When he wasn’t immersed in the fallout, Lynott watched it all carefully, with the detachment of a battle-hardened strategist. ‘This time, man,’ he would say to no one in particular, ‘this time, man, we’ve got to be very careful …’ He was acutely sensitive to how Thin Lizzy would be perceived, and was desperate to control and shape their own destiny. He checked the contact sheets from photo sessions, selecting the pictures that he felt sent out the right message, vetoing the rest. ‘Philip was very careful with the control of the images,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘I remember a couple of times pictures weren’t used just because he was smiling. He would talk about his propaganda. “Get your propaganda together, control your image, make sure people don’t see the wrong thing.” He was very, very shrewd. He knew exactly how to be a rock star. Attention to detail.’
He couldn’t settle. ‘He was very worried,’ says Chris Salewicz. ‘Very worried. It had all gone pear-shaped after “Whiskey in the Jar” and he was very nervous about it all. He could appear very cool and louche, but he wasn’t really like that at all. He was very hard-working and kept an eye on everything. I’d never seen anyone so fastidious, almost to an anal degree.’
‘There was a slight panic,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘This was real stuff – not just a fluke single. We were in the album charts everywhere. Phil was looking at us, as managers, thinking, “Have I got the back up?” We had to step up. You had to be on your measure with Philip. He said, “Look, Chris, I’ve got one career. You can go on and manage other bands, but I’ve got one shot. If you bring something to me, don’t drop the ball. Make it happen or don’t bring it to me.” We would have furious rows about things.’
To capitalize on the momentum, Thin Lizzy planned to extend their American tour from an initial six weeks to twelve. Shortly after the concert at Santa Monica they joined Rainbow, led by Lynott’s one-time prospective band-mate Ritchie Blackmore, for a string of dates in the Midwest and eastern seaboard. These would have been critical shows, dove-tailing with their mainstream breakthrough and taking in Ohio, Detroit and a first ever performance in New York City, at the Beacon Theatre. On the eve of the first concert, Lynott was diagnosed with hepatitis.
‘He’d been feeling bad for weeks, he was really tired and overly sweating,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘I remember the day he got diagnosed. We were supporting Rainbow in Columbus, Ohio. He knocked on my door and said, “I’m really sorry, man, I got some bad news and the doctor said I’ve got to stop.” We were in my hotel room and he pulled up his mirrored shades, and oh God, his eyes weren’t yellow, they were practically orange. He was in a really bad way. The hepatitis had spread right through him.’
Hepatitis is an infectious liver disease transmitted through contact with contaminated blood or bodily fluids, with intravenous drug use and sexual intercourse both common causes of infection. Symptoms include nausea, sickness, fever, stomach pains and jaundice.
In the summer of 1976, Lynott was nobody’s idea of a drug casualty. In common with the entire Thin Lizzy entourage, he was a dedicated drinker, but smoking dope was his only real habit. On tour, an ounce of cannabis would be placed on his bedside table by a roadie as soon as he checked into the hotel; it was no more noteworthy than room service leaving a chocolate on the pillow. ‘I don’t think I ever saw Phil when he wasn’t high,’ says John Alcock. ‘It was perpetual. I would get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee, he would get up in the morning and roll a joint. [But] Phil was totally in control. He could work, he could write, he could do anything.’
In recent months, Lynott had been flying at increased altitude. Success almost instantly altered the environment and atmosphere surrounding the band, and the drugs offered became more varied, particularly in the States. ‘Coke came on the scene just after Jailbreak, but not in any great measure,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Nobody went out looking for it [but] you might find a piece at the weekend.’
The high times were essentially extracurricular. The job came first, but Lynott was not a man predisposed to look the other way when new experiences presented themselves. Chris Salewicz says Lynott confided privately that he caught hepatitis from sharing a dirty needle. ‘It was from shooting up,’ says Salewicz. ‘He told me … It wasn’t something he was regularly doing, it was just what happened on that particular night. He was up for it, basically, [but] mostly he was just a big spliff-head, and cocaine was kind of a professional courtesy.’
Publicly, Lynott put his illness down to an increase in partying in the wake of their success. Having been slightly wary watching ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and Jailbreak ascend the charts, ‘when I was sure it had happened, I started to go a bit crazy … and ended up with hepatitis in a hospital,’ he said. ‘I was so run down from touring and celebrating, I ended up sick.’7
The unfortunate consequence was the cancellation of the second half of the US tour before it had even begun. Lynott was diagnosed in Columbus and was quickly flown back to England, where he was admitted to hospital in Manchester. The rest of the band and crew followed him home shortly afterwards, having effectively been quarantined by Rainbow. Ritchie Blackmore had caught hepatitis a few years earlier and wasn’t taking any chances. ‘Blackmore wouldn’t even let us go down to do a soundcheck because he was convinced he’d get it off the mic,’ says Brian Robertson. ‘He was really paranoid.’
