The Quality Street Gang are in the mix, happily exaggerating their exploits in the Biz and Deno’s, while the entire song is a celebration of America, Thin Lizzy’s new frontier. Dino’s Lodge gets a name-check, but the depiction of the United States as one eternal Downtown was inspired by the seedy glamour of the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard, a lawless nation state which had seemingly declared every night a long weekend.
What elevates ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ to art is Lynott’s understanding that the greatest, most enduring legends aren’t created in the doing, but in the retelling. In urging his audience to remember ‘that time down at Johnny’s place’ and ‘that chick that used to dance a lot’, he not only makes it a communal experience, he embellishes and layers, heightening their exploits to the realm of folklore. It is a song about storytelling as much as it is a song telling a story. It’s a trick familiar from the great works of Celtic history, but also from long days and nights spent spinning yarns in pubs, cars and dingy dressing rooms.
It is brilliantly conceived and immensely powerful. Has any rock writer better captured the glorious ache of anticipation – of the night to come, of the loves to be loved, of the endless summer stretched out like a benediction – than in the final verse?
The jukebox in the corner blasting out my favourite song
The nights are getting warmer, it won’t be long
It won’t be long till summer comes
Now that the boys are here again
None of which would matter much if the music failed to play its crucial supporting role. It is a deceptively complex kind of anthem. Brian Downey’s snappy shuffle keeps the whole thing swinging, while the crunching power chords have an unorthodox, almost jazzy joie de vivre.
‘Basically Phil came in with the bones,’ says Brian Robertson. ‘In “The Boys Are Back …” all those fancy minors and diminished chords, I put them in there. The harmonies. The bridge. I did that. He was a great lyricist, nobody can touch him on that, but when it came to the arrangements, [other] people put so much into them, and it should have been acknowledged. I’m not taking anything away from the lyric [but] there was a lot of it to do with other people in the background.’
‘Phil came in with the basic chord structure,’ says Scott Gorham, ‘and there’s a couple of turnaround guitar chords I threw in there that he fell in love with. When we first did the demo, there were no guitar harmonies or guitar lines or anything … We all realized it needed more, something more interesting musically. That’s when me and Robbo started working the whole thing out.’
Jailbreak was, says its producer John Alcock, ‘a very collaborative effort’. Four of the nine songs are co-written, and every track relied on the band to bring it fully to fruition. The producer was struck when he visited Lynott at Welbeck Mansions that his musical process was often as fragmented as his lyrical one. ‘He played me some stuff live where he would just be singing along, at other times he had cassettes. He had a porta-studio where he put down some very rough ideas. It was all bits. It was a verse here, a chorus there, a bit of instrumental stuff there, a riff here.’
He was also surprised at the distance between the ‘ultimate rocker’ he had seen on stage in Bracknell and the man he met at home. ‘Phil wasn’t flamboyant, he wasn’t loud,’ he says. ‘I’d been around a hell of a lot of bands at that time, and the front guy is always the one with the biggest ego. Phil didn’t come off like that. He was quiet, reserved and very polite. Kind of introspective. I got the impression that still waters ran deep … Even in the whole time that I knew Phil, I always felt that there were several more layers underneath that I didn’t know about, but suspected were there.’
After rehearsing for two weeks at Farmyard Studios in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, in January 1976 Thin Lizzy moved into the Who’s Ramport Studios in London to start recording. It was the third album in a renegotiated three-album deal with Phonogram, and Lynott sensed this was crunch time. ‘Jailbreak was the sixth album,’ says Frank Murray, ‘So he owed it to himself, never mind the record company.’ According to Brian Robertson, ‘we knew that we were on the chopping block’.
Ramport was a converted church. The studio had been purpose-built by John Alcock for use by the Who, and was situated in an unglamorous part of Battersea, where the nearest – indeed only – local distraction was the Butcher’s Arms. With no clubs nearby and no hangers-on dropping in, they finished recording in three weeks. Alcock remembers Lynott ‘sitting in the control room, rolling joints that he consumed at quite an alarming rate, but it was never out of hand. I had to go down to the local pub every now and then to retrieve them, but they were there to work.’
