Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  In some respects, Lynott still resembled the restless soul who tried on every style for size in late-sixties Dublin. Even in extremis, his curiosity remained sharp. Only days before he fell ill, he recorded two songs co-written with a young Yorkshire guitarist, Steve Johnson, called ‘Revolution’ and ‘No More’. He finally completed production on the Clann Éadair album, though it would never be released, while he honoured a personal commitment to watch a new young Irish group, Hothouse Flowers, play at the Magic Carpet pub in Foxrock, south Dublin, on Easter Sunday. The Celtic-soul band were unsigned but his cousin Monica sang with them sometimes, and Lynott was interested in their story. After the show they all went back to his aunt’s house.

  Through May and June 1985 he was busy working with Gary Moore. Lynott had been reconciled with Moore in 1983, following a four-year estrangement, after they had bumped into one another at Heathrow Airport. Moore had subsequently participated in Thin Lizzy’s farewell shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, and at the end of 1984 Lynott had joined him on stage in Belfast and Dublin. As they started socializing again, Moore got to know Lynott’s daughters. ‘He’d say to me, “Come on around, Gary, the kids are here,”’ Moore recalled. ‘They’d do little dances on the window ledge and entertain us. They were really cute little girls.’

  Moore asked Lynott to contribute to a song he had written called ‘Out in the Fields’. ‘I went over to his house and we made a little demo of it on his eight-track,’ Moore said. ‘He’d come down about two hours late, with a spliff in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. That’s what Phil was like at that time. I knew him a long, long time, and he changed at the end … When Phil started out he was always the first in the studio and the last to leave. He was a bundle of energy. At the end he had gone downhill. I hated to see him like that.’

  They recorded the song near Kew, at Eel Pie Island Studios. Lynott bypassed his management and cut a direct deal with 10 Records, taking part for a one-off fee of £5,000, paid in cash. It was a maladroit piece of business that left Chris Morrison exasperated, particularly when the song became a sizeable hit. ‘Out in the Fields’ reached number five in the UK charts in June 1985, number three in Ireland, and number two in Norway and Sweden.

  Lynott’s contribution was rather more minimal than advertised. He sang two lines at the start of each verse, and contributed a brief spoken section. It was his idea to wear the crimson militarystyle jackets on the single sleeve and in the video. ‘Out in the Fields’ was a gnarly anti-war song that made reference to the ongoing violence in Moore’s native Northern Ireland. ‘At last you’ve come out and said something,’ interviewer Gaz Top told a whacked-out Lynott during a prickly satellite TV interview. Lynott bristled. ‘What do you mean, at last? I’ve been saying things all me bleedin’ life.’7

  Mark Nauseef had dinner with the pair in Hamburg while they were in the city to perform on the Rock Pop Music Hall programme. ‘It was the same old stuff,’ he laughs. ‘I could tell there was something going on between them. I didn’t even want to ask whose record it was! It was cool, we had fun, but I could see Philip’s vitality, his energy, was different.’

  The B-side of ‘Out of the Fields’ was Lynott’s own harrowing ‘Military Man’. When he played it live with Moore on Rock Pop Music Hall, it felt crushing. His confidence and playfulness, his engagement with the audience and the camera – it had all gone.

  When he sang ‘Mama, take a look at your boy, he’s dying’, it seemed horribly apposite. Sweating profusely in his military garb, at times Lynott appeared to be struggling to breathe. Heroin and cocaine clogged up his respiratory system and triggered his asthma, making him cough and wheeze dreadfully. He was not fat by any stretch of the imagination, but his pipe-cleaner frame now had a sizeable kink at the gut. ‘I remember seeing him with Gary and his bass was an extra foot away from him, sitting on this paunch,’ says Midge Ure. ‘That just wasn’t Phil. He was the archetypal skinny rock star.’

  His face had become waxy and bloated. His eyes were dulled and discoloured. He took to wearing sunglasses, previously a rock-and-roll trapping he would usually avoid, not least because those big, mother-me peepers were his first line of attack when it came to the opposite sex. Now he seemed reluctant to meet anyone’s gaze, as though to avoid seeing the expression fixed on the face of the person to whom he was talking. He would get dressed and ask younger friends if they thought he looked all right, a lack of sartorial confidence so at odds with his core character it was almost the most shocking change of all.