Because it is not uncommon for chronic hepatitis sufferers to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer in later life, recovering patients are recommended to give up alcohol, ideally permanently. The doctors advised complete abstinence from drink and drugs as Lynott recuperated in hospital under the watchful, worried eye of Philomena. (It was not an entirely conventional convalescence. To lift his spirits, one day his mother arranged for female triplets to dress up as nurses and visit Lynott in hospital.) In the event, he mustered sufficient resolve to curb almost all of his more destructive habits for twelve months.
‘For the rest of us it was a real pain in the ass,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘He wouldn’t be drinking and we’d get in the car in the morning and he would remember every single thing we had done the night before. But he religiously stuck to the year – a year to the day. He still smoked some weed, but as far as coke and all the rest, that was out. I was pretty impressed that he had the willpower to stop everything … It made me think he might have been able to do it again near the end.’
According to Frank Murray, Lynott bent the rules when he could. ‘Of course, he came out and he was soon saying, “I can’t drink, but the doctor said I can drink white wine, maybe, and an odd glass of champagne.” He did start asking for champagne in his dressing room because he had the right excuse: doctor’s orders.’
‘I think he did his best,’ says Chalkie Davies, which seems a fair summation.
Lynott was far from oblivious to the ramifications. A year later, he recognized the bout of ill-health as a potentially life-changing episode. ‘Standing in bars watching other people getting drunk was a revelationary [sic] experience,’ he said. ‘Being sober for so long gives you a whole head turnaround. So I went through a few changes, for the better, I hope. It was definitely me body saying, “enough”.’8
Personally and professionally, the long-term effects of the illness were profound. For Thin Lizzy, the cancellation of the US tour was the first in a series of misadventures that fatally hobbled their attempts to forge a meaningful career in the United States. In the immediate aftermath, it meant that they were not able to capitalize on the momentum built through the success of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and Jailbreak. Not only were the critical taste-makers in New York denied the chance to see the band in their natural live habitat and at the peak of their powers, but the promotional opportunities offered to a rising band were cancelled. It was a hard lesson in the first rule of US success: if you weren’t there to grab it, you might as well not exist. ‘We were convinced on that tour that all the stars were lined up; we were going to show the US audience en masse what this band could do,’ says Scott Gorha
m. ‘We felt we were peaking in terms of our playing abilities and the songs and the arrangements. We had a lot of momentum on our side, we felt in our bones that we were going to crack it in a big way. All of a sudden we were on our way back home. That was one of the lowest lows.’
At least they came home to a hit. Thin Lizzy had already appeared on Top of the Pops. The show had broadcast a prerecorded segment of the band performing ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ in a TV studio in the US, intercut with footage of teenagers dancing in the BBC studios in London. Throughout June 1976, Lynott watched from his hospital bed as the single kept climbing, reaching number eight in the first week of July. To celebrate, they arranged a one-off show at the Hammersmith Odeon. ‘Thin Lizzy are big time now, and thriving on it,’ wrote Harry Doherty, reviewing the 11 July concert in Melody Maker and hailing the band’s ‘arrival as top league rockers’.9
‘We were looking down and people knew the words,’ says Gorham. ‘All of a sudden, out of nowhere, we had cracked it. That was a pretty significant high for the band.’
‘It was a huge breakthrough for us,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘Up until then we were still playing smallish venues and we might be second or third on the bill. When Jailbreak became a huge international hit we were headlining, which was a big change.’ Their guaranteed fee changed almost overnight from three figures to four and sometimes five figures. They could demand as much as 85 per cent of the takings on top.
Lynott couldn’t contemplate missing the Hammersmith Odeon party. A sensible recovery period for hepatitis is a year but he appeared on stage a little over a month after being diagnosed. His swift return to frontline action was partly borne from his macho sensibilities but it was indicative, too, of a mindset that would ultimately do few favours for Thin Lizzy, and Lynott in particular: a neurotic anxiety that to take even the shortest break was to risk being forgotten.
The long-term effects on his health are likely to have been significant. Already an asthmatic, Lynott’s liver and immune system were now also severely weakened. The constitution he so prided himself on was no longer cast iron and he pushed it harder in the final years of his life. ‘What snookered him, I think, was catching hepatitis,’ says Ted Carroll. ‘He was always in danger after that, but he didn’t stop … You could advise someone like Phil, but you couldn’t tell him what to do.’
Recently, Chalkie Davies was looking through his portfolio of photographs of Lynott. He was particularly struck by one image taken some months after he had left hospital in the summer of 1976. ‘I was thinking, there’s something weird about him in this picture, and it’s because his face was slightly yellow,’ says Davies. ‘He was still recovering and he didn’t quite give it long enough. That affected his health. I honestly think the downward path started there.’
12
‘I don’t know where my father is …’
Success triggered several aftershocks. One was the greater degree of scrutiny that fell on Lynott’s private life and family history, especially when he veered away from the music papers and began to be courted by more mainstream publications. In a single-page interview in 1976 with the rather sensationalist weekly human interest magazine Titbits, the interviewer’s line of questioning focused on his father.
