Taking a midnight ride around Manhattan in the now inevitable limousine, Lynott first checked in on Sid Vicious, who was living in the Chelsea Hotel with Nancy Spungen and playing a series of freak-show gigs at Max’s Kansas City to cover bed, board and drug bills. During a break in his set they all took cocaine in the toilets. Later, Lynott cruised to the Greenwich Village apartment of Willy DeVille; shortly after arriving, Lynott’s limo was despatched to Harlem to score hundreds of dollars’ worth of Dilaudid, pharmaceutical morphine in pill form. The capsules were later melted down and injected.
For Chalkie Davies, who accompanied Lynott and Scott Gorham to DeVille’s place, the visit was a ‘pivotal moment’. There is a picture of the two men taken that night in the apartment. DeVille, his greased-back coiffure in a state of magnificent dishevelment, wears his shirt open to the waist and stares out with a look of glassy insolence. Lynott is way-high, still chic in his white jacket and skinny tie, but with a dangerous new look in his eye. He brandishes his flick knife towards the camera. ‘Those two together, man, was beyond anything you could describe,’ says Nauseef. ‘They were peas in a pod, although maybe not in a great way.’
Lynott had insisted that Chalkie Davies take the shot, as though it was a moment that deserved its place in posterity. Against everybody’s advice, he had also insisted that the sleeve of Live and Dangerous feature a photograph from the studio sessions showing a line of cocaine, a five pound note and a straw. ‘It was all part of that Keith Richards’ thing,’ says Chris Salewicz. ‘He thought you had to behave like that to be a rock star. He’d go on about being in touch with the “street”, this mythical concept. He was very good at self-mythologizing.’
A fortnight after Thin Lizzy’s New York shows, Nancy Spungen was dead of a single stab wound to the abdomen, and Sid Vicious had been arrested for her murder. Within six months, Vicious, too, would be dead. DeVille later died of a heroin overdose. But however unsavoury or unstable some of these characters were, Scott Gorham dismisses the notion that Lynott was not master of his own destiny. ‘I liked those guys,’ says Gorham. ‘When you latch on to a group of guys who are doing those kinds of professional drugs, you’re going to fall into it, too, and we both did. But trying to keep up with Philip was impossible. He could out-drink you, out-drug you, out-womanize you. It was scary. I think it was [a case of] other people trying to keep up with him, rather than the other way around.’
The Greedy Bastards reconvened on 16 December 1978 at the Electric Ballroom, and then flew to Ireland for an end-of-term blow-out. When they attended the Hot Press Christmas party at McGonagle’s on 19 December, appearing alongside Thin Lizzy and the two former Sex Pistols were members of the Vipers, the Boomtown Rats, Revolver, as well as Noel Bridgeman and Brush Shiels. U2 were there that night too, ahead of supporting the Greedies at their upcoming shows in the Stardust Ballroom in Artane.
‘Phil was a big star, he carried himself with a certain swagger and elegance, the like of which I’d never seen before,’ said Bono. ‘But there were knowing glances between them which disturbed me, without my understanding what they were … One of the Greedy Bastards came off stage, walked straight through the door, threw up into the [dressing] room, and then immediately walked back on stage. There was a mood around them that was so far from our mood.’2
U2 were still a baby band, naive and idealistic, yet they were not the only ones who were aware that the atmosphere around Lynott had changed. ‘By then it wasn’t quite the same,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘I felt there was the influence of something else going on. At one point Philip took me away from the madding crowd. I said, “Jeez, things are flying for you,” and he confided something. He said, “Yeah, but I can’t get a buzz. I can’t get a buzz … I’m even trying heroin.” I was slightly taken aback. I didn’t quite start lecturing him, but I said, “Ah Jesus, Philip, there’s no need for that.” It was a strange conversation … It was almost like he had to boast that he was moving to another level.’
‘Was he into smack because he liked smack, or was he into it because he thought there was something cool about it?’ says Chris Salewicz. ‘I was never certain, and I maybe thought slightly the latter.’ Eric Bell shrugs. ‘He just enjoyed it. He enjoyed getting smashed, and after a while it was as if he couldn’t get out of it enough.’
