When the tour reached the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 15 November, Philomena Lynott came to see the show. She and her son were now thoroughly bonded. They had forged the close and loving relationship that remained until his death. Too much had occurred, however, for a conventional parental relationship to exist. They would always relate on a slightly different frequency. ‘I think it was a pleasant surprise to her that Philip became the person he became, and she kind of lived her life through him,’ says former Thin Lizzy manager Chris O’Donnell. ‘I wasn’t comfortable with it. It wasn’t a mother-son relationship, it just wasn’t. There was no discipline: “Oh, it’s harmless, it’s just a bit of puff.” She was blind to the obvious, and always in his defence.’
‘There’s no doubt he adored her,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘When they started to spend time together she was an amazing mother and he was an amazing son. If anything she was too liberal with him. I would have put manners on him, especially when it came to drugs, but you can’t blame her for Philip’s nonsense.’ Lynott was fond of her partner, Dennis Keeley – ‘a great guy, I hope my father was like him, I really do’4 – who regarded himself as a friend rather than a stepfather figure of authority.
After the Manchester show, Thin Lizzy, Suzi Quatro and her band stayed the night at the Clifton Grange Hotel. Quatro wasn’t terribly impressed. ‘The room was cold and damp, that’s what I remember,’ she says. ‘But it was free of charge, and we were on a shoestring, so we said, yes. His mother was a very nice lady, very eccentric.’
The hotel was a must-stop fixture on the tour itinerary each time they ventured into the north-west. If they were playing Liverpool, often they would drive straight to Manchester after the show and stay there. By the early 1970s, the Clifton Grange had established itself as a unique part of Manchester’s social landscape, and was known locally as the Showbiz or the Biz. The residents’ bar was a tiny room adorned with photographs of Hollywood film stars, complete with fake autographs. The bar operated far beyond its legal remit, becoming an after-hours drinking club that rarely opened until two in the morning. It was, in the words of one regular, a ‘shebeen’. Late-night callers walked up the steps at the back of the house to a door, and buzzed to get in. Dennis Keeley would be upstairs acting as lookout.
The clientele were drawn from a wide spectrum of society. Northern Irish football legend George Best was a regular during his days playing for Manchester United. Later on in the 1970s, other players from the club would regularly drop in. ‘Philip started getting really into football then,’ says Frank Murray. ‘It was obvious he was going to be take Manchester United [as his team]. Philip was never going to be a guy who was going to follow a team that was going to lose.’ He would eventually become a shareholder in the club.
In the Biz bar in the early hours, the renowned QC George Carman might graze elbows with Best, still out carousing as dawn broke on the morning of a game. Pop singers mixed with actors from Coronation Street, and the local CID would fraternize with the so-called Quality Street Gang, a loose affiliation of Manchester businessmen of dubious repute. Despite the myths that have sprung up around the gang over the years, many self-propagated, they weren’t necessarily career criminals. In their official capacity, they ran car-sales pitches, pubs, scrapyards and bookmakers, and very few had serious convictions. But they undoubtedly operated on and often beyond the fringes of the law. They associated with genuine gangsters, and would not back down from trouble. They adored Philomena – they called her the ‘Godmother’ – and they became good friends with her son, too.
Lynott was an easy touch when it came to gangster chic, with its grimy glamour and macho code of ethics. He needed very little impetus to get the creative juices flowing, and the rough-house romance of the Quality Street Gang was filtered – not always verbatim, but in spirit – into several Thin Lizzy songs. The adrenalized swagger of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ was partly a tribute to the atmosphere in the Biz whenever the Quality Street Gang descended. One of several templates for ‘Dino’s bar and grill’ was Deno’s, a famous and rather fancy Manchester nightclub run by Denos Kitromilides, a Greek-Cypriot entrepreneur. It was often the last legitimate stop on the circuit before everybody piled back to Clifton Grange.
Though it was set in the American ghetto, ‘Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed’ was initially inspired by Biz regular and Manchester villain Jimmy ‘The Weed’ Donnelly, while ‘Waiting for an Alibi’ drew on a favour owed to another family friend, Joe Leach, who at one point supplied Daimlers to Thin Lizzy, and was later instrumental in guiding keyboard player Darren Wharton towards the band. ‘They were nice people, sweet and respectful,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘You wouldn’t have known [about their criminality] unless they told you. We would go to football with them.’ When guns, hard drugs and ultra-violent gang culture hit Moss Side in the 1980s, the Quality Street Gang suddenly looked rather quaint.
