Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  As Skid Row progressed, Lynott’s place in the Orphanage hierarchy shifted at least a couple of notches. ‘They did a version of “I Am the Walrus” in Dixon Hall in Trinity College which just blew me away,’ says Booth. ‘The song had only recently come out, and I thought, “How do they know how to do that?” It sounded really like the [Beatles] recording. It was a very good cover and they did it effortlessly.’

  Early in 1968, a fifteen-year-old prodigy moved to Dublin from his home city of Belfast, driven south by the unrest fomenting on his hometown streets and his parents’ disintegrating marriage. Gary Moore was filling in with Belfast trio the Method, who had travelled down to Dublin to play a residency at the Club A Go Go. Brush Shiels went to see them and, impressed, instantly invited Moore to join Skid Row. Bernard Cheevers had been offered a full-time job as an electrician with Guinness, and was leaving the band. In any case, Moore was clearly operating at a considerably more advanced level. ‘They didn’t play blues, they played all this West Coast stuff, so I was a bit apprehensive, but I joined anyway,’ Moore said. ‘It was a good way for me to get away from home. I was having a lot of trouble with my father at the time.’

  He returned to Belfast to tie up any loose ends, and a week later arrived back in Dublin. The next morning, Lynott met Moore in town, bright and early as ever, and gave him a tour of the city. Or at least, his city: the clubs, cafés, music stores, record shops and pubs. ‘We went for a Chinese meal,’ Moore recalled. ‘His suggestion. He knew I wouldn’t like it so he got to eat mine! We went to the Moulin Rouge that night and picked up a couple of girls, and it was really cool and funny.’ So began an intense and often combative friendship, inextricably interwoven with music, which would last, with significant cooling-off periods, for the next seventeen years.

  Moore was not only a great blues guitarist in the mould of his idols Peter Green, John Mayall and Jeff Beck, but a terrific all-round musician. He could play harmonium, mandolin, bass and fiddle, and he was a fine mimic, turning his hand to numerous styles, including folk. He featured on the second Dr Strangely Strange album, Heavy Petting, released in 1970, and for a while stayed in the ‘second Orphanage’, a large house rented by Tim Booth in Sandymount, down near the seaside.

  He joined Skid Row in time to play on their first single, which was also Lynott’s first time in a recording studio. ‘New Places, Old Faces’ was written by Shiels and released in 1968 on Song, a local independent label. It’s a gentle, pleasantly plodding folk-inflected track, with prominent tin whistle from Johnny Moynihan of Sweeney’s Men, one of several templates for the ‘Johnny’ persona who crops up in many Thin Lizzy songs. Shiels’s lyrics are a poignant domestic sketch of a working-class family forced out of their home by a compulsory purchase order. ‘We’ve had good times here, me and my old dad,’ Lynott sings, carefully and with feeling, affecting the air of vaguely Elizabethan gentility in vogue at the time. There are no drums. The overall feel is reminiscent of the Rolling Stones’s ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Lady Jane’.

  The presence of Moore in Skid Row and at the Orphanage ensured that the bond between Lynott and Dr Strangely Strange grew ever tighter. When Skid Row played in Carlow, seventy miles south of Dublin, Lynott lobbied hard for his friends to join them as their support act. The mutual incomprehension felt by both the band and the audience delighted him. ‘Philip would be like a ringmaster, and he loved the idea of these two musical forms trying to talk to each other,’ says Tim Booth. ‘Occasionally there would be gigs in one of the beat clubs, and Philip would ask us to play an interval spot. We would perform this folky music to all these trendy mods.’

  He was flushed by the success of Skid Row, ‘but he was kind of divided,’ says Ivan Pawle. ‘He had this very strong romantic feeling which that band didn’t necessarily serve.’

  His eventual departure from Skid Row in 1969 was, perhaps, inevitable but traumatic nonetheless. Part of the problem was the old saw: musical differences. Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience loomed large in Shiels’s mind. He became infatuated with the idea of Skid Row becoming a power trio. The introduction of Moore had radically expanded the possibilities of what they could do musically. There was an increasing number of instrumental solos. Words like ‘interplay’ were being bandied about. It was all getting rather busy. ‘Skid Row were absolutely amazing musically,’ says Eric Bell. ‘Just unbelievable. Three guys on Dexedrine, you know, playing super-fast, very complicated music.’

