Occasionally, long-submerged resentments bobbed up to the surface. One day Lynott invited Cecil to the studio to watch him work. Parris told him that he would be leaving early to collect Sarah from school. ‘He said there was never anybody there to pick him up from school when he was a boy,’ Irene Parris recalls.
Relatively quickly, the relationship petered out. ‘He was very circumspect with his father,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘He felt he was after him because [Philip] had made it, after having nothing to do with him before that. Before a show, Philip would phone the office and say, “Get a couple of tickets for me dad, but limit the backstage.”’ When father and son bumped into one another in the street one day in Chelsea, Irene Parris claims that Lynott ‘didn’t want to know’.
In 1978 Lynott wrote the words to Gary Moore’s ‘Parisienne Walkways’, providing the song with its bravura encoded opening: ‘I remember Parris, back in ‘49 …’ The producer he was working with regularly at the time, Chris Tsangarides, picked up on the resonance but failed to make any headway on the subject. ‘He never said anything to me about his father,’ he says. ‘Never spoke about it. He never did to Gary, either. We used to speak about Phil to each other a hell of a lot after he died, to try and figure out what was going on in his mind. It never came to anything because he just never said.’ He followed up the theme with a bleak, unreleased song called ‘Blue Parris’.
After their brief intersection with the Lynotts, the Parris family got on with their own lives. In the 1980s they moved to Acton, west London, and Cecil and Irene became grandparents. When Lynott died, early in 1986, they sent flowers to the funeral, but they were not invited to attend. There has been no contact between the families since.
Cecil Parris lived a further twenty-six years. He died, aged eighty-six, on 6 April 2012. At the end of his life he suffered from dementia and was cared for in a nursing home, and his wife and daughter took over the running of the business. The Duke’s old stall at Shepherd’s Bush Market continues to sell hats, gloves, artificial flowers, swimwear and wedding accessories, and still trades under the Parris name, the middle name of his son.
Johnny the Fox appeared to be ill-conceived from the beginning. In August 1976, after some time spent at the Farmyard working on new material, Thin Lizzy started recording their next album. With two hit singles – ‘Jailbreak’ was on its way into the UK top forty – a hit album and significantly increased performance fees, the financial rewards were finally beginning to accumulate. The years of Thin Lizzy Ltd working out of one room in Soho with no money were gone. They renegotiated the band’s deal with Phonogram for an advance of $750,000 per album, but it would take time for royalties to accrue. ‘Philip made all his money on the publishing,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘They barely broke even on the touring because everyone was on a retainer, and it would take eighteen months to recoup on the albums. They were on a salary of £500 a week, but Phil was getting the publishing and the PRS [Performing Right Society royalties], which enabled him to buy a flat while everyone else was living in bedsits. That was the difference.’
In 1976 he left Welbeck Mansions and bought 66 Embassy House, a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a modern purpose-built block of flats, once again abutting West End Lane at the junction with Cleve Road. It was a sedate place, full of well-heeled ladies of a certain age, a demographic that Lynott did his best to shake up. Once again, Charlie McLennan lived there with him. He was now Lynott’s ‘percy’, his personal roadie, paid for out of his own pocket and effectively at his beck and call: driver, gofer, drug-dealer, bodyguard, flatmate, wingman, friend and delivery man. The flat was partially furnished with objects that Philomena would send down from Manchester. ‘Big brass beds, carpets and wardrobes,’ says Chalkie Davies, who later bought the property from Lynott. ‘Very nice furniture that was just a little too big.’
The management planned to exploit a tax loophole by recording the next album outside Britain, at Musicland Studios in Munich, situated in the city’s high-rise Arabellapark Hotel. The top of the building was a favoured local suicide spot. The bottom was a windowless basement studio complex where the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple had all recently recorded.
The experiment was not a success. The atmosphere was mildly claustrophobic and moderately depressing. Thin Lizzy were accustomed to passing through Germany on tour, but several weeks stuck in an antiseptic environment far from home did not improve their collective mood. There were technical issues with the studio and the tape they were using. After two weeks, John Alcock persuaded the management to abandon Musicland and return to Ramport in London, ‘and screw the tax man’.
