Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  After imitation came the need for innovation, perhaps even a tilt at self-expression. While the commitment of the other Black Eagles varied – some had threatened to elope with their girlfriends; others to the Army – Lynott was not a dabbler. After the band ended, he had started up a short-lived ‘West Coast’ group called Kama Sutra but – rather contradicting its name – it was over almost before it had begun. He was waiting to make his next move when Brush Shiels showed up.

  The Black Eagles had scarcely registered as a blip on Shiels’s radar, but he had heard good things about Lynott from the Uptown Band’s manager, Ted Carroll, the local impresario who had booked the group at the Bastille Club a year earlier. One night at Dublin club Sound City, another friend had tipped off Shiels about this ‘spade singer’ who – and this was the crucial part – ‘looks great’.

  Shiels and Carroll had duly attempted to recruit Lynott to the Uptown Band, but when they failed to make contact local singer Dick O’Leary was hired instead. The Lynott household had no telephone; on such prosaic domestic details potentially life-changing opportunities came and went. This time, having been unsuccessful in tempting another local singer, Peter Adler, to join Skid Row, Shiels was determined to get his man. One early autumn morning he took the number 22 bus from the other side of Phoenix Park and headed for Leighlin Road. ‘When Philip opened the door I knew he was the man for the job,’ he says. ‘It didn’t matter if he could sing or not, we could sort that out pretty easy. As far as I was concerned he couldn’t fail.’

  A born pragmatist, Shiels’s snap judgement was all about the cover rather than the book. He needed a singer who looked the part and could front the band; the rest was mere detail. Lynott was surprised to be offered the job before anyone had even heard him sing. There was simply no time, says Shiels. ‘The first thing I told him was that things were happening, and we were going to be happening as well.’

  When Lynott turned up to his first Skid Row rehearsal, Shiels was even more convinced that he had made the correct choice. Their prospective singer arrived wearing a beautiful dark-blue overcoat and green-tinted rectangular sunglasses, the kind that Jim McGuinn from the Byrds might wear to shield his eyes from the glare of the unyielding Californian sun. Their purpose was rather less pressing in autumnal Dublin, but that wasn’t quite the point. ‘I don’t know where he would have got them,’ says Shiels, still full of wonderment almost half a century later to have discovered a singer several streets ahead of the competition in the style stakes.

  When Lynott did eventually open his mouth – to sing ‘Hey Joe’ – not everyone in the room was entirely sold. As the song finished, guitarist Bernard Cheevers called Shiels over and said, none too quietly, ‘I reckon I could sing it better than that!’ But Shiels was the boss, and for him ‘that was the end of it. He had a sound. He was singing through Mickey Mouse amps, but he sounded right, he looked right, and right there and then he could do anything that Jimi Hendrix was doing. That’s all I was interested in.’

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience had impacted in Britain and Ireland earlier in the year, recalibrating what was and was not possible to achieve with guitar, bass and drums. Hendrix swiftly became a touchstone for Skid Row, and especially for Lynott. He couldn’t even play guitar, let alone attempt what Hendrix was capable of doing with his instrument, yet he picked up on other parallels between himself and the American, noting his mixed-race heritage, his funky shyness, his cool stage presence and long, lanky frame. There was something of Hendrix’s laconic mumble in Lynott’s own singing voice, too.

  Some early Thin Lizzy songs – among them ‘Ray-Gun’ and ‘Old Moon Madness’ – were explicit homages. In 1973, when Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore came courting Lynott to form a new band with Ian Paice and Paul Rodgers, the Hendrix connection was a major factor. ‘It was like Hendrix number two,’ said Blackmore. ‘He looked like Hendrix, sounded like Hendrix.’1 Lynott was aware of the link. ‘At one time I made a conscious effort not to sound like Hendrix,’ he said. ‘It just happens I’ve got that kind of husky inflexion, so I thought, what the hell – people seem to like it. I wasn’t consciously imitating him, although I’ve always thought his stage act was the perfect balance of showmanship and music.’2 Soon his bedroom wall would be adorned with a huge poster of Hendrix, and he would grow out his smart, mod-ish ‘helmet’ into a wild, woolly Afro, à la Jimi.