Taking the temperature at the Biz became a ritual that continued throughout the 1970s whenever Thin Lizzy were within striking distance. The entire tour party would descend, accompanied by whatever guests were around, and see in the dawn. Money never changed hands. They often end up serving themselves at the bar. Graham Parker visited while touring with Thin Lizzy in 1976. ‘It was a crazy place,’ he says. ‘It was like a speakeasy or something. Drinking and women and other stuff – it was wild. It was just this riotous party.’
‘I can remember once Kid Jensen came over to see the band play, somewhere in the north-east, and we drove back to the hotel,’ says Ted Carroll. ‘We stayed up drinking in the bar, and when we decided to go to bed someone pulled back the curtains and it was broad daylight outside.’ There was no hurry. At the Biz, breakfast was served whenever you woke up.
9
At the end of the Slade tour, which concluded in Bristol on 5 December 1972, Lynott sent a letter to Peter Fallon in Dublin. ‘A wild time was had by all!!!’ he wrote, enclosing a couple of publicity photographs of himself ‘just in case the chick wants a photo of yours truly, if not, sell them!!! (for free)’. Wrapped up amid the charm and guileless, good-humoured vanity is the unmistakeable whiff of raw ambition. The man who had observed stardom up close every night for a month was suddenly hungry for a participating role.
Thin Lizzy ended the year in Ireland, where ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ was number one and would remain on the charts for seventeen weeks. They saw in the New Year at the Fillmore West, in Bray rather than San Francisco, played RTÉ’s Spin-Off programme, and recorded an excellent session for Ken Stewart’s radio show. Everywhere they went their hit single was heavily trailed.
Back in Britain, its trajectory had been stealthier. ‘It was a sleeper,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘It took ages to get into the charts.’ When it had first been released, radio play was slow except from their staunch ally, Kid Jensen on Radio Luxembourg. When the song was finally aired on Radio 1, courtesy of DJ Stuart Henry, Decca hadn’t sufficient stock to satisfy demand. The record was lost in the Christmas rush, but Carroll and Morrison decided to re-promote it in the New Year with the help of a young booker called Chris O’Donnell, who had previously worked with Morrison at the Rik Gunnell Agency.
O’Donnell enlisted one of Britain’s leading music publicists, Tony Brainsby, to drum up some interest in the band. Brainsby brought a touch of old-school patrician clout to Thin Lizzy. He represented Queen, Fleetwood Mac and Paul McCartney and lived at Atherstone Mews on Gloucester Road in South Kensington. ‘If you put an R at the front and a D at the end,’ he would say languidly, ‘It spells “Rather Stoned”.’
Brainsby assembled an only mildly hyperbolic press release, which included a picture of Lynott wearing a top hat, à la Noddy Holder. He had toyed with a demi-glam look following the Slade tour – a sprinkle of glitter here, a smudge of Gale Barber’s mascara there – but he was more comfortable in denim, even if his jeans were carefully embroidered with colourful thread and patterned patches.
O’Donnell also hired an independent record pl
ugger, Mike Beaton, to hype the single. Tim Booth was working in London as a commercial artist, and Lynott asked him to pitch in. ‘I got a little noggin and put some whiskey in it, stuck on a little label and sent it round to DJs,’ says Booth. ‘Philip loved all that.’
Almost three months after its release, ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ finally broke into the singles charts on 20 January 1973. It rose to a peak of number six on 11 February, and spent a total of eleven weeks in the top forty. It reached number seven in Germany.