They came back to Britain with almost nothing usable beyond a handful of drum tracks. In effect the album sessions began again from scratch. ‘We did the really good songs first,’ says Alcock. ‘“Don’t Believe a Word”, “Johnny”, “Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed”. Those were great. Then the problems started, because we had ten or fifteen minutes of blank space. What are we going to do, put out an EP?’
Even without a dispiriting fortnight spent in a high-tech German vault, the odds were stacked against the record. It was only six months since the band had recorded their last album and they had spent most of that time on tour and then, in Lynott’s case, in hospital. They were making a record because their newfound success demanded it, not because they were ready.
As the writer, singer and primary focus of a band now expected to fulfil certain goals, Lynott’s tension level on Johnny the Fox was high, while his energy levels were severely depleted. ‘Phil was perhaps a little more quiet than usual, but he didn’t strike me as being ill,’ says Alcock. ‘He was still smoking a lot of dope, and if somebody’s smoking a lot of weed, they’re kind of introspective anyway. I did suggest modifying the working hours a bit because he was always late … “Let’s go home at eight or nine o’clock so you get a bit of rest,” [but] he said, “No, I don’t need it. I’m all right.”’
While recuperating from hepatitis, he had used his time in hospital to write several new songs, among them ‘Fool’s Gold’ and ‘Massacre’, but the quality was inconsistent and the quantity wanting. Relations in the studio began to deteriorate. ‘He would come up with ideas and I’d say, “Seriously? Is that the best we can do?”’ says Alcock. ‘It got really bad when I suggested that we should maybe consider a couple of covers. For Phil that was absolute anathema. That was me mishandling things. You don’t say to Phil Lynott of all people, who was more or less a poet, that his writing’s not good enough, so how about covering something from Noddy Holder?’
The relationship with Brian Robertson was also breaking down. By his own estimation, Robertson was putting away at least a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label a day. Lynott was foresworn from hard liquor but was still smoking dope. Robertson tended towards aggression and provocation when he was drunk, while Lynott had a mean temper but generally maintained an equilibrium. They were running on different fuel and at incompatible speeds.
Lynott still at least nominally strived to make sure everyone felt included in the creative process. ‘I feel that in the band, everybody pulls their weight when it comes to the music,’ he told Harry Doherty at the time. ‘I just happen to write a lot of the songs and lyrics … I let Thin Lizzy interpret my songs as it wishes. I come down with a song and Brian [Downey] says that he’d like such and such a beat. Then I let the band develop the song and even if I disagree, my power’s only a quarter. I’m only a figurehead as far as the press in concerned, but that’s the superficial thing. I mean, Brian Downey is the quietest member of the band but if he says he doesn’t want to play a number, that’s it stumped.’2
What was admirable in theory threw up challenges in practice. ‘There were a few times when it became a little chicken-shit,’ says Gorham. ‘If he came up with an idea and no one liked it, he’d say, “Okay, well I’ll just quit the band.” Oh right! So that was the end of the conversation.’
During rehearsals for
the album, Lynott and Robertson had clashed over ‘Don’t Believe a Word’, at the time a slow, bluesy ballad, reminiscent of ‘Stand by Me’. Its coordinates were crudely mapped out on acoustic guitar. ‘He brought that to us and I said, “I’m not playing that,”’ says Robertson. ‘I told him it was shit, and he disappeared from the Farmyard for three days. Nobody could find him. I said to Downey, “Listen, we’d better do something about this song because he’s pissed off.” Downey suggested we do it in a shuffle. There was just two of us in a little rehearsal room. I wrote the riff. When Philip came back [the song] was a shuffle and a riff, not the slow version, which was really sort of morbid. He was well chuffed with it. Of course, he gets all the publishing.’
With larger sums now being generated, the organization of songwriting credits became an occasional grievance. Because of the increasing discrepancy in earning potential between the principal songwriter and the remaining band members, the management suggested that for one calendar year publishing revenue be split evenly four ways, a civilized compromise which Lynott agreed to, after which the copyrights reverted back to him. ‘Phil was very fair about money,’ says Ted Carroll. ‘He was a man of his word, there was nothing dodgy about him.’