The songs were packed full of action and adventure, written to play to the strengths of a band which had found its feet. By keeping things relatively loose in rehearsals and allowing the music to spark into life in the studio, Alcock was the first producer to finally harness on record their live power. Robertson and Gorham were now an intuitive unit, combining to give Thin Lizzy a completely distinctive sonic identity. ‘On Nightlife you can hear strains of that duel guitar sound, and on each subsequent album their trademark became more obvious,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘When we hit Jailbreak it was honed to a “T”. We became conscious of it, and because of that Phil decided to write songs in that direction.’
The title song is a powerhouse riff hard-wired to a further refinement of Lynott’s recurring leitmotif of bad boys on the lam. The gang are busting out ‘dead or alive’. Best not to get in their way. ‘Angel from the Coast’ is looser, a funky rock and roll fable starring a femme fatale straight out of a film noir. It ends with a circle of cops and a hail of bullets; inevitably, ‘the crook got away’.
‘Romeo and the Lonely Girl’ is a more romantic narrative, a study of a handsome ladies’ man (Gary Moore believed it was about him, although it is equally convincing as a knowing self-portrait of Lynott) who falls for everyone and ends up with no one. It was the record company’s choice for the first single from the album – they wanted to overdub a horn part – and in many ways it is a more immediate song than ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. The same is true of ‘Running Back’, easily the most concise, insistent pop song Lynott had written to this point. It was adapted from a slow, sad unreleased song called ‘Leaving Town’, but even its new breezy exterior could not hide the pain at Lynott’s break-up with Gale Barber. A vulnerable streak had not entirely been sacrificed on the altar of machismo.
If I said I was sorry
Would you still leave me?
I never thought you’d go till you did
Believe me
When they say it’s over
It’s not all over completely
‘Cause I’d come running
I’d come running back to you again
Where once Lynott drew from the mystic-folk explorations of Astral Weeks, now he was explicitly referencing the tight, blue-eyed soul of Van Morrison’s Moondance and His Band and the Street Choir, right down to the song’s ‘come running’ refrain. It was Thin Lizzy’s most nakedly accessible song to date, with a nagging, faux-naif keyboard motif played by session musician Tim Hinkley, laid-back handclaps and background saxophone. Brian Robertson loathed the upbeat arrangement and refused to play on it, a flashpoint that exemplified the growing tensions between Lynott and the Scottish guitar player, still only nineteen.
‘Brian Robertson was absolutely phenomenal,’ says Alcock. ‘I think he’s a great guitar player, but a total pain in the arse to work with. Half the time he was drunk, the other half he was depressed. And Phil could be quite high maintenance. To this day I don’t know whether he had something wrong with his hearing. We all sat around in the control room swearing up and down that everything was in tune, and Phil was going, “No, no, that’s flat, that’s flat.” We spent hours tuning guitars to the point where tempers got really frayed … then Brian Robertson would get even drunker than he was.
‘A Scottish guy that was drinking too much
and Phil shouting at him all the time because he was constantly out of tune – this did not make for a happy session. But Brian added a tremendous amount. It would never have happened, Jailbreak, without Brian Robertson. When he was on, he was great. Unfortunately that came with a price.’
‘Fight or Fall’ is a soft and rather self-conscious call to arms to Lynott’s ‘black brothers’, ending in a vocal refrain that comes perilously close to pastiche. He did not yet know where to align himself with his black heritage, not least because he wasn’t entirely sure where those roots lay. On the one hand, Lynott wasn’t keen to pursue the topic in public because it forced him to acknowledge a sense of difference in his appearance, which he didn’t particularly believe mattered. ‘I think questions [about my colour] could make it an issue,’ he said. ‘I never thought of it as an issue before; it’s just accentuating the fact. It’s like somebody goes “Do you know you’ve got a mole on your face”, and everybody looks. It’s there, but you just don’t see it.’1
‘I don’t think he was proud or not proud of being black,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘When you hung around with Phil, colour was not an issue, it never was. Unless some asshole came up and made a remark, it wasn’t talked about. Not that it was swept under the carpet.’