  Gale Barber was now Gale Claydon following her marriage in 1983, and was about to become a mother. She was producing music programmes at a new satellite station, Sky Channel, and met up again with Lynott after several years of non-communication when he appeared on a show called Sky Trax alongside Neil Murray, the bass player in Whitesnake. ‘The Philip I’d known was the vainest man on the planet,’ she said. ‘He would spend hours getting ready to go out, everything had to be exactly right, and the way he looked now was heartbreaking.’8 She confronted him about his drug use, but he denied it was a problem.

  Chris Salewicz bumped into him at an Ultravox party in a modish wine bar in central London. ‘I saw him in a terrible state,’ he says. ‘He looked okay when he arrived, then he went off to the toilet, and he came back just fucking green. He was nodding out, he had snot dripping out of his nose and he just let it curl around his hand … He was such a great, warm guy, to see him like that was ghastly. I just stared. I didn’t know what to do.’

  The last year of Lynott’s life was the first full year he had spent without being in a band since 1963. It meant more time at Kew Road. During the final few months Lynott’s young cousin Monica was living there, working as a teacher and keeping ‘normal’ hours. He did his utmost to ensure, not always successfully, that she was shielded from direct evidence of his excesses. Drawings and messages from Sarah and Cathleen were pinned up all over the house. Brian Robertson lived nearby and he would come around with Jesse Wood, the nine-year-old son of Ronnie Wood and Krissy Findlay, whom Robertson was going out with, and they would play with train sets. ‘They were close,’ says Robertson. ‘Jesse loved Philip, and he loved Jesse coming around.’

  These were rare elements of stability in an environment increasingly overrun by dealers, addicts and freeloaders. ‘I think there was a pathological fear of being alone,’ says Midge Ure. ‘He always had people around him, which was odd. Unfortunately at the end some of them were very dubious and fed his habits. A lot of hangers-on.’

  Gus Curtis had returned to Dublin and Charlie McLennan was no longer on the payroll, although he was still on the scene. Former Thin Lizzy roadie Liam Kelly was another regular presence. He later served a prison sentence for supplying Lynott with Class A drugs. Jimmy Bain was perhaps the most invasive influence. Living close by, Bain did not like to get high alone.

  Scores of others came and went. Lynott would pass people on the stairs of his own house and have no idea who they were. Young women from overseas would arrive and not leave; pushers, gofers, roadies and musicians moved in. Between bouts of socializing, Lynott sometimes retreated to his room for days, and spent long spells in bed. He ended up surrounded by people but very alone.

  The wretchedness of Kew Road seeped into the carpets and the curtains. It saddened and repelled those who had known him in happier, more innocent days. During the final period of Lynott’s life, many of his oldest friends had dispiriting encounters with him, where they struggled to equate the person in front of them with the various versions of the man they loved: the gentle poet; the dedicated, disciplined pro; the heroically vain swordsman; the ball of ideas and energy. Where did he go?

  Jim Fitzpatrick made a rare visit to Kew Road one morning while he was in London, and found a young woman lying comatose on the sofa, a crumbling cigarette burning the flesh on one hand. She had apparently been living on Lynott’s couch for several months. ‘They’d had sex and had been smoking heroin,’ he says. ‘It was a scene of s
qualor in a very beautiful house.’

  Lynott had not been to bed and seemed unperturbed. He and Fitzpatrick went into the garden to play football, and then came inside to have breakfast. ‘I had cereal, he had a bottle of claret. I kept checking on the girl. I thought she was gone, she looked as if she could die at any moment. It was really fucking disturbing. It never sat right with me. When I used to come over to Welbeck Mansions, the house would be spotless, the bins would be full of bottles and cigs and trash. He cleaned up, he was meticulous. That stopped. He changed big time. I thought, what the fuck is going on here?’

  Frank Murray was now managing the Pogues and Paul Scully was working as their sound technician. On St Patrick’s Day 1985, Lynott turned up with a bottle before the Pogues’s concert at the Clarendon, and promised to return for a guest spot on ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. He failed to show, and afterwards Murray, Scully and a boisterous Pogues’ touring party descended on the house. ‘Whenever I’d see him he’d run over and throw his arms around me, always,’ says Paul Scully. ‘It was great seeing him, but by this time he was a lonely man down at his big house in Kew on his own, surrounded by fellas who would call in just to do what he was doing.’