  Shiels was an equally devout follower, but from the beginning of Skid Row it was clear that Lynott’s more esoteric musical tastes were not shared by his band-mate. ‘The first time we met he was telling me about things I wasn’t expecting, like Paul Simon’s “I Am a Rock”,’ says Shiels. ‘Then he starts on about Nico and the Velvet Underground. I had no interest in that. I was coming from somewhere else. Soul and rock, the Hendrix thing.’

  Skid Row rehearsed at the home of Kathleen Quigley, who owned a sprawling tenement in Synnott Place, north of O’Connell Street. At the back of the house was an extension where, it seemed, every band in Dublin convened at one time or another. With no bespoke rehearsal studios in town, Mrs Quigley’s home became the hub of the local group scene. It was a social service; no money changed hands. Two of her five sons knew Lynott well. Pat Quigley was a bass player in the Movement and would later play with him in Orphanage. Fran Quigley, his younger brother, became a friend and unofficial roadie for Orphanage and Thin Lizzy.

  Drilled into shape at Synnott Place, Skid Row became very good very quickly. Their first rehearsal took place in September 1967. By February 1968 they were widely regarded as the best new group in Ireland. The trick was to mix virtuosity and a vivid stage presence with, in terms of musical choices, a savvy blend of the experimental and the familiar. Their repertoire was almost entirely covers. The Beatles’s ‘I Am the Walrus’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the Byrds’s ‘Eight Miles High’ and ‘So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star’, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Manic Depression’ and ‘If Six Was Nine’. They played the Animals’s ‘Sky Pilot’, some Buffalo Springfield, a smattering of soul. Cheever owned a wah-wah pedal and Lynott had bought a Binson Space Echo effect for his vocals, the kind of technology that enabled the sound to weft, warp and phase in and out, keeping pace with the times as music started to become more psychedelic and the influence of the US West Coast scene drifted over the Atlantic.

  It was a dawning age of visual as well as sonic experimentation. In America the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Doors were using liquid lights: slides of multi-coloured liquid ink heated by the lamp of a film projector to throw abstract, constantly evolving patterns behind the bands. Pink Floyd were attempting much the same thing in the UK. In downtown New York, the Velvet Underground were working with Andy Warhol and his Factory acolytes to create provocative film projections intended to shock and stimulate the senses just as much as the abrasively beautiful sound they were making.

  Lynott, the sponge, picked up on these pioneering ideas and fed them into Skid Row. ‘Philip knew what was happening, and he brought his own sub-culture with him,’ says Brush Shiels. ‘We put the band together, and the following week he brought Frank Murray and Paul Scully to me. They were our unofficial roadies. The week after that he brought Mick O’Flanagan. He brought all the lads to the band who really made a difference. We were surrounded with people who had ideas, and that came from Philip. There was always an arty flavour to it.’

  The liquid lights came courtesy of another friend, Gregory Brown. In the prevailing spirit of the age, he preferred to be known as Ashtar. O’Flanagan handled the film content. ‘Philip knew all about the Velvet Underground and what they were doing with projections,’ he says. ‘I’d never heard of them, but Philip wanted me to do the same for him.’ One portion of footage showed the Pope visiting Jerusalem intercut with images of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. This was back-projected while the band played ‘Sky Pilot’. Performed at the Catholic Young Men’s Society Hall, such transgressions made the front page of the
Evening Herald, under the headline: ‘GROUP PERFORM BLASPHEMOUS SONG AT LOCAL DANCE’. ‘Me ma wouldn’t talk to me for three days,’ says Shiels. ‘It was quite progressive for the time.’

  ‘They were really at the forefront of experimentation, and at the time Ireland was very conservative,’ says Paul Scully. ‘They even did a little mini-opera and performed it at the Moulin Rouge club in Dublin. Myself and Frank, who were the crew at the time, had to dress in white coats with stethoscopes and come on as doctors. I seem to remember amputation was involved. They used to fake fight on stage. Phil would walk off and then come back on, and the audience was so gullible they would believe it.’

  This was a routine based on a scene from the film The Defiant Ones, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, where the pair – one black, the other white – break out of jail and then turn on one another. Skid Row tried it out at one of their first major gigs, at University College Dublin, during a version of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Manic Depression’.