‘I haven’t seen or heard from him since I was four years old,’ Lynott continued. ‘He could be anywhere. My mother doesn’t talk too much about him. I know he had a lot going for him and a lot of girls after him. He even had a nickname, The Duke. He was South American and a pretty flash dresser. She tells me I’ve got most of his looks – he was fairly tall and a good dancer – and most of his characteristics. She said he was a good geezer and I should be proud of him.’1
At the age of twenty-six, Lynott’s perception of his father had advanced little since childhood. He believed that Cecil Parris was living in west London, and may have been working as a barber. Still lacking a name, in 1974 he and Frank Murray had spent a Saturday afternoon visiting barber shops in the Portobello Road, Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill Gate, asking staff and customers if they knew a man in his late forties called ‘The Duke’. It was a venture doomed to disappointment and a degree of ridicule. ‘We failed miserably,’ says Murray.
The Titbits interview set off a chain reaction that very quickly brought Lynott face to face with some rather prosaic home truths. The myths and mysteries that had been spun around Cecil Parris turned out largely to be a smokescreen. The ‘Brazilian seafarer’; the ‘Caribbean tap-dancer’; ‘The Duke’ – the seductive veil of these exotic characterizations fell away upon contact. Lynott’s biological father transpired to be a sharp-dressed family man running a hat stall in Shepherd’s Bush Market.
After ceasing contact with Philomena and his son, Parris had made a life in London. Members of his family travelled over from British Guiana, including a brother and a sister. In 1955, at a dance at the Lyceum, the vast ballroom situated off the Strand, he had met Irene Lewis, a twenty-three-year-old white woman from London.
Lewis had already been involved in a marriage, which was later dissolved. She and Parris began a relationship, and in time moved in together as common-law man and wife, living at 15 Ashburnham Road in World’s End, Chelsea, in west London. In time, Irene changed her surname by deed poll to Parris, and on 21 September 1964 they had a daughter, Sarah Jeanetta Parris, Lynott’s half-sister. They finally married in 1984, when Cecil was fifty-nine and Irene was fifty-two.
Before their baby was due, in 1964 the couple moved around the corner to 15 Burnaby Street. World’s End was the ‘wrong side’ of Chelsea. It was at the more ragged end of the King’s Road, one of the pre-eminent pendulums of Swinging London in the sixties, and still a vibrant thoroughfare. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Sex boutique had recently opened nearby. Don Letts’s Acme Attractions clothes store was also close to hand. It was an area with an aura, and one Lynott knew well. Never mind Rio or Demerara. Father and son had been living only five miles apart in London for several years before finally meeting.
According to his wife, Parris was working not as a barber but as a tailor, and for a period had been employed in Savile Row; one truth that did map the outline of the legend was his dramatic sense of style. In 1974 he had set up his own business selling hats.
Irene Parris read the interview with Lynott in Titbits. She had always known that her husband had fathered a boy before they had met. When she showed the piece to Cecil, he immediately contacted Thin Lizzy’s management at their offices in Dean Street, Soho. ‘I was there when he disclosed himself,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘This guy walked in, wearing a blue denim coat with a sheepskin lining and collar, and a fedora. You could imagine this guy managing a couple of girls. He looked like a pimp, basically.’
Morrison called Philomena, who spoke with Parris and verified his identity. That formality completed, very quickly a meeting between Lynott and his father was set up.
Thin Lizzy were recording a radio session for John Peel at the BBC studios in Maida Vale when Lynott received the news. The band picked up his instant unease. ‘He never talked about his dad,’ says Gorham. ‘And he wasn’t happy about meeting him at all, believe me, but he was intrigued. He arranged to meet, but he said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t leave me alone with this guy.” I said, “Are you sure? You’ve never even met him. You don’t want five minutes alone?” He was sure.’
When Cecil Parris walked back into his son’s life he was wearing ‘a three-piece all-white suit, white patent leather shoes, a white tie – I think he might even have had a white hat,’ says Gorham. ‘Real Superfly shit. Philip looks at this guy and looks at me, and we both almost start to laugh. The atmosphere is really tense. It was very strange. I don’t think they knew what to say to each other.’ Gorham eventually stepped outside to get a coffee and to allow the newly reunited father and son a chance to talk. When he returned, Parris was already leaving. ‘It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes. Philip didn’t really want to know.’
D
espite the natty attire, ‘his father’s story was radically different to what he thought it was,’ according to Midge Ure. ‘Philip had a much more glamorous story [in his head] than the reality.’ Parris had showed up with his wife and their eleven-year-old daughter. ‘I asked him about that meeting with his father, and he was totally nonplussed,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘I don’t think it was a defensive reaction. It was more like, “Okay, that was interesting. Bye. Now I’m me again.”’
His Irish family sensed a similar neutrality in his response. Lynott said little of consequence on the subject to those closest to him, other than intimating that he would not be seeing his father again. In fact, they saw each other on several more occasions, invariably at 15 Burnaby Street, and always with Lynott bringing a chaperone, usually in the form of Charlie McLennan. The family were sent tickets to Thin Lizzy concerts. ‘I remember I was at a show once and Philip pointed to a girl in the dressing room and said, “That’s my half-sister over there, let me introduce you to her,”’ says Frank Murray.
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