Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  From the start, Lynott approached the idea of being the lead singer in a band with dedication. ‘Philip would insist every day after school, “Come on, I want to do a bit of practising, you get the guitar and I’ll sing,”’ says Feighery. ‘We literally went to school and then went straight back to his place. This was outside the standard practice we would do with the band. He lived it. He got a high when he sang, although he was a very shy person.’ Already, the notion of a career was crystallizing. He told Feighery, ‘I’m black, I’m Irish and I’m a bastard – if I don’t make it as a singer I’m never going to make it.’ ‘I knew I had something to offer,’ he later said. ‘I had a strong determination.’1

  The Black Eagles provided him with the archetypal musical apprenticeship. Between 1963 and 1967 Lynott learned his stagecraft performing at tennis and bowling clubs, community centres, skating rinks, church halls, teenage dances and schools, and after hours in many of the myriad of local cinemas, where the stage would be so narrow they had to be careful not to fall off.

  The devil’s music made a pact with God. They played Father Browne’s, St John of Gods and St Anthony’s Hall. They had a regular Tuesday spot at the Grove Hall in Clanbrassil Street, and a Sunday-night residency at St Paul’s Hall in Mount Argus, the tiny parochial church hall in Harold’s Cross where Lynott’s mother recalls first seeing her son sing on one of her visits home. ‘It was a beautiful monastery, and at the back of it there was a church hall where they used to run little concerts for everybody,’ she told me. ‘I knew he wouldn’t want me to go near him, and I snuck down there with my friend. The priest came out, he was like a Franciscan monk, and I stood behind him and I watched Philip come out on stage. I thought he was really good, and full of confidence.’

  ‘I’d see Philip in halls around Mount Argus and I was very impressed that he had guys who could play guitar with him,’ says Kevin Horan. ‘He wasn’t brash, but he wasn’t as shy as the rest of us were, and he obviously had plans for himself. They used to do “Blue Suede Shoes” and numbers by the Kinks. I thought it was great.’

  The repertoire was sixties orthodox, although Lynott would often push for something a little different: ‘Still I’m Sad’ by the Yardbirds rather than ‘For Your Love’; ‘Crying Time’ by Ray Charles. Little slivers of innovation slipped in alongside ‘World Without Love’ by Peter and Gordon and the latest songs by Manfred Mann, Billy J. Kramer, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and anything else in the top twenty. ‘We would just imitate,’ says Hugh Feighery.

  The Black Eagles would regularly perform on Sunday nights at Moeran Hall, a community building on the border of Walkinstown and Crumlin. ‘All the various beat groups from Dublin would come,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Because they were local the Black Eagles were favourites, they played there more than a lot of the other bands. I liked the songs they were doing – the Yardbirds, the Who, some R&B, a lot of the choice pop songs of the day – and Philip stood out. In some kind of naive way, people would assume that because he was black he was a great singer.’

  Lynott and Murray became fast friends, along with Paul Scully and Michael O’Flanagan, two other Walkinstown boys who had seen the group play at Moeran Hall. One night Lynott and Murray bumped into each other after a dance and ‘started walking home together. We started to discuss music, and we talked for hours and hours. I remember we stood outside my house and it just poured out of us. We had a lot in common about music and movies. That established our relationship, and we became great friends after that. He was just a regular teenager. He liked being in a band. His interests were music, girls, and movies. He didn’t think of himself as anything special.’

  Although the Black Eagles were essentially a local draw rather than a top name in the city, they regularly played prominent gigs in Dublin and around the country, supporting showbands and national touring acts. A modern continuation of the old dance bands, showbands were slick, professional ensembles numbering at least seven musicians and sometimes more, almost always with a brass section. They played the popular hits of the day and had the bigger, better ballroom circuit in Ireland sewn up. Typified by acts such as Joe Dolan and Dickie Rock’s Miami Showband, they had no great interest in playing original or especially innovative music. Their purpose was to dish up a reliable set menu for drinkers and dancers during a night out. It could provide a good living, if not a terribly creative one.

  Typically, showbands would play for between four and six hours, up to six nights a week. To lighten the load, they would often hire a group to play for the first hour to warm up the room. ‘One of the regular bands we used was the Black Eagles,’ says Robert Ballagh. The one-time bass player in the successful showband the Chessmen, Ballagh is now one of Ireland’s most acclaimed artists. ‘I don’t think Philip was remotely interested in the showband scene. Any young guy with creative energies had to gravitate to groups.’