  The trouble was that Lynott, at heart, was a melody man. He liked songs with tunes that said something and cut through emotionally. Band and singer were heading in opposite directions.

  In the mid-1970s, Lynott discussed this clash in sensibilities in the abstract, but it was clear which band he was talking about. ‘That whole weird thing rock went through when the arrangements dominated … was very harmful … because although there are a lot of good musicians, musicianship and melody don’t always have to be the same thing. There’s a lot of false focus. The very harmful stage of the whole thing was when the bands just got up and just let it float … put screens and films on and hoped the audiences were tripping and that they’d get off on it.’2

  In another interview, he put it more succinctly. ‘I wasn’t really needed anymore. I knew I was in line for the bullet.’3

  Matters reached a head in June 1969, when Skid Row were booked onto RTÉ’s music programme Like Now!, recorded at the Top Hat ballroom in Dún Laoghaire. Television was a step up. At 85 Leighlin Road, family and friends gathered around their sets to watch Skid Row perform ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. According to Michael O’Flanagan, the performance was ‘a disaster’ – particularly the vocals. Photographer Roy Esmonde, briefly a manager of Skid Row, remembers, ‘I told Brush he should get rid of Philip, because he was singing flat.’

  Whatever he may have sounded like live, ‘New Places, Old Faces’ and a Skid Row demo tape dating from 1968 give the lie to any suggestion that Lynott’s voice, in general, wasn’t up to muster. Recorded in Avon studios in Dominick Street, ‘Living in the Shadow of a Shady Neighbour’ is heavy and Hendrixian, while ‘Notion in Motion’ is smoother and snappier. Written by Shiels, both are relatively wordy, but Lynott sings them with verve and panache. The unique tone and style of his singing voice is already easily identifiable. He may not yet have had the confidence to fully forge his own vocal identity, and he may have slipped off-key from time to time on stage – but he could certainly sing.

  Nevertheless, Shiels insists that ‘Phil was having trouble pitching, and he was starting to jump around more, starting to look more like Roger Daltrey.’ He tried to improve Lynott’s breathing control by ‘sticking his head in a bucket of water. I’d heard that could help, but it didn’t work. It turned out his tonsils were really bad. I looked down his throat one day and there was this fucking golf ball halfway down. His ma said she would bring him over to Manchester and get the job done.’

  While Lynott was in St Joseph’s Hospital having his tonsils removed, Skid Row were already making plans to get rid of him. ‘Philip wasn’t even on the plane and we were practising [without him],’ says Shiels. ‘That was the end of it. When he came back I had to tell him. It’s like being the manager of a football team. “You’ve been great for us up till now, but …”’

  In January 1969, Shiels had spent a week – gratis – honeymooning at the Clifton Grange Hotel with his new bride Margaret, with Lynott tagging along for good luck. Now he was firing his friend in the doorway of Bruxelles. ‘He took it very bad. It was fucking brutal, actually. Couldn’t have been worse. Like a death in the family. He had his family, but the band was like another family, and he loved it. Just as everything was going terrific the family was letting him down. It was almost a form of rejection. Abandoned again. He was very upset, he got very emotional.’

  For Noel Bridgeman, the sacking ‘was like being kicked out of his house again,’ although he adds that ‘there was a little bit more to it all, I think. Brush knew that Philip had other thi
ngs to do, but being young and insecure he maybe didn’t have the necessary courage to make the leap into the unknown. It was comfortable in Skid Row. The band was very popular and Philip was very popular. I think Brush pushed him and said, “Go off and just do it.” And he did.’

  At the time Lynott was crushed, but he wept in private. In public, he readied himself for the next move. He and Shiels remained on good terms. As part of what might be termed the redundancy package, Shiels promised to teach Lynott to play bass. When their mutual friend, Robert Ballagh, left the Chessmen, he had sold his Fender Jazz to Shiels for £36. It ended up in the hands of Lynott, who played the instrument well into the Thin Lizzy days. Five days a week for the next few months, Lynott would take the bus from Crumlin to Cabra West and spend hours practising bass with Shiels. ‘He got over his hurt inasmuch as he was playing pretty good bass in a fortnight, and in the back of his mind he was going to fuck me up. I could feel it. It was like, “I’ll show this guy.”’