Lynott had been exploring his black identity for songwriting impetus since ‘Black Boys on the Corner’ in 1972, but readily admitted that ‘I haven’t got a natural feel for playing reggae or funk.’2 Lyrically, too, his approach to the subject didn’t always ring true. The rhythmic blues of ‘Ghetto Woman’, written in 1973 and never officially released, felt like a rather dutiful exercise in imitation. In interviews and in private Lynott talked about the ‘brothers’, in the manner of a man outside the circle of conversation trying to find a suitable entry point. ‘I’m very proud of being a Brother, don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘But I think that there are a lot of people like Stevie Wonder who’re more apt than me to put it across. My cause is more the half-caste cause. You know, a lot of people are really delicate with the questions: “it must be really difficult being a half-caste”.’3
In 1975 he had written a reggae song called ‘Half-Caste’, released on the B-side of ‘Rosalie’. It’s the somewhat tongue-in-cheek lament of a twice-over outsider in multicultural London. He can’t click with his black girl in Brixton because he’s not black enough, and doesn’t quite measure up to the middle-class white girl in Richmond because her father thinks ‘the brown boy is born to serve’. If a proscribed choice of female company was not something Lynott generally had to worry about, the song at least pointed out – however clumsily – the obstacles he felt in wholly aligning himself to any one community, or being accepted in return. Having been raised in a white environment, he would always be most comfortable defining himself as ‘an Irishman first, black second’.4
The disenfranchised black man was just one of several manifestations of the heroic outsider on Jailbreak. ‘Cowboy Song’ is a variation on the Eagles’s ‘Desperado’ and depicts the touring rock and roller as the modern-day vaquero, a high-plains existentialist dedicated to living a life without ties. The thunderous ‘Emerald’ is perhaps the ultimate Thin Lizzy Celtic epic, all myth and muscle, written collectively in the studio and documenting a terrible triumph of merciless right over vanquished wrong.
Down from the glen came the marching men
With their shields and their swords
To fight the fight they believed to be right
Overthrow the overlords
‘Warrior’ was similarly heavy, a tribute to a rather dubious heroism that Lynott detected in those musicians who ‘gave up everything to make music and live life to the full’.5 In interviews he namechecked Jimi Hendrix, Robbie McIntosh and Duane Allman as examples, all three of whom conformed to the live-fast-die-young cliché, which Lynott seemed increasingly inclined to find seductive.
‘Warrior’ was just one strand in a connective thread of rebel songs – ‘Cowboy Song’, ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Angel from the Coast’, ‘Emerald’, ‘Fight or Fall’ and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ – in which the protagonists rise up against moral restrictions and accepted social boundaries. Building on the more prosaic aggression of Fighting, Lynott had developed a stoned libertarian manifesto that drew from Space Invader arcade games, Marvel comic-book figures, Irish mytho-history, cowboy lore, rock-and-roll rebellion, low-rolling Americana and H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. For the cover image, Jim Fitzpatrick depicted the band breaking loose from a video game gripped by the sinister Overmaster character. The sleeve notes expanded on the theme.
‘That warrior aspect fell into the concept of the whole Jailbreak album of people constantly trying to escape and being held down by this Overmaster figure,’ said Lynott when the album came out. ‘The jailbreak thing is about youth and oppression. When you reach the age of 14 or 18, you suddenly find strength that you’ve never had before. There’s aggression, power and rebelliousness … it can be put to good use in the right position, where there is an oppressor … The whole point was that the Overmaster was bad and we were busting out for the right of freedom of speech, for all that freedom stands for.’6
Jailbreak was released on 26 March 1976, midway through Thin Lizzy’s headline tour of the UK, which had Graham Parker and the Rumour supporting. Parker’s Irish manager, Dave Robinson, was part of the crowd that had run around the Dublin clubs a decade earlier and was in the process of setting up Stiff Records. Lynott liked London’s pub-rock scene, enjoyed its rough-and-ready rootsiness, and sensed that what would shortly become ‘punk’ was fomenting in its kernel. He had turned up to see Graham Parker and the Rumour before one of their early shows in the capital. ‘I think he was just really interested in all kinds of music and he was very up on what I was doing from the very beginning,’ says Parker. ‘We played “White Honey” at the soundcheck, and I sat down on the edge of the stage with the acoustic guitar and Phil started talking. He said, “What’s that ‘White Honey’? Show me how you play that.” So I played him the riff. The swing beat interested him. Then he walked off and the next thing I know we’re touring with them.’