‘Don’t Believe a Word’ was one of the highlights of the record. It was Lynott at his leanest – not street-guy tough, but emotionally ruthless. An unflinching mea culpa, it’s an anti-love song that sacrifices the songwriter’s greatest weapon – sincerity – in favour of a much more unpalatable truth.
Don’t believe me if I tell you
That I wrote this song for you
There might be some other silly pretty girl
I’m singing it to
Don’t believe a word
For words are only spoken
Your heart is like a promise
Made to be broken
Don’t believe a word
Words can tell lies
And lies are no comfort
When there’s tears in your eyes
Around this time in interviews he revelled in his image as the lethal lady killer. ‘I’m the easiest lay in town,’ he’d say, adding that the road crew called him ‘Philip Line-’em-up’. ‘Sometimes I’m real brutal with chicks, just go after them, get what I want and see you later,’ he said. ‘Everything I do and say is to get what I want.’3
It’s an attitude summed up by the bluntly chauvinistic line from ‘Jailbreak’ – ‘Hey you, good looking female, come here!’ – but Chris O’Donnell insists that it offers a simplistic distortion of life on the road. ‘These people weren’t groupies,’ he says. ‘There were people we knew in every city we went to. College journalists, women who worked for the promoter or the radio, people who had supported us. They were individuals, they weren’t random women picked up for a shag. We met [infamous groupie Connie Hamzy] in Arkansas, she was desperate to meet the band. She said, “You’re not a real rock band until you’ve slept with me.” Phil said, “Huh?” He didn’t get it at all. Wasn’t interested.’
‘Don’t Believe a Word’ is concise and punchy, testament to a rock band in full control of its sonic identity. ‘Johnny’ and ‘Rocky’ are similarly hard-edged. The former – originally called ‘Weasel’s Rhapsody’ – explores the dark alter ego of Lynott’s perennial protagonist, now a ‘juiced up junkie’ on the wrong end of a stand-off with the police. ‘Rocky’ is an ambiguous portrait of Brian Robertson (‘Cocky Rocky, the rock and roll star / He’s got the talent to take him far’) and comes, aptly, with a trademark twin-guitar break.
‘Fool’s Gold’ ties together Lynott’s shared fascination with Ireland and America. His terrifically hammy spoken prologue on the Irish potato famine – where Spinal Tap’s ‘Stonehenge’ collides with Patrick Kavanagh’s epic starvation poem The Great Hunger – leads to an emigrant’s tale of hard times fortune-chasing on the frontier. The fine, pimp-rolling funk-rock of ‘Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed’ is a more contemporary slice of American history, a ghetto hustle full of ‘shady deals’ in the parts of town ‘where only black men go’.
In the wake of the tight, controlled aesthetic of the past two albums, there was a conscious effort to be more expansive. Songs arrived fleshed out with strings and backing vocals. The aching ‘Borderline’ entered country-rock territory familiar to fans of the Eagles, or the Rolling Stones in their more reflective moments. ‘Sweet Marie’ and ‘Old Flame’ were limp rather than limpid. ‘Boogie Woogie Dance’ was unabashed filler.
Johnny the Fox offered the first faint hints that Lynott as a writer was falling back at times on rehashed archetypes. He was over-utilizing the ‘Johnny Cool’ persona, while the pounding ‘Massacre’ was essentially a sequel to ‘Emerald’. Originally titled ‘Little Big Horn’, it was another song of slaughter, only this time the battle-lines had moved from ancient Ireland to the nineteenth-century American plains. But even when repeating himself, Lynott was routinely capable of vividly arresting imagery. ‘Massacre’ tells of ‘six hundred unknown heroes killed like sleeping buffalo’; towards the end of ‘Fool’s Gold’, there is an abrupt and effective switch of scene and tone, as ‘the vulture sits on top of the big top circus arena’ watching the ‘beautiful dancing tightrope ballerina’, a Van Morrisonesque tumble of words rendered all the more memorable by Lynott’s immaculate phrasing.
