Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  It worked its way into their bones. The hardy perennials were Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Jeff Beck and Frank Zappa, taking their place alongside new progressive blues-rock bands such as Free, Spirit and Spooky Tooth. But there was room for everything: jazz, crooners, Chicago blues, cowboy songs, Irish traditional music, soul, the sepia-tinged Americana of the Band.

  Castle Avenue wasn’t a bachelor pad for long. First, Bell’s girlfriend, Eleanor, moved in. Then Lynott met Gale Róisín Barber, an eighteen-year-old dentist’s daughter from Belfast who had finished her A-levels earlier that summer. One of Barber’s friends had socialized with Thin Lizzy after a recent show up north, and secured an open invitation for anyone passing through Dublin to come and visit the band in Clontarf. Barber ‘wanted to escape from Belfast’2 and shortly afterwards headed to Dublin, where she tracked down Lynott and his friends drinking in the Bailey one night. She found him shy, handsome and charismatic.

  Soon she was lodging in the plant room, wrapped up in a sleeping bag and earning her keep as the flat’s head cook and bottle-washer. She and Lynott became an item on the night of his twenty-first birthday party, a rowdy affair which lasted until morning. He looked lonely as the party wound down and dawn broke, Barber recalled. She later discovered that he had been with four other women the previous night.

  ‘Gale was beautiful, and a really smart girl,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘Small, dark-haired, wore glasses. Beautiful face. I loved hanging out with her. She was a fascinating woman, really interested and intelligent. For a while they had a great relationship.’

  Although they would remain a couple for several years, Lynott didn’t tend to advertise his relationship status and, like Carole Stephen before her, Barber’s presence wasn’t encouraged at gigs. They rarely went out together as a couple, except to the cinema, where darkness offered anonymity. When Philomena came over from Manchester to visit her son at Castle Avenue, Barber was asked by Lynott to leave for a few days, although the two women later got on extremely well. Any discussion about his early childhood was off-limits.

  Girlfriends were just the start of the influx. Castle Avenue soon became the after-hours destination of choice for every rocker, roller, chancer, dealer and freeloader in Dublin and its environs. The house rapidly went from a dishevelled kind of domesticity to a surrogate Orphanage, only significantly rowdier.

  ‘It ended up with about fourteen people living there,’ says Bell. ‘People just appeared out of the wallpaper and next minute they were on the floor. Some of them had sleeping bags in the kitchen, on the staircase. Groups would be doing gigs in Dublin at night then they’d drive to Castle Avenue, and arrive about two o’clock in the morning. We’d hear “beep, beep” and look out the window, and there’d be about two or three transit vans with all these fucking weirdos and hippies, all coming up into our flat. We’d have about thirty or forty people in our house, guys out of bands, roadies, managers, women, groupies. We’d have big parties every night.’

  Even today, the escapades of the ‘Clontarf Cowboys’ retain a mythic aura. Frank Murray remembers Castle Avenue as ‘a crazy place’. Paul Scully recalls ‘wild all-night parties, but it was all good fun, nothing horrible. It was like student days, almost, though we were more students of life than students of books.’

  It was a time of great promise, fuelled by an exploratory hedonism. Lynott was already smoking dope daily, and to this staple he added hallucinogens and greater quantities and variations of alcohol. Sometimes at Castle Avenue a plastic bin was filled with any and every type of available drink, and the contents drained. He discovered that he had a remarkable constitution for excess. ‘We used to drop lots of acid and mescaline together, get out of our heads,’ says Eric Bell. ‘The next minute the whiskey bottle would come around. No glasses, just the bottle. “Aw Jaysus, you can’t hold your drink, man.” All that crap. Macho stuff. Pain in the ass. But what I did notice is that we’d all be absolutely destroyed, and then some guy would come up at 1.30 in the morning from a record company or magazine and go over to Philip and start talking to him, and Philip could just pick himself up off of the floor and start talking business. It was incredible.’

  Not everybody was as comfortable with Lynott’s expanding repertoire of chemical distractions. It caused a divide among some of his old Dublin posse, which became more pronounced as the years went on. ‘I never really got involved, I stayed away from all that,’ says Brush Shiels. ‘They were doing what they were doing, and we were kicking a football. Away he went.’ Fran Quigley remembers feeling uneasy at elements of life at 28 Castle Avenue. ‘I went down there many times and hung out, but then I’d leave because the dope would be coming out and I was a very straight character.’