  When Lynott and Frank Murray came into contact, it was almost unbearably painful for them both. Neither man quite knew where to look. ‘It would be okay as long as there was just me and him there, or maybe one or two other people,’ says Murray. ‘Then somebody would inevitably turn up with smack and he’d be pretty useless after that. I would look at him and think, how the fuck did you get into this? Who are these freaks you’re hanging around with? It was like the house was infected. You felt like getting a broom and just clearing them out. He can’t get out of bed. You’d have to go up to the room and tell him, “You get up,” and he would. It was like he was guilty or something. He’d try to be all happy and clappy.’

  Lynott was injecting heroin into his toes and legs to avoid marking his arms, but to anyone paying close attention his addiction was blindingly obvious. He was taking cocaine almost constantly. He uttered dire warnings that his mother must never be told what he was doing, but the truth was written all over his face, his lifestyle and his songs. ‘The signs were there, we all knew it, but what do you do?’ says Chris Morrison. ‘I said, “If you ever need any help you just have to ask,” but he’d back off and be out the door. He didn’t want to know. You can’t talk sense to someone on smack. My advice from drug people in those days was to let him hit rock bottom and then ask for help.’

  When Scott Gorham had collapsed on stage from the effects of heroin in Portugal in 1982, he had been sent to rehab in a manner which had the scent of shame about it. ‘In that era, you weren’t manly if you went for help, and I think that was part of Phil’s mindset,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘I think he was bottling a lot of shit up and not letting people know exactly what was going on.’

  When confronted, occasionally Lynott would say he was going to kick everything and get healthy. More often, he either got angry or went into denial. Jim Fitzpatrick noticed that after being on the receiving end of a pep talk, Lynott would stop answering the phone to him. Sometimes several months would pass before he allowed contact to resume. True friends became alienated or could not get through. Like many others, Ted Carroll heard about his predicament and sighed. Brush Shiels lost heart. ‘He wouldn’t talk to me when he was overdoing it, he wouldn’t talk to a lot of us,’ he says. ‘And I have a limited amount of patience, which is not very nice.’

  They had their own lives to lead, careers to maintain, their own personal struggles and challenges. Life went on. Paul Scully noticed that, increasingly, Lynott would loop back to the past and talk ramblingly about the old days. ‘We were mates from fifteen, sixteen, and I think he was very nostalgic for that kind of innocent time,’ he says. ‘He was already king of the castle even then, everyone knew him and everyone recognized him walking down the street. He had a different kind of fame then, a lovely fame, more natural, and probably more rewarding than the false adulation that comes with being a rock star.’

  The fillip of ‘Out in the Fields’ was offset by Live Aid. The dual-venue, sixteen-hour charity concert was held on 13 July 1985 at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, in aid of Ethiopian famine relief. A live spin-off from the Band Aid single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ released at the end of 1984, Live Aid was organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure. No favours were granted. The boy who had collected for the ‘Black Babies’ wasn’t asked to participate in the Global Jukebox.

  ‘I think Geldof made a conscious decision not to involve Philip,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘People say, “He might have slurred his speech, he was overweight.” You don’t understand. When he put that guitar on, no matter how sick he might have been, he would have delivered in spades. I think that was a terrible, terrible shame.’

  Chris Morrison was a member of the Band Aid Trust and didn’t utter Lynott’s name as a prospective participant in the six months leading up to the concert. For Lynott, far worse than being deliberately side-lined was the implication that they had simply forgotten he existed.

  ‘To our dying shame neither Bob nor I even thought about asking Phil to put Lizzy together for Live Aid,’ says Midge Ure. ‘If he had been in a healthy state, that could have been the Queen moment for them – “The Boys Are Back in Town” at Wembley? Jesus, can you imagine? But it never crossed our minds, and we were both good friends of his. I think he would have felt absolutely betrayed by that. I think if we had done that, Lizzy would have reformed. Why didn’t we do it? Was it that psychologically we had given Phil up as gone? It’s something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.’

