His sensibilities were highly attuned to visual stimuli. Just as he was turning fifteen, in the summer of 1964, the Beatles’s A Hard Day’s Night had screened in the Star Cinema. He went with Michael O’Flanagan. ‘It was ground-breaking because it was just a load of guys acting the bollix,’ says O’Flanagan. ‘It didn’t have a proper narrative and didn’t set out to be serious. Philip was very taken with that.’
Lynott later proposed that the Black Eagles embark on their own mini-movie. The owner of a Rolleiflex camera and a Bolex D8L 8mm cine-camera, O’Flanagan was carving out a niche filming and photographing many of the Dublin beat groups of the mid-1960s. For this project he was enlisted as cinematographer. Lynott appointed himself director.
They shot mock fight scenes around several local landmarks: the old police station, the cottages of Crumlin Village, the open spaces of Mooney’s Field. There was some rudimentary technical trickery involved in a shot in which the entire band appeared to enter a telephone box without anyone getting out. Later, the group was shown pounding on the door of a locked Moeran Hall. This smart and inclusive shot is the first example of Lynott knowingly finessing a crowd; when the film was shown some weeks later while the Black Eagles were playing at the venue, the place went wild. Another moment suggests a more poetic aesthetic at work. A stone is dropped into a puddle and we watch the ripples slowly disperse, a visual non sequitur denoting a change of scene.
Mostly his life revolved around music: playing it, listening to it, talking about it, dancing to it. On the nights when he wasn’t performing, Lynott would be in the clubs and local discos. His time-keeping was the only real source of dissention at 85 Leighlin Road. ‘Sometimes he was a little fucker,’ recalled Peter Lynott. ‘If we were to be home at eleven o’clock, he could stay out until one or two in the morning and we’d be waiting up for him. He was rebellious in that way, coming in late.’6 Mostly, however, he was ‘a lovely kid’, according to Timothy Lynott. ‘You never wanted to chastise him too much because he was so gentle.’7
After Frank Lynott’s death in 1964, it was Lynott’s older uncle Timothy who assumed, reluctantly, the role of patriarch. Timothy would insist that he be back by ten or eleven o’clock, and then sigh and summon up the required dose of censure when his rules were ignored. It is Lynott’s uncle who is ‘the father’ in ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’, Thin Lizzy’s breezily soulful hit of 1977, and one of Lynott’s most charming hymns to his carefree teenage days. ‘I should have took that last bus home, but I asked you for a dance,’ he sings, recalling one of any number of nights when his head was turned by a pretty girl. ‘And my father he’s going crazy, he says I’m living in a trance.’ By the last verse, predictably, the lesson has not been learned.
It’s three o’clock in the morning
I’m on the streets again
I disobeyed another warning
I should have been in by ten
On occasions when Timothy was successfully duped or placated, Sarah would have to be negotiated. ‘Sometimes when we were coming home late from clubs, we would sneak into his house at two in the morning and I’d stay overnight,’ says Frank Murray. ‘We’d have to wait until his grandmother went out the following morning, because he didn’t want her to know he had me staying over. She’d worry that he was staying out late.’
Timothy Lynott was the only person at 85 Leighlin Road working full-time, in a flour mill, and he spent a good proportion of his earnings on music. ‘I bought one or two LPs a week, but when I got them home Philip and his friends would spend all day listening to them.’8
Lynott was fortunate. His uncle had good, broad tastes, encompassing everything from Mose Allison to the Who, folk to blues, the Mamas and the Papas to Tamla Motown; and later, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cream, Steppenwolf. ‘Timmy had an incredible collection of music,’ says Paul Scully. ‘We used to mitch off of school and we’d go to Philip’s granny’s house and play vinyl all afternoon, just sit on the floor and listen to the music. It was pre-drugs, pre-sex, really, pre- any of that. We were just cool guys hanging out together, all obsessed with music.’