  Determination, resilience and a positive work ethic often get lost amid tales of rock and roll misadventure. Lynott had impressive reserves of all three. Michael O’Flanagan – whose projections were considered by Skid Row to be integral to their live show – would occasionally cry off when the band were playing some of Dublin’s more volatile venues, like the CIE bus drivers’ social hall, which guaranteed three fights a night as a bare minimum. ‘One time Philip turned on me and said, “You only turn up when it suits yourself,” and, more or less, “Shut up and mind your own business.” He wasn’t short of voicing his opinion in a forceful manner. He was sensitive to people’s feelings, except when he was having a row with you. That would be different!’ ‘He was very sensitive,’ says Noel Bridgeman, laughing. ‘On the other hand, he was very insensitive.’

  His sacking from Skid Row added another layer. It hardened him. In future years, Lynott was rarely reticent when it came to making hard decisions about getting rid of band members. ‘You’ll find that a lot of the guys who played with me got much tougher afterwards,’ says Shiels. ‘Things have to be done. You could honestly say it was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. He was going to show everybody that he could do this thing, and he did. I was kind of surprised when he got bigger than me. I really was. It didn’t suit me at the time.’

  Other factors fed into Lynott’s split from Skid Row. He was growing older and asserting his own tastes. Brush Shiels was a solid type. He married his childhood sweetheart in 1969, shunned drugs, liked football and kept fit. Lynott had no problem with any of that, but he leaned towards a more adventurous social scene. ‘I noticed that Phil was taking something,’ says Shiels. ‘I don’t think it was acid, it was something that could keep him going day and night. I didn’t fancy that.’

  Hugh Feighery recalls that while he and Lynott were in the Black Eagles and still at school, Lynott experimented with the time-honoured method of squaring the eternal circle of long nights and early mornings. ‘Around that time Philip went in for pep pills,’ says Feighery. ‘He used to ask me to take them and I never did. Not that I felt any burden, but a pint used to do it for me and I used to smoke like a trooper. When he’d taken a dose of them, he was a different guy. He had this brash, didn’t-give-a-shit attitude. He needed these things. Apart from the energy surge, I think it came from a complex of not feeling good enough about himself.’

  Lynott told producer Tony Visconti years later, while working on Bad Reputation, that ‘my mother turned me on to smoking spliffs when I was 13’.4 There may be an element of poetic licence in that, but Philomena certainly had her bohemian side, and Lynott’s visits to Manchester in his later teens could be eye-openers. The Clifton Grange was a home from home (and in some cases, an actual home) for scores of battle-hardened musicians, and Philomena was liberal enough when it came to accommodating the tastes and habits of her core clientele.

  On ‘Clifton Grange Hotel’, from the first Thin Lizzy album, Lynott commemorated the establishment with a poetic twist, portraying it as an oasis of tolerance peopled with kindly, eccentric characters. One of these was Percy Gibbons from black Canadian trio the Other Brothers. Gibbons lived in a room in the attic, which was solemnly locked when he went on tour and ceremoniously reopened when he returned. He and Philip formed a friendship, in the mould of mentor and apprentice, playing songs together, writing, talking. The Other Brothers evolved into Garden Odyssey Enterprise, whose 1969 single ‘Sad and Lonely’ is a minor psychedelic wonder. For a short period there was some talk of Lynott joining its ranks.

  His visits to Whalley Range provided an alternative education in the ways of show business at ground level. Back in Dublin, he was privy to a very different set-up at the Orphanage, where the drug scene was more ritualized, if relatively sedate. ‘One has to say, there was the dope,’ says Ivan Pawle fondly. ‘Philip was attracted by that, that’s perhaps one reason he came around to see us … I remember I once handed him a joint made out of five papers, I was quite proud of the fact that I could do a five-skinner back in the day.’

  ‘The refreshment of choice in the Orphanage was a bit of Lebanese or Black, occasionally some Thai sticks,’ says Tim Booth. ‘Always very mild, soft drugs, and the odd tab of pretty good acid. We didn’t take anything else at that stage, but we did smoke a lot of dope. Philip would smoke dope with us, but I never took acid with him.’ They were a generous, nurturing crowd. When the young Gary Moore took to ingesting large quantities of amphetamine sulphate, they ‘had a word with him,’ says Booth.