Lynott and the band were despatched on twenty-four-hour junkets to France, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany to perform on television and talk to the press. In Britain, there was a sudden surge of media interest. They were interviewed by New Musical Express and performed on Top of the Pops and the children’s television staple Crackerjack. The latter had been hosted by Lynott’s future father-in-law, Leslie Crowther, from 1960 to 1968, and was now presented by Michael Aspel. On the former they were introduced by Noel Edmonds wearing a tartan bow-tie. ‘It really took us by surprise,’ said Lynott. ‘Suddenly we were flung into a new world.’1
Lynott was ‘over the moon’ at it all, says Bell. ‘Completely, totally, absolutely joyful.’ He relished the attention and recognized the opportunity it presented. The single may have been a ‘fluke’2 but it had saved their career. It bought them time, brought them attention and afforded them greater power in controlling their own destiny.
Once ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ had stuck, Ted Carroll and Chris Morrison immediately went to Decca to renegotiate their contract. Instead of parting from the label, they agreed a six-month extension on the original deal, which would encompass a new album and take them through to March 1974. Decca advanced the band £10,000 of the royalties accruing for ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, monies spent on paying off heavy debts. The company also agreed to make a budget of £5,000 available to help promote the next album.
Doors opened. Thin Lizzy started playing cooler clubs to larger crowds, but such developments further exposed the problems highlighted during the Slade tour. Audience expectations had increased exponentially, but the group struggled to keep pace. They did not yet have the music, or the showmanship, to deal with the step up in status. The crowd would surge forward when they played ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, but when Thin Lizzy failed to hold their attention they would retreat back into the shadows.
Before the single had even left the charts, Lynott was distancing Thin Lizzy from it. ‘We don’t want people to get the impression that we are a folk rock band who do nothing but up-date old Irish drinking songs,’ he said in March 1973. ‘The flipside [‘Black Boys on the Corner’] is really much more reflective of what we play on stage. We do all our own material apart from [that] one number, and it’s all hard driving rock.’3
He was acutely sensitive to how the band were regarded critically, and suspected that the single could, in the long run, do more damage than good. The NME suggested that the Anglo equivalent of ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ would be a reggae version of ‘Greensleeves’. Brush Shiels thought the record was abysmal and made no bones about it. Eamon Carr regarded it as ‘a novelty’. ‘It took them a long time to escape from “Whiskey in the Jar”,’ says Paul Scully. ‘They ended up hating it.’ The second incarnation of Thin Lizzy, featuring Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, never performed the song live. A decade after its release, Lynott declared that the ‘song has lived to haunt me’.4
‘After the success of “Whiskey in the Jar” there was an awful lot of pressure on the band,’ he said. ‘People wanted us to record “Tipperary” rocked up, or “Danny Boy” rocked up … Everybody was coming up and telling us what we should be doing, and it wasn’t going too well.’5
Rather than take the easy or predictable option, the next Thin Lizzy single was ‘Randolph’s Tango’, an elegant, unashamedly romantic original which was, said Lynott, ‘the result of a conscious effort not to record a follow up’.6 It’s a sharp, sweet song, a mini movie or short story compressed into four minutes. He has fun with his two protagonists – the sensuous señorita with a plan, and the swashbuckling ranchero forever two beats off the pace – whose star-crossed affair finally comes good. Tim Booth’s ad campaign turned the lyrics into an illustrated cartoon strip. The single bombed, but the point was duly made that here was a writer of wit and substance, fronting a band which was far more than a one-trick pony.
And yet as much as Lynott professed his dislike at what ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ represented, from time to time he explicitly tempted lightning to strike twice. The singles ‘Philomena’ and ‘Wild One’, released in 1974 and 1975 respectively, were attempts to write original songs that echoed the Celtic folk-rock template of their breakthrough hit. Neither made any commercial headway, which was no loss in the case of ‘Philomena’, though more surprising in respect of the excellent ‘Wild One’.
‘Looking back, [the success of “Whiskey in the Jar”] must have been extremely hard for Philip,’ says Eric Bell. ‘Number one, it wasn’t one of his songs, and number two, he didn’t even play the bass on it. And it became a hit.’ Not just a hit, but the definitive version of a song which had been around for more than 300 years. The tempo, melody, guitar hooks and lyrics on the Thin Lizzy version have become the standard. They are integral elements of subsequent recordings by Simple Minds, Pulp, Metallica and scores of other pop and rock artists. One wonders what Lynott would have made of it all.