  Nonetheless, the dance-hall circuit was expanding rapidly; a young group could make decent headway swinging on the coat-tails of bigger bands. The Black Eagles supported Belfast R&B group the Mad Lads on a Sunday night at the Bastille Club, a small ballroom attached to the Cliff Castle, a hotel in Dalkey, just south of Dublin. It was the first time that future Thin Lizzy manager Ted Carroll laid eyes on Lynott and his band. ‘They were excellent,’ says Carroll. ‘The Yardbirds, the Small Faces, a little bit of soul – Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. It wasn’t like, “Wow, we’ve got to hire these guys as soon as we can,” but they certainly took care of business. They were only youngsters, but they were quite professional.’ Carroll had never heard of the Black Eagles, which in itself illustrates the limits to their fame. ‘They got changed in the back of the Commer van,’ he recalls. ‘The back door opened and they all came trotting in with their instruments in their stage uniform.’

  In common with most bands of the day, the Black Eagles cultivated a unified look. They started out with black polo necks and Cuban heels and graduated to more flashy attire. The first time Frank Murray saw them, ‘Philip had a kind of sparkly jacket that seemed to come to his waist, like a Bolero outfit.’ He would sometimes wear a single glove, pre-empting Alvin Stardust and Michael Jackson by several years. When Carroll first saw Lynott at Dalkey, he and the rest of the band were wearing ‘black shirts and pale blue bell-bottom denim jeans with little brass bells sewn down the outer seams below the knee. Phil came jingling out of the van.’ Later, he would adopt a pared-back mod aesthetic: button-down shirts, silk ties, tonic suits and Chelsea boots. Tom Collins recalls photographing Lynott for a feature in the Evening Herald about new bands. ‘He had the strangest hairstyle,’ says Collins. ‘It looked to all intents and purposes like a helmet.’

  Keeping up appearances was a major part of the job description, on stage and off. It was a philosophy Lynott subscribed to his entire life. Being the lead singer of the Black Eagles offered the kind of opportunities he could use to his advantage. One made one’s own luck in Holy Ireland. Supporting showbands, Lynott was granted access to places that were otherwise off limits to regular under-eighteens. After he had played his set, he could head into the throng, soak up the attention and determine what fun could be found.

  ‘He had mini-celebrity status – “Look, there’s Philip!” – because he stood out like nobody’s business,’ says Feighery. ‘We had a good craic for our age. We had a very quick puberty, shall we say? There was great opportunity. I’m not saying you were riding [having sex], but you’d get girls wanting you to [walk] them home, and you’d get a feel. You had a great little life. At the time we were well ahead of ourselves. He lived for music and he loved singing and he loved women. That was 95 per cent of the time.’

  It was a rapid initiation into the ways of adulthood, and a certain lifestyle. Lynott fell in love with being part of a road band early in life. Like many first loves, he never quite got over it. ‘I believe in the rock culture,’ he said in 1976. ‘That is, spending six months of your life travelling to gigs and the other six months playing.’2

 
The Black Eagles were already playing three or four nights a week in Dublin. Perhaps once during the week and once on the weekend they would be booked further afield: Tramore in Waterford; Salthill in Galway; Dundalk in Louth; or Monaghan. The roads were awful and there were no twenty-four-hour roadside amenities out in the sticks. They would visit an all-night restaurant in Rathmines on their return to Dublin for something to eat before arriving home at two or three in the morning. Then up for school after a few hours’ sleep.

  It was physically wearing, and Lynott’s already lacklustre engagement with his studies fell even further by the wayside. Though not a dedicated troublemaker – by nature he was more of a people pleaser – he had little interest in school and would frequently ‘act the maggot’ in class to keep himself amused. One day he tapped Hugh Feighery on the shoulder and whispered, ‘Did I tell you, Hughie, I’m Lady Chatterley’s lover?’

  The Chatterley trial was a cause célèbre of the early 1960s. Penguin Books, the UK publishers of D. H. Lawrence’s classic and controversial 1928 novel, had recently been prosecuted in the wake of new British obscenity laws. Following the verdict of not guilty, a new edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in 1961. The novel had been in the news, and although it certainly wouldn’t have been on the CBS reading list, the unholy trinity of sex, profanity and notoriety ensured that it had popped up on Lynott’s radar.