  The stimulus offered by Dr Strangely Strange and their associates was not merely chemical. They opened up a world of new experiences on Lynott’s doorstep. ‘Some nights you might wind up reading poetry in a bar with Pearse Hutchinson or Peter Morgan, and we’d go back to people’s flats with a six-pack of beer and Luke Kelly would be singing ballads,’ says Eamon Carr. ‘It didn’t happen all the time but when it did it was memorable. That would have been the kind of milieu that Philip was involved in.’

  At the Orphanage he would rub shoulders with Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band, one of the Strangelys’s key influences. Williamson often came over from Edinburgh to stay with them, and ‘Philip was very enchanted by this,’ says Pawle.

  ‘I remember going in there once, and someone said, “Oh, be quiet, Robin is upstairs meditating,”’ says Paul Scully. ‘I’d never heard the word “meditation” in my life! Philip was getting into folk music at that time, he was playing a lot of acoustic guitar. The commune was all exotic-looking women and men, hippie types, living together. Dr Strangely Strange had a big influence on him. They were very arty and had gone to university.’

  Lynott was an affiliate member of the gang, leaning in from the fringes. He would join them in Toner’s on Lower Baggot Street, a favourite haunt, close to the Orphanage and the College of Art. At the time the pub was still under ownership of the Toner family, who felt an almost patrician concern for the Orphanage crowd. Every Christmas they sent a quarter tonne of coal to the house, accompanied by a crate of Guinness, a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of gin. ‘It was a hang-out for artists, writers, musicians and poets,’ says Robert Ballagh. ‘There was a regular crowd of us who hung around together, had shared interests, and Philip would have been a junior member of the club. He was part of all that. He was very young, but he was accepted. It was a very creative, optimistic time. We thought we could change the world.’

  The venerated figures of the future were the youthful, questioning agents of change in the Ireland of the 1960s. People who went on to become some of the country’s most acclaimed poets, artists, publishers and editors were making their first notable footprints on the landscape. At Sinnott’s on South King Street, the likes of Leland Bardwell, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Hayden Murphy, Peter Fallon and Pearse Hutchinson would get up to read their work. There was no ceremony. It was a snug space, warm and scuffed, like a family sitting room. To wash down the poetry, there would be generous amounts of acoustic music and strong drink.


  Dr Strangely Strange played at Sinnott’s frequently, and on occasion Lynott would tag along, though it’s unlikely that he ever stood up and performed anything himself. ‘I don’t recall him doing it,’ says Tim Booth. ‘I think he might have been a bit overawed to read his lyrics, or poetry, in front of people who really did have a craft. People who became very highly regarded Irish poets were trying out their wings there.’

  Fallon agrees that ‘he was more of an observer, but the literary side was very important to him’. He was dipping into the rich well-spring of Irish writers: Brendan Behan, Flann O’Brien, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Patrick Kavanagh, James Joyce. ‘He’d often have an old book of poetry under his arm,’ says Ballagh. ‘He was genuinely interested in, and influenced by, the poetic heritage of Dublin.’ He regularly spent time at Slattery’s in Capel Street, another informal hub of poetry and acoustic music. Here, Pawle recalls, ‘Philip did get up and read his stuff, I’m almost 100 per cent certain.’

  He certainly performed with Tara Telephone. An influential poetry and music group formed in 1969, Tara Telephone were modelled on the Liverpool Scene and the Scaffold, the affiliation of northern English poets and musicians that included Roger McGough and Brian Patten. The Liverpool Scene were much beloved by John Peel, who produced their first album and played them often on his radio shows. They created a considerable stir in the late 1960s, finding fertile common ground between the rock firmament and populist poetry.

  Tara Telephone established a similar set-up in Dublin. At their performances, poems were read with musical backing – guitars, bongos, viol – or set to a melody and sung. They were inclusive affairs, and there was often room for a folk group, a ballad singer or a band. Tara Telephone also ran a poetry magazine, Capella, which published work by Beat pioneer Allen Ginsberg, as well as John Peel, Marc Bolan and Mike McGear.