  At least one of Lynott’s friends suspects that he had his first experience of heroin around this time. Heroin and cocaine were practically unheard of in Ireland in the 1960s, but not entirely off the radar. ‘I believe he got into using heroin at a very young age,’ says Noel Bridgeman. ‘I wasn’t aware of it then, but looking back I could see the signs of it. I remember the dealers at Clontarf, after he had left Skid Row and I was down there.’

  Lynott was friendly with Jimmy Faulkner, a well-known guitarist who played in the Jingle Jangle Band and later with local soul singer Ditch Cassidy in his Freak Show band. Faulkner remained a popular musician until his death in 2009. He was a wonderful guitar player, and also a heroin user. ‘It was a small scene in Dublin then, a very closed shop,’ says Bridgeman. ‘I worked with Jimmy for quite a number of years, and now and then he let slip that when he and Philip hung out together as young fellas in the early days they took it.’

  Lynott’s flatmate and chemical comrade in arms at the time, Eric Bell, doubts whether he was taking heroin during this part of his life. ‘He would have told me,’ says Bell. ‘Jimmy Faulkner was a good friend and a very good guitar player, and yes, I think he was [taking heroin]. There were a few people we knew who were. Another guy we knew, a great slide blues player, was into heroin as well, but they kept it very hush-hush. They didn’t flaunt it. Maybe Philip had taken it. It’s possible, but he never mentioned it.’

  Drugs were strictly recreational. Lynott was above all focused on making music. In Castle Avenue Thin Lizzy truly became a band, and Lynott became a songwriter capable of serving its needs. He composed on a nylon-string guitar, experimenting with ideas, which he and Bell would then develop together, exploring riffs and chord sequences. Brian Downey was still living with his parents in Crumlin, but before long he was in Clontarf every day. When Lynott had the bones of a new song, the three of them would work it through again and again, Bell and Lynott on acoustic guitars and Downey playing the drums on his lap.

  As the songwriting evolved, Thin Lizzy’s live set gradually began to jettison most of the unoriginal material. Many of the tracks on their first album were written at Castle Avenue. Lynott pulled inspiration from all around him. ‘Eire’ and ‘The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle’ drew on scenes from local history. The former recounted High King Brian Boru’s vanquishing of the Vikings in the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. The latter was completed at Castle Avenue by the addition of two verses, in which Lynott name-checked the landmark at the end of his street.

  He wrote a song for Gale Barber, ‘Look What the Wind Blew In’, indulging his life-long love of secret codes and clunky puns. Playing on the unusual spelling of his girlfriend’s first name, the lyric outlined her impact on a man inclined to run from the strength of his own feelings.

  Many lovely ladies

  I have felt, touched

  And I was not afraid

  I took them out dancing

  Out romancing

  And I was not afraid

  Then somewhere from the north

  This Gale I knew just flew in

  And I am afraid

  Lynott took his lyrics seriously. ‘He was great for working and working and rewriting,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘He’d have notebooks with loads of stuff. I can test
ify to the trouble he went to really get the lyrics right.’ For a long time the endeavour paid handsome dividends. The concluding verses of ‘The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle’ were written as a poem, and are rather beautiful in their crafted capturing of joy and sadness and all the in-betweens.

  To feel the goodness glowing inside

  To walk down a street with my arms about your hips, side by side

  To play with a sad eyed child till he smiles

  To look at a starry sky at night, realise the miles

  To see the sun set behind the steeple

  Clontarf Castle, no king, queen or knightly people

  A coal fire, and it’s pouring rain

  To wave goodbye to a very good friend, never meet again

  Little thoughts bring little memories of you to me

  ‘I always thought he was a gifted songwriter – he had that naturally – but the guy worked his bollocks off,’ says Eric Bell. ‘He would go out and run about with all these chicks, but behind it all he was working on songs all the time. He used to carry a gypsy bag with him and he’d have a book in there of lyrics. You’d be sitting talking to him and the next thing he’d pull the book out and start writing in it furiously, then put it back again and go, “Sorry man, what were you saying?” He really worked incredibly hard all the time. If it wasn’t his singing, it was his lyrics, or it was his bass-playing, or it was his image on stage. The whole package.’