  Rock and roll was a winner’s game, and Live Aid was about global pulling power. Geldof was nothing if not a pragmatist. He was looking for superstars. If the concert had taken place between 1976 and 1979 then Thin Lizzy would legitimately have been on the bill. By 1985, they were just another decent but deceased rock band who had quit slightly beyond their sell-by date. Lynott spent part of that day visiting RTÉ studios in Dublin, where he donated a bass guitar for auction, which raised £900.

  Shortly afterwards, he was on holiday in Marbella with his two children and his mother when he met Irish nightclub-impresario Maurice Boland. They went for a drink, and Boland offered Lynott a booking at Disco Cuba, the local club he managed on the Golden Mile. He claimed that Lynott only agreed on the proviso that the club would contact the other members of Thin Lizzy and book them for the show. The Lookalikes’s Sean O’Connor received a call from Boland, and was told that Lynott wanted either O’Connor or Gary Moore to play lead guitar.

  In the end, Disco Cuba got Grand Slam redux rather than Thin Lizzy. Doish Nagle and Robbie Brennan were flown out, joining O’Connor (who brought Lynott’s bass) and Justin Clayton, a guitarist who played regularly with Julian Lennon. It was a strange set-up. The club was owned by three Glaswegian businessmen; the musicians were paid £1,000 cash and each given free and unlimited use of an apartment.

  The backline PA was rudimentary and there was no rehearsal time. Playing to a crowd of 700, Lynott didn’t get on stage until after three o’clock in the morning, by which point he and most of the musicians – as well as one well-known professional snooker player – had been rendered virtually insensible by cocaine. ‘He was off his trolley,’ says O’Connor. ‘How he got through the gig I’ll never know.’ They played an hour of Thin Lizzy’s greatest hits in severely deconstructed form. Despite the fact that Nagle and Clayton barely knew the songs, ‘it went off okay,’ says O’Connor. ‘The fact that it was Thin Lizzy material and Phil was singing them, we just about got away with it.’

  It would prove to be Lynott’s final concert, although he appeared at Gary Moore’s shows at Manchester Apollo on 23 September and the Hammersmith Apollo on 27 and 28 September 1985, performing ‘Out in the Fields’ and ‘Parisienne Walkways’. ‘That was it,’ said Moore. ‘I never saw him again after that. It was pretty
sad, actually. He said to me, “Gary, I’m going to kick this fucking drug habit, and I’m going to kick all the booze, and we’ll go out and we’ll play.” But it never happened.’

  Two days before the Manchester show, on 21 September, Lynott had been described in Kilmainham District Court in Dublin as a ‘drugs victim and a tragedy’ by his own brief. It was the latest in a line of several well-publicized busts. Lynott was often cavalier about ferrying drugs between England and Ireland, and he was caught in possession of cannabis, methadone and heroin, having been stopped and searched at Dublin Airport the previous May. He was fortunate that the presiding judge, Gillian Hussey, had a progressive view of not sending addicts to jail. ‘I am not going to do anything to hamper this man’s career,’ she said. ‘As long as he is only using these drugs himself and not giving them to others he is only destroying himself. I wish he would give them up.’

  ‘I’m notorious for being busted,’ Lynott said during a TV interview shortly afterwards. ‘But I am anti-drugs for other people. Like [Jimi] says, “Have you ever been experienced?” I wouldn’t advise people to do it.’9

  The very first song on the very first Thin Lizzy album had begun with Lynott reciting a poem. ‘The Friendly Ranger paused / And scooping a bowl of beans / Spreading them like stars / Falling like justice on different scenes.’ The last song he ever recorded began rather differently: ‘You want it rough? You got it rough / You want it tough? I’m tough / You want it mean? I’m mean / I’m bad / Nineteen.’

  Lynott’s first and only solo single for Polydor, ‘Nineteen’, was released on 6 November 1985. ‘Rubbish,’ declared NME in a review that was not so much scathing as tetchily dismissive. Although the single reached only number seventy-six in the UK charts, Lynott had a handful of promotional commitments to fulfil. He needed a drummer to perform the song on the Razzmatazz Christmas Special, a children’s television show filmed in Newcastle. He asked John Salter to call Brian Downey, who was surprised that Lynott hadn’t called himself, but happy to help.