An incessant, insatiable quality to Lynott’s appetites became more apparent to those close to him at this time. ‘He couldn’t be satisfied,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. In a new song, ‘With Love’, Lynott sang, ‘This roving Casanova’s days are over… more or less.’ The caveat showed a degree of self-awareness. ‘I think [sex] just became another addiction,’ says Chris Salewicz.
Lynott had been one of the judges at the Miss World 1978 contest, held on 16 November at the Royal Albert Hall and televised live. Thin Lizzy were working on the Black Rose: A Rock Legend album in Good Earth with Tony Visconti. They watched the show in the studio. ‘There were shots of him winking at the winner,’ Visconti recalls with a laugh. ‘It was so funny. He claimed when he came back that he’d had Miss Brazil in either the men’s room or the ladies’ room. I wouldn’t have put it past him. He probably did – but if he didn’t, he had to say that he did.’
He would complain about American women on tour because they made it all too easy. ‘I miss the old hunt and kill, I really do,’ he said. ‘I like to feel, okay, I’m getting here, but I got here by my own route.’3 He could be notoriously predatory around other people’s girlfriends, a fact confirmed by Midge Ure, Bob Geldof and Tony Visconti, among others. Graham Parker recalls an occasion on the US tour of 1977 when Parker’s companion flew in from Los Angeles to spend time with him. She came along to the soundcheck for that night’s show. ‘She was pretty hot-looking,’ he says. ‘She walked in and Phil’s eyes were like, I want that. I felt a certain pissed-off feeling from him that she was actually with me. I thought, he’s really jealous. Why? He’s had more women than I’ve had hot dinners. It was the conquest thing. There was a feeling that if he didn’t get a girl, he seemed a bit depressed.’
‘I didn’t understand,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘You can’t say Philip wasn’t loved. His granny adored him, the women in his family were very strong. He had Carole and Gale, and then Caroline – three amazing, beautiful women, who really cared about him and were no bimbos. But there were plenty of other bimbos. He had a need to go further. It was like he was verifying himself.’
In the space of twenty-four hours on 19 December 1978, the Greedy Bastards played McGonagle’s and Lynott became a father. Caroline Crowther gave birth to their daughter, Sarah Philomena Lynott, in the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, Dublin. While marriage was not considered necessary, some traditions were to be observed. The child had to be born in Ireland, and would be raised as a Catholic. ‘I remember on the night Sarah was born, you could not have been around a more proud father,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘He carried around a box of cigars. We were going down Grafton Street, and we hit every bar and everybody got a cigar. She really tugged at his heartstrings in a huge way. He loved her so much it was unbelievable, and right away he wrote that captivating little song about her.’
That sweetheart song, ‘Sarah’, was eventually included on the new Thin Lizzy album, recorded either side of Christmas, at Pathé Marconi in Paris and at Good Earth in Soho. The only Thin Lizzy album to feature Gary Moore, it is also the last Thin Lizzy album to truly be worthy of the name.
PART THREE
Sun Goes Down
14
‘I always think that something was lost,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘I’m not quite sure what.’
In December 1976, Lynott had participated in the recording of Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds. Taking on the dramatic role of Parson Nathaniel, he contributed hoarse, hammy theatrics to ‘The Spirit of Man’, a lengthy duet with Julie Covington. Finally released in July 1978, the album has since sold over 2.5 million copies in the UK alone. It was far from Lynott’s finest hour, but its commer
cial success may have solidified the idea of a career outside of Thin Lizzy.
When Lynott signed a solo album deal in 1978, it changed the way he wrote and the way he functioned within the band. Of some 500 unreleased Thin Lizzy tracks recovered by Universal Music Group in recent years, an unusually high proportion were recorded in 1978 and 1979. Where in the past the band had set aside a block of time to record a new album as a discrete entity, now that focus became blurred. Lynott envisioned a rolling series of sessions drawing on a pool of musical talent, then cherry-picking the best of the results for whatever project they most suited.
‘It was always, “Let’s go to the studio, let’s do something!”’ says Mark Nauseef. ‘We cut tons of stuff. Bahamas, London, Dublin, Memphis. He had so many ideas. It was like a laboratory. He was always experimenting, stocking up tracks.’