  ‘I swear to God I had no idea who Lady Chatterley was, but I laughed,’ says Feighery. ‘One of the masters, Mr Carruthers, insisted that I share the joke with the class. He was one of the more lenient guys, rather than some of the Brothers who were vicious bastards. I resisted but he insisted, so I said, “Philip said he was Lady Chatterley’s lover.” Well! This was sacrilege in Ireland. A big to-do started and we were dragged into the headmaster’s office. We were actually expelled from school. Philip and I were walking home and we really didn’t care, we didn’t see the seriousness of the situation, but at home my mother met us. She was a very strong woman. She marched us back up to the office, and she went in with Brother Blake, who was the head man. I don’t know what happened in there, but when she came out we were back in school.’

  Not for long, in Lynott’s case. He left as soon as he was allowed, at the age of fifteen, and enrolled at Clogher Road Technical School, where he studied metalwork and woodwork for two years without any great enthusiasm.

  Life in the Black Eagles was also changing. In 1965, Brian Downey joined the group on drums. A fellow Crumliner and schoolmate, Downey was eighteen months younger than Lynott. ‘We had crossed paths a few times,’ he told me, ‘But I didn’t really know Philip too well until much later.’

  Downey’s father was a drummer in the local pipe band, and by the age of thirteen his son was playing in local groups the Liffey Beats and Mod Con Cave Dwellers. Already a terrific drummer, he was the taciturn type. Quiet and solid. ‘Brian hasn’t changed since day one,’ says Paul Scully. ‘A proper Dub: straight talking, no airs and graces, what you see is what you get. I’d say at times it was Brian who held the band together.’ He was the kind of musician easily overlooked from the outside, but who played an invaluable role within a band. ‘Brian Downey wasn’t a drummer, he was a musician who played the drums,’ says Eric Bell. ‘There is a difference.’

  The Mod Con Cave Dwellers had supported the Black Eagles one night at St Paul’s Hall, and Downey had impressed. Lynott invited him to try out for them. ‘We were looking for a drummer who could play a drum beat independent of the bass drum and the snare, and the best way we could tell that was to play “You Really Got Me” [by the Kinks],’ Lynott recalled many years later. ‘Brian Downey had seen us a few times, and we’d seen him. He came down and the minute he could play that beat he had the job. Plus, he had tom-toms, which the other drummer didn’t have.’3 Downey and Lynott became not just the rhythm section but the spine of Thin Lizzy – and great friends, although the hierarchy was established early on. ‘In the Black Eagles, he became the leader because he had the personality,’ says Downey. ‘He had a fairly domineering personality to say the least, he had a sense for leadership, and his musical judgement was always spot on. He picked the best songs for us to play, he had a great ear, and that carried on into Thin Lizzy as well. He definitely was the leader, no doubt about that.’

  Around the same time, Hugh Feighery also departed the Black Eagles, replaced on guitar by Alan Sinclair. Feighery and Lynott had been extremely close, but when the guitarist left the friendship dissolved abruptly. ‘I was disappointed that I didn’t get more support off of him,’ says Feighery. ‘We just drifted away from each other. We were thick mates from the age of eleven through to about sixteen, and those are pretty formative years. You go through a lot of life experiences in those delicate years, and we did it together.’

  In 1965 Lynott started seeing Carole Stephen, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Drumcondra, a more prosperous area on the other side of Dublin from Crumlin. She had gone with friends to a Sunday afternoon disco at the Flamingo Club on O’Connell Street where the Black Eagles were playing. Lynott spotted her from the stage – pale, very pretty, red-hair in ringlets and a distinctive sense of style – but didn’t make a move. When the show was over and Stephen had left, he passed on a message to Brian Downey’s girlfriend, and later wife, Terri O’Leary, who was a couple of years above Stephen at Maryfield College.

  ‘Terri came over at school the next day and said, “Philip, the singer, asked me would you come again next Sunday to the disco?”’ says Stephen. ‘Well, I did go, with my friends, and at the interval he came down, bought me a mineral, and asked me to dance. Then he said, “Would you like to come out with us next Wednesday?” He said us, so I thought he meant the band, but he actually meant with just him. Very Dublin. We ended up going to the movies, and that was the beginning of it.’