  The idyll at Clontarf couldn’t last forever. Such a respectable area would only tolerate an open-all-hours hippie commune in its midst for so long. One day there was a knock on the door at no. 28 and through the reefer haze and across the generational divide Lynott was handed a petition signed by more than fifty local residents, demanding that they move out. It scarcely registered. ‘Looking back on it I couldn’t blame them in the slightest, but you know when you’re young and you don’t give a shit, you don’t see it that way,’ says Bell.

  Eventually, the lease lapsed and Lynott took a one-bedroom flat with Gale Barber, who was now working in an accounts office in Mountjoy Square. His days in Dublin were drawing to a close; the city was throwing out heavy hints that it was time to move on. On 4 September 1970, Thin Lizzy played at Ireland’s first outdoor music festival, held at Richmond Park, the home of local soccer team St Patrick’s Athletic. Mungo Jerry, riding high with their folksy hit single ‘In the Summertime’, were top of the bill.

  The previous weekend, a tatterdemalion army numbering some half a million had made the trek to see Jimi Hendrix, the Who and the Doors at the third Isle of Wight festival. (It was one of Hendrix’s last performances; he died on 18 September 1970, and Lynott and Bell held a ‘wake’ for him in the Bailey.) In the lead up to the Dublin Open Air Pop Festival, an agitated local press had been full of spook stories about the event happening on their doorstep. Private-security personnel, guard dogs and floodlights were being deployed to ward off ‘hooligans’ and ‘a lunatic fringe element’. In the end, less than 1,000 people attended Ireland’s first gathering of the clans, and the event was swiftly written off as a catastrophe. Even Lynott, resplendent in full-length leather coat, stack-heeled boots and two-toned bell-bottoms, couldn’t save the day. ‘I’ve been to more interesting wakes,’ was one young attendee’s verdict, reported in the following day’s Irish Times. The underlying message of this aborted attempt to kick-start ‘the sixties’ in Dublin as a living concept was clear: as a cultural hothouse, Ireland had a long way to go.

  Thin Lizzy had recorded a single. Their gigs were sold out almost everywhere they played. They were featured regularly in the papers and magazines. At the end of October they appeared on RTÉ’s Like Now!, the scene of Lynott’s downfall with Skid Row fifteen months earlier, and received a positive response. Ireland had offered what it had available. The best thing the country could do for them now was conjure up an escape route.

  They found one courtesy of Brian Tuite. Until now, Thin Lizzy had been managed by Terry O’Neill, a friend from Lynott’s Skid Row days. Smart and inventive – ‘imagine a young, Irish Del Boy,’ says John D’Ardis – O’Neill was also broke and inexperienced. He was on the lookout for a partner to alleviate the workload and the financial burden. O’Neill approached Brian Tuite, the former manager of local band Granny’s Intentions and the owner of Dublin’s main music-equipment shop, the Band Centre. Tuite had already been tipped off about Thin Lizzy by Fran Quigley, who worked in his shop. He contacted Peter Bardon, who ran a successful agency that booked showbands all over Ireland. Bardon agreed to put up capital, but only on the condition that Terry O’Neill relinquish any claim on the band.

  In the autumn of 1970, Tuite and Bardon took over the management of Thin Lizzy for a nominal sum, remembered by most parties to be in the region of £200. ‘More of a thank you fee than anything else,’ says Bardon.

  Both men had other, bigger irons in the fire. For Bardon Thin Lizzy was always strictly business but for Tuite, the more hands-on of the pair, it was a matter of heart as well as head. ‘The big thing at the time was bands writing their own material,’ says Tuite. ‘Phil said, “We’ve got twelve songs at the moment that we’d be happy enough to record.” I thought, yeah, I’ve heard that crap before, but when I listened to the stuff he was writing I liked it very much.’