Although Lynott’s first solo album, Solo in Soho, would not be released until April 1980, its influence began to assert itself during the recording of the next Thin Lizzy record, Black Rose: A Rock Legend. Two songs – ‘Sarah’ and ‘With Love’ – featured Jimmy Bain, Huey Lewis and Nauseef. They were recorded during sessions that did not feature certain members of Thin Lizzy. Written by Gary Moore, with words by Lynott celebrating the arrival of his daughter, the joyful, unashamedly sentimental ‘Sarah’ was recorded in London at the same time as Moore’s first solo album, Back on the Streets, to which Lynott contributed heavily. Another song on Back on the Streets, the bruised bolero ‘Parisienne Walkways’, was started at the same sessions and later finished while Thin Lizzy were recording Black Rose.
It was a preview of how things would often work from now on. Although Lynott’s solo deal was not a source of friction within the band per se, the methodology caused a slow bleed. ‘I thought it was a good outlet, because he was getting a little bit frustrated,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘He had stuff he couldn’t play with us and he wanted to do it on his own. I encouraged him, and I played on a lot of tracks on those albums and I was more than willing to do it.’
Despite Gary Moore’s claim that ‘Philip wanted to be Rod Stewart’, Scott Gorham insists that ‘Thin Lizzy was always, always number one for Phil’. He was, by nature, more pack leader than lone wolf. ‘But what was confusing was that some of those tracks ended up on Lizzy albums, and some on the solo stuff,’ says Downey. ‘It was never cut and dried, and that chipped away at the band a bit.’
Another contributory factor to Thin Lizzy’s at first gradual, then increasingly swift descent from the peak of Live and Dangerous was drug-induced. Gary Moore was working with Thin Lizzy in the studio for the first time as they laid down the basic tracks of Black Rose in Paris. Moore had cleaned up his act, relatively speaking, and was frustrated almost from the start of the sessions at what he perceived as a general slackness within the group. He noted how Lynott would often struggle to get into the studio, and when he did his bass sometimes seemed out of tune. The singer could take hours to complete a finished vocal, and was eager to knock off early to visit the newly opened Le Palace nightclub in Faubourg Montmartre, Paris’s notoriously excessive answer to Studio 54. The patrons opened up one of its VIP rooms to the band and their retinue.
The environment was not a wholly healthy one for Lynott. ‘Black Rose was when [our drug use] became totally professional,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘In Paris the dealers were beating the door down – and of course, we let them in, which was just madness. I remember Cliff Richard was recording in the same studio, and Phil said, “Come on, let’s drag over Cliff and see what he thinks.” So we sat Cliff in front of the desk and right behind him there’s this fucking drug dealer chopping out a line of smack. I’m looking at Cliff and, God bless him, he didn’t look over his shoulder one time, he doesn’t even acknowledge that this guy is even in the room. But I thought, this has got to be uncomfortable for him.’
A defining snapshot of the sessions was the image of Lynott singing ‘Got to Give It Up’ in the studio. It was a song in which he blurred the lines between fact and fiction, casting himself as the beautiful loser ‘sinking slow’, a man already lost to alcohol who is ‘now messing with the heavy stuff.’ Deliberately close to the bone, it played a flirtatious game of truth or dare with the listener. When Lynott wasn’t relating his bad habits with a kind of grim pride, he sounded a little frightened. In the studio, he sang ‘Got to Give It Up’ with a joint in one hand and a brandy in the other, snorting lines of cocaine between takes. ‘I’m sitting next to Visconti,’ says engineer Kit Woolven. ‘Tony was no angel at the time, either, but he turns to me and goes, “Got to give it up? I can’t work with this fucking hypocrite!” I think that’s highly amusing, actually. It’s rock ‘n’ roll, isn’t it?’
The song returned to the dubious manifesto of ‘Warriors’ three years previously. ‘I don’t condone drugs, really, but I know why artists take drugs,’ Lynott said, explaining the ‘honest contradictions’ of ‘Got to Give It Up’. ‘Why do people climb mountains? To go to the edge. People always want to go to extremes, and if you go to the edge, you must be prepared to fall off. And lots of guys have. Well, some people don’t need it at all – but seemingly all the artists that I rate have, one way or another, gone to the extremes. Some made it back and wrote about that experience, and others didn’t.’1
‘Honestly Philip wasn’t really any different to [how he had been] on Bad Reputation and Live and Dangerous,’ says Tony Visconti. ‘He was ill, though. There were a couple of days when he couldn’t get out his hotel room and he’d just stay in bed. Charlie [McLennan] would come in with chicken soup, and Phil refused to see a doctor. I told him I was worried about his health and that he looked like shit, and that he should stop whatever he was doing. He’d be sheepish and promise not to hit it too hard, but it’s a hard call to make. The drug of choice was still cocaine, and there were copious amounts of it in Paris. People were doing cocaine openly. If they were doing heroin I’m sure that was covert. I didn’t see it, but it would explain his poor health.’