  ‘Beforehand, I cut Philip’s shirt down the back, so it was just barely holding together, and we had handcuffs on,’ says Shiels. ‘Bernard was playing guitar with his teeth, and we came out like we were locked together, and then I ripped the shirt off him and [threw] my bass at him. The audience jumped up on stage to separate us – it was that good. So right from the start we had that dramatic thing. We got plenty of publicity right away. We could play, but we could do this other thing as well. Philip had that all his life. He knew how to put on a really good show.’

  Lynott later recalled that he was ‘totally into image in those days’.3 It was part of the job. ‘He was a brilliant frontman,’ says Noel Bridgeman. ‘A great presence, and a great mover without the guitar. We were very popular, we became a big band very quickly, and Philip had a lot to do with that. He had a great personality. He laughed really easily, he was very bright and alive and great company. Fantastic to work with onstage. Totally into the music.’

  Though some distance from the strutting, crotch-splaying frontman he became, Lynott could throw the necessary shapes. ‘He had a natural rhythm, sinewy and flowing,’ says Shiels. ‘He had no problems out the front. He lived the part day and night, he never slept. He was up for it, from day one.’

  People would recognize him as he ambled down Grafton Street, and they would nod and say howya. He felt part of something. To paraphrase another hero, Bob Dylan, he could feel that something was happening, even if he wasn’t yet entirely sure what it was.

  ‘Dublin was a very small town,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. ‘You could put your arms around everybody.’

  It was a city by name but still a village by nature. Dublin’s cultural life force pumped out from the heart of St Stephen’s Green, down Grafton Street and over the river to O’Connell Street, and along South King Street, Merrion Row and Baggot Street. This was Lynott’s stamping ground. ‘Things moved fast from the Black Eagles to when Phil joined Skid Row,’ says Frank Murray. ‘The Black Eagles were just a bunch of kids from Crumlin, but when he joined Skid Row it started to happen. It was more of a hanging-around-town scene.’

  He was finished with college. For a short while he experimented with gainful employment for the first and only time in his life, working as a turner and fitter at Tonge & Taggart, a local foundry in East Wall which made the cast-iron manhole covers and flood mouths which adorned Dublin’s roads. He was paid two pounds and five shillings a week, he got his hands dirty and had to wear overalls. ‘He hated it, absolutely hated it,’ says Carole Stephen. ‘I don’t think he was cut out to have a job. He was definitely destined for better things.’ Lynott tended to agree. The arrangement didn’t last long. ‘He was lined up to be a draughtsman,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Then he started making money with Skid Row. It wasn’t a lot but it was as much as you could make as a draughtsman, and it was more fun.’

  Unyoked, Lynott made the most of his freedom. No matter how late he went to bed, he emerged magically bright-eyed at dawn, looking immaculate and eager to embrace what the new day offered. He is remembered as a bundle of energy and ideas. He would catch the bus into town from Crumlin; or walk; or hitch a lift on the back of Michael O’Flanagan’s Honda scooter, his long legs jutting out comically like bat wings.

  He hung out at St Stephen’s Green with a group which included Frank Murray and Paul Scully; John Hodges, a DJ at the Moulin Rouge club, a converted church in South Great George’s Street; and Stevie Bolger and his younger brother Seamus, better known as ‘Smiley’, who was also a DJ. They created their own makeshift approximation of what they knew to be happening at the time in Haight-Ashbury and the King’s Road. Only a few years later Lynott was already fondly mythologizing it. ‘During the hippie days when I was starting to get into singing we used to buy a five-bob bottle of wine and sit [on the Green] just getting wrecked,’ he said. ‘You used to meet these tourist chicks all the time. You’d say, “I’d love to show you around, but I’ve got no money.” So they’d go, “Oh it’s okay, I’ve got money.” So that was it. You were in! I wasn’t a gigolo … but it was pretty fucking close.’4

  The Green wasn’t just about women. Bands in town from Limerick, Cork or the north of Ireland would congregate there. Musical connections could be made, hot tips traded, tastes verified and confirmed. If the Green wasn’t happening, Lynott might take a spin to the Picture House on South King Street or wander down to the Grafton Cinema, near Trinity College, which showed a continuous loop of cartoons, newsreels and comedy shorts. He loved cartoons the same way he loved comics: for their colour and invention, and for the quick-fire and often anarchic leaps of imagination.

  He mooched around the stores and flea markets, rummaging through the wares and chatting up the shop girls. Just walking down Grafton Street was an event in itself. Not yet pedestrianized, it could take Lynott half an hour to stroll from the top to the bottom. ‘He was a showman,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘He would promenade up and down Grafton Street – that’s the only word to describe it. He loved the attention.’