Graham Parker and the Rumour was a support act to be reckoned with, a band of musical adepts led by a ball of wiry intensity, but Thin Lizzy were by now one of the finest live bands in Britain. ‘After a show, you’d watch them fight over a dropped note,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘“You dropped a note in the fourth song!” Everyone would be waiting outside the dressing room while they discussed this note. They were a very, very professional unit.’
Their show had become a perfectly paced tour de force. ‘You had three albums and when you picked the best, then you had a genius live set,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Everything kind of fell into place for that tour. There was a great bunch of songs and they all worked really well live. They had a very high standard. Philip never stopped working on the stage. He had learned that if you’re playing to a packed house, the crowd are already on your side. You don’t have to work too hard to get them to clap their hands or repeat something after you. They want to be part of the show.’ They introduced three ramps which reached out from the stage into the crowd, creating a physical and symbolic bridge between band and audience.
‘Phil looked forward to going on the road …’ says John Alcock, ‘more than the release of the record … He wanted the excitement and that feeling of being in front of people, playing.’
As the tour was gathering pace, the album made an almost immediate impact, reaching the top ten in the UK in April 1976. On 17 April, Thin Lizzy switched continents to begin a string of US dates supporting bands that included Aerosmith, Rush and Styx. Between these commitments, they had a scattering of headline shows in smaller halls. By 2 June, the day of their concert supporting Journey at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in California, the ground was shifting beneath their feet. Jailbreak was heading for the top twenty in the States, while the previous week ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ had broken into the Power Play top fifty in the Bil
lboard charts. Having been picked up by regional radio in America, ‘it caught on and grew,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘It was like a bowling ball running down towards the pin. It was pretty cool.’
On the night they played Santa Monica, thoroughly outperforming Journey, the song had risen to number thirty-two. Mercury Records threw a celebratory after-show party at the Old Venice Noodle Company on Main Street. The single continued to climb steadily during the next eight weeks, reaching a peak of twelve on 24 July.
Listening to ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, several American critics and DJs drew a comparison between Lynott’s writing style and that of Bruce Springsteen. It was something friends had remarked upon much earlier. ‘I remember when Springsteen came along, Tim Booth said, “Have you heard this guy? He writes just like Philip,”’ says Eamon Carr. Although the first Thin Lizzy album pre-dated the first Springsteen album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., by almost two years, the ebb-and-flow of influence was less clear-cut than that timeline might suggest. Both men were in thrall to Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, and had hit upon a similar style at a similar time. On one level, Lynott took it as a compliment. ‘Phil was genuinely excited about that, and touched,’ says Chris Salewicz. A music writer covering the West Coast tour for NME, he and Lynott became good friends. ‘He felt he had moved up a level.’
On the other hand, Lynott tended to be handed the rough end of the comparison. Springsteen had become a huge deal in 1975 with his third album, Born to Run, and he was granted seniority to a band only now registering on the American landscape. Lynott was needled, but otherwise the detail surrounding their US success was movie-script perfect. Thin Lizzy were staying in the Continental Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard, a rock and roll Elysium, and the scene of many of Led Zeppelin’s and the Who’s most legendary escapades. Lynott did his best to compete. With five minutes to spare before leaving on a chauffeur-driven day out to Disneyland, he selected a random bikini’d blonde from the Hyatt poolside and, with barely a grunt of introduction, took her to his room for a swiftly negotiated sexual diversion before continuing to his audience with Mickey Mouse. It was a grotesque and fabulous distortion of the American Dream. On the radio, in bars, bedrooms and limos, Elton John and Kiki Dee’s ‘Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart’ vied with ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ for supremacy, providing a constant backdrop to similar scenes from the sex, drugs and rock and roll set text. On stage, the audience response – Thin Lizzy were second on the bill, but had already staged an unofficial coup d’état – was rapturous.
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