To Timothy’s collection of albums Lynott began to add his own purchases. ‘Philip actually got a copy of the first Mothers of Invention album, Freak Out!, the original with the blue cover, in 1966,’ says Scully. ‘Alongside that he’d be playing Frank Sinatra’s Capitol albums. Sinatra would have been so uncool in those days because your parents would have been listening to him, but Philip didn’t care if it was cool or not. He was absorbing influences from all over. He’d be playing Buddy Guy, B. B. King and Muddy Waters, the Byrds and that psychedelic West Coast sound. He was into the Velvet Underground when nobody had heard of them. He had the first Simon & Garfunkel record. He had hugely diverse and eclectic tastes. He had a great antenna. We were like sponges, and he was really open to exploring.’
Brian Downey was part of their social group, and he would also spend hours at Leighlin Road, cycling from his home on Cashel Avenue, often with an armful of his father’s jazz records. Eddie Vinson’s ‘Kidney Stew Blues’, Oscar Brown Junior’s ‘When I Was Cool’ and other cool cuts were added to the melting pot of music.
They often hung around the Snack Bar, a little café wedged between a chip shop and the Apollo cinema in Walkinstown. Lynott would order a Fanta or a hot chocolate and shoot the breeze with his friends. It was the closest the area came to sophistication.
‘There was always a group of hard “chaws” hanging around looking for a fight,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. ‘We were lower middle-class lads interested in music and film and stuff like that, but these lads were tough nuts. They’d walk past and pick a fight. Somebody would get a box, someone would get a kick. Some of these guys would carry a hatchet in their pocket. We were a bit scared of them, but Philip didn’t give a fuck. He wasn’t a bit afraid of them. He’d give them a dig back, no problem. There was that side to him, too. He could handle himself if it turned to a fight, but he didn’t spend a lot of time fighting, and he didn’t go around picking fights.’
In common with many local teenagers, Lynott tried boxing, going for trials in the National Stadium, a mile down the road towards central Dublin. ‘I think people thought, “Hey, there’s a black guy, he’s probably a great boxer,”’ says Frank Murray. ‘He wasn’t. He always told me it wasn’t good, what happened in the stadium.’ Lynott’s priority was to preserve his looks rather than put up a fight, although the experience served to further clarify his options. ‘There were two ways of making it back in Crumlin,’ he recalled. ‘You were either a tough guy who thumped everybody around and pulled the chicks that way, or you played in a band. Not wanting the bruises, and being a bit of a coward at heart, I decided to sing in a band.’9 In doing so he found a means of continuing to indulge tough-guy fantasies and channelling his aggression without, at least most of the time, getting a smack in the mouth.
Later in Lynott’s life there were claims made for his prowess as a footballer, even a suggestion that it might have provided him with an alternative career path. Peter Lynott recalls him playing in goal, but by all accounts he wasn’t particularly good at the sport or terribly interested. ‘He couldn’t kick a ball to save his life,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Entirely uncoordinated. He didn’t grow up following football or anything like that. He only caught the soccer bug when he started following Manchester United around the mid-1970s.’ Peter Fallon and Jim Fitzpatrick once convened a local football team they nicknamed Energy Reserves, which would meet for a kick around in the local park. ‘Philip wanted to come, but he turned up in his cowboy boots and new jeans, and he thought he might get them dirty,’ says Fallon.
Lynott lived in the everlasting now of adolescence. It was not an age, nor an era, for soul-baring. Privately, Lynott did not discuss at all the years before he arrived in Crumlin, and only rarely would he talk about his parents and his unusual domestic set-up. In time the questions of who he was and where he originated receded into the background, for those who knew him and
perhaps even for Lynott himself. ‘I used to look at him and think, where did he come from?’ says another friend from the 1960s, Fran Quigley. ‘We would have thought that he was an orphan, but I’d never ask him. I can’t remember anyone making such a conversation. Why would they? We were young, we just went with it.’
His youthful feelings towards his mother were ambivalent. ‘Philip never got on with his mother in the early days,’ says Hugh Feighery. ‘He had a problem with her, in so much as he felt hard done by. Even though when she came to visit he’d get stuff that other kids wouldn’t get, it didn’t really compensate for the mental trauma it caused. He certainly had hang-ups about that … In his formative years he felt [abandoned].’