  Stephen was attracted to his air of vulnerability, always more immediately apparent, it seemed, to women rather than men. ‘He bent a little when he walked,’ she says. ‘He didn’t have the confidence to walk tall. He wasn’t able to. He was a very shy person until he got to know you. Even when he asked me out, he asked somebody else to do it!’ She was also struck by his looks and his ‘fabulous’ singing voice. ‘I used to say to Philip, “You should be singing this or that song, it would be fabulous for your voice” – all those soul ballads from the 1960s by the black American singers. The band knew it was me, giving out on what they should play, and it would drive them mad. He wasn’t striving to be a pop star when I knew him, he just loved playing music. He was amazing on stage. They weren’t flash places, but he was so charismatic, and such a wonderful voice.’

  They made a fashionable couple. Lynott with his thrift-shop chic, crew-neck jumpers, sheepskin coats and button-down shirts; she with her home-made dresses fashioned from remnants and sewn up at the back, her hand-crafted jewellery and huge bracelets, covered with vibrant material and transformed into earrings. Beauty on a budget. Lynott was living off money sent by his mother and the cash he earned from Black Eagles’ shows (although if Stephen came to see the band and couldn’t get a lift home in the van, he would often hand her his share of his ten-shilling fee for a taxi). He didn’t play guitar or bass and he wasn’t writing songs yet, but his creativity found other outlets. When his girlfriend was ill with tonsillitis he wrote her a poem, and he made her an iron identity bracelet at college with her name on it – a sign, she says, that ‘he clearly wasn’t doing the work he was supposed to be doing’. It was a physical relationship, but there was a youthful innocence to it. ‘We were going steady,’ says Stephen. ‘We went to the cinema a lot, there was nothing much else to do.’

  It was grey time – the Swinging Sixties hadn’t quite swung all the way over the Irish Sea – and Crumlin was a grey place. ‘Dreary,’ says Kevin Horan. ‘There wasn’t much money around and not many products available. We still had coupons for coal and milk and sugar.’ As with many modern housing developments, there was plenty of sculpted greenery and a fuss
y sense of order – but someone had forgotten to sketch in the details. There was a bingo hall, a boxing club and a few pubs, but even the incurably romantic Lynott later struggled to poeticize it. Crumlin was: ‘Green grass. A girl who used to live across the road. A gang of guys on the corner playing spinning the coin. Me gran.’4

  It would be a couple of years before the nightclub scene in Dublin took off and the music venues became licensed. Peter Lynott took Philip to the pub for his first pint at the age of fifteen, but it was not a regular occurrence. ‘I had my first drink with [Philip], in the Elbow Inn on Mary Street,’ says Carole Stephen. ‘I didn’t know what to have, and he said, “Have a Bacardi and coke.” Very classy! I couldn’t finish it.’ He would take the occasional cigarette, but he wasn’t a dedicated smoker.

  Cinema was Lynott’s other true passion outside of music and girls. He was a regular at the Star in Crumlin, the Apollo in Walkinstown and the Kenilworth in Harold’s Cross. He admired Vanessa Redgrave and Catherine Deneuve, and his favourite film was Casablanca. Movies presented an opportunity to imagine numerous paternal archetypes, as well as role models that he might aspire to emulate: the lothario, the gunslinger, the gypsy, the cowboy, the vagabond. If it’s not too fanciful to suggest that the Johnnies, Randolphs and Rockies who would come to inhabit so many of Lynott’s songs walked off the cinema screen and into his lyrics, neither is it entirely implausible that he plucked much of his own sense of deportment from the same source. He particularly loved Westerns. As a young boy he often dressed up in cowboy outfits to role play. It offered the same sense of release he later experienced writing songs and performing on stage.

  ‘I can get as heavily into what I’m doing as when I used to be a kid playing cowboys,’ he said in 1977. ‘When you’d be completely wrapped up in killing millions of Indians and just living this whole trip out: hiding behind rocks and trees and sneaking off to imaginary places. Anybody can be anybody in rock and roll. It allows for all these people to exist within it and live out their fantasies. I mean, I certainly do.’5