Prior to touring with Slade, Lynott and Gale Barber moved out of Hillfield Road and into 2a Welbeck Mansions on Inglewood Road, less than half a mile south along West End Lane. It was a rented two-bedroom flat in the kind of elegant mansion block typical of London’s more affluent districts. There was a security gate, a lobby with a marble floor and an elevator leading to the apartment on the second floor.
Thin Lizzy were still constantly on the verge of financial catastrophe, but for Lynott there had been a small but significant shift in status. In February 1973 Ted Carroll and Chris Morrison set up their own publishing company, named after a new addition to Lynott’s homestead, a black kitten called Pippin. Carroll and Morrison owned 15 per cent each of Pippin the Friendly Ranger, Music, Bell and Downey 20 per cent each, and Lynott 30 per cent. With publishing and performing money filtering through, he could afford to move. What extra money he earned was often ploughed back into Thin Lizzy in the form of equipment and stage clothes.
Domestic life was communal. Lynott lived at Welbeck Mansions until 1976, but he was almost never alone. He and Gale occupied one bedroom, and the other was open to anyone who needed it. Frank Murray, Brian Robertson, Nick Tauber, Smiley Bolger, Jim Fitzpatrick and a Nigerian engineer called Desmond all lived there at one time or another. Many more bodies could be found sleeping it off on the living-room floor on any given morning. Letters went home to his friends: ‘call and crash any time’ – an offer routinely accepted. The ‘open-house’ ethos was maintained until he died. ‘Philip didn’t really know how to be alone,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick.
The parts of his life that existed away from the band generally revolved around listening to music, watching films and smoking dope – in letters to friends Lynott would sign off, ‘Stoned Again, Philip.’ They might go for a drink in the Black Lion on West End Lane, stop in at a café or falafel house, catch a band and go to the Speakeasy for a late drink. He’d go shopping for clothes on King’s Road, and when summer came around, he cleared his daytime schedule to watch Wimbledon tennis on television. Arthur Ashe was his favourite. ‘It’s a good stoner sport, you just sit in the armchair,’ says Frank Murray. ‘I remember he insisted we drink Pimm’s while we were watching it.’
It was a more worldly extension of the scene that had existed at 85 Leighlin Road when they were all in their teens. ‘The guys were always in and out of the flat,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Collecting wages, discussing gigs, or just hanging out. They used to smoke a lot so they’d often come over and intend to stay an hour. Four or five hours later they’d still be there. We’d listen to a bunch o
f records and just shoot the breeze.’
Ted Carroll had set up Rock On records in 1971 at Portobello Road market. He had access to the best of all worlds of music. Lynott loved Capitol-era Steve Miller and Rod Stewart’s Gasoline Alley, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush and old favourites like the Kinks, Buffalo Springfield and Jimi Hendrix. He was listening to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Trouble Man, Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind and Sly Stone’s Fresh. ‘I remember hearing the first Eagles album with Philip at Frank Murray’s house,’ says Tim Booth. ‘I think later that seeped into things like “Borderline” and “Cowboy Song”. We all had the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Byrds.’
The impression he gave was of a man constantly on the move. ‘He didn’t like sitting still,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘He was either having sex, taking drugs or working.’ Of these three, work took precedence. He thought about the band constantly – its sound, its image, the songs, the show. He was often in touch directly with the record company. ‘Philip learned very quickly how to use the music industry properly,’ says Nick Tauber. ‘He was, with the exception of Freddie Mercury, the best worker of a room on the planet. He used to go down to the call centres where they sold the records and speak to all the girls, as well as the secretary of his A & R man, the secretary of the label’s managing director. He knew how to work the business. He was an incredible asset, not only on stage, not only as a bass guitarist, singer and writer, but as a member of that brand. He knew how to make people like him and he knew how to make them feel easy. He was very smart. He knew what he wanted from the band, he knew what he wanted to accomplish in life, and he knew what he wanted from everyone else.’
He was writing all the time, often enlisting help from Gale Barber to fill in words or phrases. ‘He was always looking for words that rhymed,’ she said. ‘We had a lot of parrying backwards and forwards with that, and with stanzas.’7 When a new song had been whipped into decent shape, he would make an acoustic demo on the hefty reel-to-reel recording machine he now had at home, set up in the living room next to his TV, record player and stack of records.
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