During Thin Lizzy concerts, Lynott would introduce ‘Wild One’ as ‘a song about running away’. It’s an Irish song, alluding to the nation’s complex dance with exile, and in particular the fate of the Wild Geese, the 30,000 Irish soldiers who left to serve in continental Europe following the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. It would take a tin ear and a particularly hard heart, however, not to also hear it as a deeply personal song from a son to his free-spirited mother who had first run away from Ireland, and then – as the child in Lynott couldn’t help but perceive it – from him.
Wild one, won’t you please come home
You’ve been away too long, will you
We need you home, we need you near
Come back wild one, will you
How can we live without your love?
You know that could kill you
How can we carry on?
When you are gone, my wild one …
So you go your way wild one
I’ll try and follow
And if you change your mind
I will be waiting here for you tomorrow
For I would beg for you
I would steal and I would borrow
I’d do anything, anything at all
To end this sorrow
The candour of his comments to Hugh Feighery was unusual. As he grew older, Lynott was far less forthcoming on the subject. ‘I was only aware that his mother was working in England and his granny was looking after him,’ says Paul Scully. ‘I never questioned it. There was none of that modern idea of going to see a psychiatrist about your hang-ups or your long lost family. He may have internalized it, but there were no long conversations.’
Had his friends felt sufficiently emboldened to quiz Lynott, this is what he might have told them: his mother was still living in Manchester, and he saw her only rarely. Having endured a tough few years, in 1964 Philomena Lynott had begun what became a long, settled and loving relationship with a local man called Dennis Keeley, two years her junior. They set up home together in a flat in Didsbury, and in 1966 they took over the management of a rundown hotel in Manchester’s Whalley Range district, two miles south of the city centre. The area was separated from Moss Side to the east by the busy Princess Road, where Lynott had attended school only a few years earlier.
At the time Whalley Range was a byword for seedy neglect, a red-light district typified by unkempt tenements and once-elegant Victorian villas converted into shabby bedsits. Its atmosphere of down-at-heel disrepair was later captured by Morrissey in the Smiths’ ‘Miserable Lie’: ‘What do we get for our trouble and pain? Just a rented room in Whalley Range.’ In the 1980s, the German singer Nico, once of the Velvet Underground, lived a rather diminished existence in the same area.
The Clifton Grange Hotel, at 17 Wellington Road, was a roomy Victorian house that had seen better days. It was less a conventional hotel and more bed-and-breakfast digs, aimed at long-term tenants who were known, only somewhat euphemistically, as ‘show-business clientele’ – cabaret musicians, nightclub turns, drag acts, strippers, showgirls, comedians and dancers. It was about as far from Crumlin as Philomena Lynott could have travelled – which presumably was the whole point.
In short order, Lynott’s mother went from manager to co-owner to outright owner of the establishment, which she created in her own lively, eccentric image. Once she had settled and found her feet, from his late teens Lynott would visit and stay at the hotel. In the mid-1960s, however, there was still a distance – physical and emotional – and much left unspoken. Lynott saw Philomena perhaps once or twice a year, when she came over to Dublin, an event which had all the pomp and ceremony of a royal visit. She would stay not at Leighlin Road but at the homes of older siblings. Various younger Lynotts would get the day off school and be taken shopping for beautiful clothes that their parents would disapprove of. She would arrive with a fashionable item for her son – a good shirt, a cool leather jacket – and take him out for tea at the Coffee Inn on South Anne Street or Sheries Café on Abbey Street. Sometimes his girlfriend Carole Stephen was invited along.
‘She was terribly interested in me, asking all sorts of questions,’ says Stephen. ‘She was lovely to look at – very tall, hair up in a bun, very elegant. She’d bring Philip something really nice, and he loved that, but he didn’t really know his mother in those days. I wouldn’t say she was vastly important in his life at all. He adored his gran, Sarah. He loved her and was always quoting her.’