  As musical and fashion tastes rapidly evolved, his wardrobe somehow kept pace accordingly. Before the Dandelion Market opened in April 1970, finally bringing the delights of tie-dye T-shirts, loon pants, cheesecloth shirts and sheepskin coats to Dublin’s massed ranks of fashion-starved youngsters, there was precious little on offer for a sharp-dressed man. Jeffa Gill had come over to Dublin from Birmingham Arts College in 1965 to work on a design project, and ended up staying to help set up a boutique in Upper Leeson Street called The Happening. A machinist would make up her designs to order, but just as often people would drop in to chat, read books and play chess.

  ‘Fashion-wise, there wasn’t much at all,’ she says. ‘You had to make your own trends because you couldn’t buy them. They didn’t exist. There was a great shop called McBirney’s on the Quays, where you could buy fabric and remnants. Philip stood out because he was very cool, very stylish. He loved dancing in the clubs, and he moved beautifully. He ranged down Grafton Street, arms and the legs flapping in and out. He always had an entourage, one or two guys from his area that hung out with him.’

  He was inventive. He trawled the flea markets for vintage gear that could be given a fashionable twist. Frank Murray’s girlfriend, Ferga, later his wife, was a fashion student at Grafton College. She would make the band custom-made bell-bottom trousers or even suits. Lynott swung from kaftans to white mackintoshes, suits to a full-length leather coat, patterned woollen jumpers to sunglasses and, recalls future Thin Lizzy manager Brian Tuite, ‘a pair of ladies’ boots with high heels. Charisma oozed out of him.’

  It’s fair to say that Crumlin had seen nothing quite like it. ‘My mother started to complain that there were all sorts of funny people coming up the path to the door, dressed in these way-out outfits,’ said Philomena Lynott, who was, nevertheless, happily encouraging his experiments from afar. ‘I was bringing him all kinds of stuff from England, and he’d buy all this old gear. Evening dress wear from the flea markets, a grandpapa shirt with
a studded collar …’ He persuaded Brian Downey to travel to Manchester with him, primarily so they could get their hair cut at a fashionable salon.

  His partner in crime, sartorially, was John Hodges. When Hodges died of leukaemia in 1969, aged only twenty, Lynott was ‘heartbroken,’ says Michael O’Flanagan. ‘We had a wake at Slattery’s in Capel Street and Philip was very upset. I’d never seen him like that, so emotional. He and John were very close. They were both like male models.’

  Lynott moonlighted as a model during this time and for a period afterwards. He appeared in an advert for the new Wimpy restaurant, which opened in 1968 at 80 Lower Dorset Street. Propped up at the counter, his back to the camera, he turns his long, lean, unsmiling face to the lens beneath a strapline which promises, ‘After the show it’s the place to go’. He fitted the bill as the face of Dublin’s coolest new musical scene-setters, although pragmatism may have played its part. The new Wimpy – ‘Enjoy your meal in comfortable and artistic surroundings to mood music’ – was a stone’s throw from Synnott Place, where most of the groups rehearsed.

  He was on the cover of Hitsville ’68 beat magazine with model Millie Jackson, and was used several times for New Spotlight by photographer Roy Esmonde – whose work appears on the first two Thin Lizzy albums – as the token boyfriend in female fashion shoots for the magazine. ‘He would come up to my studio on Parnell Square,’ says Esmonde. ‘He’d come in with a little bag with multiple pairs of trousers and then go strolling off down Grafton Street with some new style.’ Later, in 1971, Lynott frolicked in a pastoral scene with model Niki Adrian to advertise the wares of Dublin’s Drury Lane Boutique. A year later he was holding hands with Pat Harrison as she sported a variety of mini-dresses from Cinderella Boutique.

  When the shopping and parading was done, the nearby Coffee Inn was a regular late-1960s meeting place, an archetypal Italian café with red booths and Formica tables. Lynott would nurse a chocolate or, if funds were available, have a slice of pizza or a plate of pasta – ‘spaghetti bollock naked’, he called it. When his order arrived, he would mark his gratitude by saying ‘tanks and armoured cars’. The downstairs restaurant at the Switzer department store on Grafton Street was another favourite place to spin out a few hours.