Heroin is an analgesic. Brian Downey was not alone in feeling that Lynott was starting to sink under the pressure of keeping all the balls in the air. He was also missing his girlfriend and daughter. ‘He was very, very lonely after he met Caro and he was [away from home],’ says Chalkie Davies. In Paris, sometimes he talked to Caroline for so long on the telephone he would fall asleep and wake up the next day still connected to Kew Road.
Black Rose: A Rock Legend was released on 14 April 1979, midway through Thin Lizzy’s British tour. It was their second number-two record in a row, and though lacking a certain vital spark of inspiration, it contains some of Lynott’s most concise and direct songwriting. The irrepressible ‘Waiting for an Alibi’ gave the band their biggest hit since ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, a song it seemed consciously to mirror. ‘Do Anything You Want To’ – glam-rock meets New Wave meets Lynott’s Elvis Presley impersonation – was another top-twenty single. Attitudinal and aspirational, it aimed a swipe at the critics ‘who proceed to blindly criticise you for not doing what they think you ought to be doing,’ a theme which was becoming a regular Lynott beef.2
The rest was a mixed bag. ‘S & M’ was throwaway funk, and a further example of Lynott’s desire to take a walk on the sleazy side; as well as the potions and powders of ‘Got to Give It Up’, ‘Toughest Street in Town’ talked of ‘taking smack’. The vulnerable open-heartedness of ‘Sarah’, with its light, Stevie Wonder-like jazz lines and major-sevenths, was an anomaly. If fatherhood had relocated the whereabouts of Lynott’s sweet spot, it had also made him more intolerant. ‘With having the kid now I’m far more protective,’ he said. ‘It’s making me twice as quick to go off the mark with the temper … as well as making me very soppy.’3 Henceforth, these emotional extremes were carried through into his songwriting, which became increasingly polarized: Thin Lizzy was for the rough stuff. His solo albums for the lighter and more reflective material.
The album’s title track ‘Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Le
gend’ was Lynott’s final stand as the great Celtic-rock romantic. It was inspired by the poetic symbol of the black rose, the ‘dark Rosaleen’, the female figure who personified Ireland in its times of need against its oppressors. The opening minutes are the equal of anything from Jailbreak or Johnny the Fox in terms of sheer scale and power. The musical battery is warlike, as Lynott summons up familiar friends: the ancient kings and queens of Ireland, and Cúchulainn, the man who would ‘fight and always won’. The Troubles had worsened as the 1970s wore on, but still Lynott wanted to hear only ‘the legends of long ago’. Halfway through its seven minutes, ‘Róisín Dubh’ switches to a turbo-charged ceilidh, stitching together snippets of ‘Shenandoah’, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘The Mason’s Apron’. Later, there are references to ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. It is another song about songs; a story about stories.
During the long fade, Lynott sums up the track’s mix of monumental grandeur and extreme eccentricity by reeling off a list of terrible puns: the Joy of Joyce; William Butler Waits; Oscar, he’s going Wilde; Brendan, where have you Behan?; George, he knows Best; Van is the Man.
‘Róisín Dubh’ was Gary Moore’s crowning achievement in Thin Lizzy. His arrangement of the disparate musical elements was technically adroit, and his playing mighty. It was all downhill from there. A handful of dates into Thin Lizzy’s summer tour of the US, following a festival show on Independence Day 1979 at Oakland Stadium in San Diego, Moore disappeared.
‘He just left, like Eric Bell left,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘In fact, it was even worse because he left us in the middle of America, and nobody knew where the hell he was. There’s no forgiving people leaving halfway through a tour. You don’t do that. It really left us in a fix.’ The slight was made worse when, upon surfacing, an unrepentant Moore publicly claimed that Thin Lizzy were a band who were no longer fit to perform.
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