His mother did not set him down to explain the exact details of his paternity. Cecil Parris was not a fully fleshed out figure in Lynott’s mind. He didn’t even know his name. Instead, he was drip-fed snippets of information, not all of it necessarily accurate. Lynott’s feelings towards his father were a mixture of confusion, hurt, bitterness and defiance. ‘I’d ask him about his dad and he’d say he didn’t know who he was,’ says Hugh Feighery. ‘He’d say he was a seaman, that’s all. Sometimes he used to say he was a black bastard. A big black bastard. That’s what he was calling him, but it wasn’t a subject that he would be too happy to be discussing. He had a complex about it to a degree, I would say.’
Entering his mid- and late teens, and into adulthood, Lynott became increasingly emotionally guarded. ‘Most of the time he kept his feelings wrapped up,’ says Frank Murray. ‘I think his mother played a part in making him tough in that way; not to show his feelings too much, in case that was perceived as a weakness. He would say odd things about his dad, but never anything deep … Phyllis didn’t actually go, “Let me tell you a bunch of things about your father.” She told him she didn’t know where he came from, that they’d had a relationship and they’d split up.’
In the absence of hard facts, he formed a romanticized portrait of his father. He believed that he was originally from either Brazil or the Caribbean. He learned that he was nicknamed ‘The Duke’ and that he had charm and an easy way with women. ‘It all seemed a bit exotic, and he liked that,’ says Murray.
‘We heard he was a tap dancer,’ says Paul Scully, laughing. ‘That’s all we ever heard! This very exotic idea that his father was a Caribbean tap dancer who wore very snazzy suits, hence Philip was a very snazzy dresser. He built up these images, depending on what Phyllis had or hadn’t told him.’
Those close to him felt that his paternity was a source of nagging curiosity, rather than a gaping absence. It would flare up from time to time. ‘I think he went through stages with it,’ says Frank Murray. ‘I don’t think he was looking for the father, I think he accepted the fact that he was in a great family situation. He was brought up in a really loving family, by his grandmother and his uncles.’
Lynott did not give the impression of being a young man living under a cloud of angst and abandonment. He was heartbroken when his grandfather died, but otherwise he was a young man who appeared to be having the time of his life.
‘Philip was a very, very happy guy, and a very funny person,’ says Frank Murray. ‘He was one of the funniest guys to be around, and it was infectious. Life was just funny for us. We were all very quick-witted, everyone was great with one-liners and nobody took anything too seriously. There were lots of verbal put-downs, and someone would shoot back with something equally barbed.
‘We never moaned about being depressed, or about havi
ng broken up with our girlfriend. Everything was a laugh. The “sixties” had come along, we’d got out of the sepia 1950s, and life was Technicolor. There was a great sense of freedom and discovery. We were finding out about writers, musicians … and film-makers, broadening our horizons. That was enough to keep anyone busy.’
4
In September 1967, Lynott received an unannounced house call from Brendan Shiels. Known to one and all as ‘The Brush’ in honour of his bold cultivation of long hair and moustache, Shiels was the former bass player in the Uptown Band, a Dublin flower-power outfit which served as a breeding ground for several significant Irish groups. Other members of the band went on to play in the Chosen Few, Granny’s Intentions and Elmer Fudd.
A straight-talking twenty-two-year-old from Cabra West in Dublin, Shiels knew what he wanted – fame; money; respect – and wasn’t shy about grabbing it. He was also ‘an extraordinary bass player,’ says Eric Bell. ‘He was into virtuoso stuff. Really knew what he was doing.’ Shiels was on the lookout for a singer for his new group, Skid Row, to play alongside drummer Noel Bridgeman and guitarist Bernard Cheevers.
Lynott was a free agent. With a certain inevitability, the Black Eagles had fizzled out. One of their final shows was at Moran’s Hotel in Dublin on 28 April 1967. ‘It was really the stepping stone for us all to become a bit more experienced,’ says Brian Downey, who went off to join a new blues band called Sugar Shack, having declined Shiels’s offer to join Skid Row. ‘We wanted to be the best beat group in the area, and I think we became that in the end.’
Cowboy Song Page 5
