which Lynott, seemingly reflecting on the masks he and we all wear in public, ‘gave them my one-man show’.

  There is a lovely, natural photograph taken by Tom Collins on the day the first copies of the book arrived from the printer. Lynott is sitting in Neary’s between Peter Fallon and Jim Fitzpatrick, sharing a drink and a joke. ‘It was a moment of real excitement,’ says Fallon. ‘There was another little swagger to his step.’

  Songs for While I’m Away was published on Lynott’s twenty-fifth birthday, less than five years after he had first summoned up the courage to perform his own work publicly at the Arts Society at Trinity College. The simple, stylish line illustrations were provided by Fitzpatrick and Tim Booth, while the short introduction was written by Fallon, who in 1970 had set up the Gallery Press in Dublin. By 1974 the imprint had already published dozens of elegantly designed volumes of poetry, and would later put out work by such vital and eminent Irish voices as Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, as well as publishing Fallon’s own verse.

  Lynott had asked Fallon to publish his lyrics in Galle
ry Press, but his friend declined. His reasons for doing so lie at the heart of any serious discussion of Lynott’s merits and status as a writer.

  ‘These were the times when Bob Dylan wasn’t just a songwriter, he was “a poet”,’ says Fallon. ‘Every second person who was good was “a poet”. The need for people of that generation of songwriters to place themselves in the realm of poetry was a reaction against Tin Pan Alley and the pop single …

  ‘Creative people have a shared currency, and in our early hopes and ambitions and aspirations there was common ground between us [as poets] and Philip. I understood his impulse to be called a poet, but I took the position, which I maintain, that poetry is a different thing. What’s wrong with being known as a really good songwriter? So I said to Philip, “I’m not going to publish it, but I can help you with it.” I think he understood that. There was no resentment because he knew he couldn’t have done it on his own … It really was a question of whittling it into shape from a scrappy mess of papers. He gave me everything – things like spelling weren’t his forte – and I put into some kind of shape a little book. I came up with the name for it. I wrote a little introduction, which was about some of that era. He was still very excited about it. He decided his record company or management would pay for it.’

  Songs for While I’m Away was self-published by Pippen Publishers (a literary twist on the name of Lynott’s music publishing company, Pippin) in an initial print run of 1,000 copies: 200 signed hardbacks and 800 paperbacks. It was dedicated to his father.

  For Lynott to have his work published in Gallery Press would have classified it unambiguously as literature, a weight the words would struggle to bear. He is still often referred to, perhaps rather casually and usually with good intent, as a ‘poet’. Such a description requires context. It is best regarded as an acknowledgement of his status as a popular songwriter who truly cared about words and thought deeply about how he used them.