  Almost the first thing Tuite did was to seek out a record deal. He was good friends with Frank Rodgers, a Dubliner now working in London as an A & R man with Decca. Rodgers’ father was Louis Rodgers, a powerful dancehall promoter who brought major American country acts like Hank Locklin over to Ireland. Frank’s sister, Clodagh, was a successful singer, actress and TV personality who went on to represent the UK in the 1971 Eurovision Song Contest with ‘Jack in the Box’.

  Tuite arranged for Frank Rodgers to see another of his acts, the white soul-singer Ditch Cassidy, with a view to Cassidy earning a deal with Decca. Rather than use Cassidy’s regular band, Tuite secured Thin Lizzy a spot at the same audition as the singer’s backing group for the day. ‘I said to the lads, “Listen, Frank’s coming over to hear Ditch, but he’s not going out of here without you …”’

  Watching Cassidy sing that afternoon in an empty Zhivago’s nightclub, Rodgers found himself intrigued by the trio. Although Lynott was just playing bass, Rodgers could feel the star quality. ‘I could see the potential,’ Rodgers said. ‘Because of Phil. Everything could be hung around Phil … He had it.’3

  Afterwards they repaired to a nearby pub and Rodgers offered the band an album deal with Decca on the spot. (Cassidy drew the short straw, and was signed up for a single on Decca subsidiary Deram.) ‘Before Frank left we had shaken hands on a deal,’ says Tuite, although Rodgers ensured that he and other Decca personnel saw the band play again before anything was signed, this time performing their own songs at their own concert. He departed even more convinced that ‘I had something that was going to make the company money.’4 It wasn’t just about Lynott’s looks, but his abilities as a songwriter. According to Tuite, ‘“Look What the Wind Blew in” was the one that swung Frank, but he really thought the cross section of songs would make a good LP.’

  Tuite travelled to London to meet Decca’s head of A & R, Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles and signed just about everybody else, including the Rolling Stones, Tom Jones and the Small Faces. The paperwork was drawn up on 12 November 1970, and on the first day of December Decca officially signed ‘Tin Lissy’ to a one-year recording contract, with the option of extending the deal by two further periods of one year in September 1971 and September 1972. All going well, they were committed to delivering three albums to the company. The advance was £500, with a further £500 to be paid after the album had been completed.

  Lynott left for London with the band and Brian Tuite on 3 January 1971, the morning after a Thin Lizzy show at the Afton Club in Dundalk. On the boat to Holyhead, he spotted John Peel at the bar. Never one to miss a hustle, and aware that Peel was good friends with Peter Fallon, he was bold enough to introd
uce himself. ‘Philip went over and started speaking to him, and said, “Oh, I’m in a band called Thin Lizzy, maybe we can keep in touch?”’ says Eric Bell. The permanently abashed Peel mumbled his assent. ‘He liked the nerve of it,’ Lynott remembered. ‘So we had one contact.’5 It was a good one. Within ten months Peel would be booking the group for a session on his Radio 1 show; within six years he would be writing the introduction to Lynott’s second volume of poetry.

  The meeting with Peel on the ferry was regarded as an omen, a laying on of hands from the hippie-prince of Britain’s underground music scene. They arrived in London with a powerful sense, says Eric Bell, that ‘everything was happening’.

  They booked into a guesthouse in Sussex Gardens, within striking distance of Decca’s studios in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead. The following morning, a Monday, they began recording the first Thin Lizzy album. By Friday evening they were done. ‘We got up at nine in the morning, [went] into the studio, played from about ten or half ten to eight or nine, then clocked off and went back to the guesthouse,’ says Brian Downey. ‘Then we did it again, for the whole week.’

  They were working with American producer and songwriter Scott English, who had co-written Jeff Beck’s hit ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ and Amen Corner’s ‘Bend Me, Shape Me’. English was Decca’s choice. He ‘wasn’t a bad producer,’ says Brian Tuite, who is credited on the album sleeve, only half-jokingly, as ‘Referee’, ‘but he thought he was better than he was. Philip fell out a bit with him because Scott wanted to turn down the bass. It got to the stage where I was up in the control room and Scott would say, “Go down and tell the bass player to turn down.” He wouldn’t use the [talkback] mike because Phil wouldn’t do it anyway. So I’d say to Philip, “The Bearded One wants you to turn down the bass,” and he’d say, “Tell that fucking Yank to piss off.” He knew full well the mike would be open.’