Given the circumstances in which it was made, Johnny the Fox was good enough. Released on 16 October 1976, it was an act of consolidation, solid rather than spectacular, and in Britain and Europe it maintained Thin Lizzy’s upward trajectory. It climbed to number eleven in the album charts and brought the band another hit single in ‘Don’t Believe a Word’, which reached number twelve in the UK in mid-January 1977.
It was a patchy album conceived with an unerring certainty of what would deliver on stage. ‘Massacre’ worked well enough in the studio, but in the shows that the band undertook in the autumn of 1976 it became a slashing, astonishingly visceral tour de force.
NME sent reviewer David Housham to the concert at Bristol’s Colston Hall on 22 October: ‘Watching two thousand Bristolians exploding in a spastic frenzy, cheering, stomping, screaming for a third encore, you have to conclude that there is no better bona fide rock band in England, maybe the world, than Thin Lizzy at the moment.’ The sold-out UK tour ended with three shows at the Hammersmith Odeon on 14, 15 and 16 November.
These concerts were recorded for future release on Live and Dangerous, and represent a high-water mark of unity, power and dynamism. The Thin Lizzy show had become a vivid piece of theatre, tightly choreographed and ritualistic. ‘Jailbreak’ began amid wailing sirens, police lights and a flurry of flash bombs; a cleverly lit mirror ball showered stars around the theatre on ‘Cowboy Song’, and Lynott picked out individuals in the crowd with the beam from his mirrored scratch plate. The set was a perfectly paced mix of consistent attack and occasional release, the tension only slackening slightly on the semi-improvised audience participation number of ‘Baby Drives Me Crazy’, and full-tilt encores of ‘Me and the Boys Were Wondering How You and the Girls Were Getting Home Tonight’ and ‘The Rocker’, the sole song from the original Thin Lizzy incarnation included in the set.
‘They were a real working band,’ says Nick Tauber. ‘That’s why they were so brilliant when they hit the big time, because they were ready for it. Philip honed his stagecraft. He’d got all the patter down. He’d got the way he looked down. He’d done everything he wanted to do.’
The next stop was their first ever headlining tour of America at the end of 1976. On the eve of their departure, Brian Robertson badly cut his hand while socializing at the Speakeasy, defending Scottish singer Frankie Miller from an attack with a broken bottle by a member of funk band Gonzalez. ‘Everybody thinks I was pissed as a fart, but in fact I’d only had two whiskies,’ says Robertson. ‘It was Frankie who was [drunk], I just went to save his face.’
The night of the opening show was three days away. Frank Murray was already in the States, setting up
the concerts and organizing the band’s biggest round of promotional activity to date. He received the call from Chris Morrison informing him that Robertson would not be able to play guitar for several months, and set about informing press, agents and the record label at a moment’s notice that, once again, a crucial Thin Lizzy tour would not be happening. Lynott was ‘fucking furious,’ says Murray. Injured and isolated, Robertson announced the following March that he was leaving the band permanently. Predictably, it turned out not to be as simple as all that.
A silver lining arrived in the unlikely form of Freddie Mercury. On the night of 26 November, when he should have been subordinating New York to the power of Thin Lizzy, Lynott instead visited Advision Studios in London for the playback of Queen’s new album, A Day at the Races. The two groups shared a publicist in Tony Brainsby and knew each other socially. By the end of the night, Thin Lizzy had been booked to support Queen on their forthcoming US tour, starting on 18 January 1977 and playing arenas and stadiums with capacities between 5,000 and 20,000. Lynott was pragmatic, viewing the tour as a chance ‘to get through to the promoters and remind the kids that we’re still alive and well and get some reliability into our reputation.’4
Gary Moore was again brought in as a replacement for Brian Robertson, both parties agreeing in advance that it would be a temporary arrangement. Thin Lizzy played a forty-five-minute opening set each night, the distilled essence of a world-class act. ‘Freddie Mercury was really, really shocked at how good Lizzy were on that tour,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘Their soundcheck time got less and less, because Freddie felt threatened. He knew that Philip had something special as a frontman, in terms of communicating with an audience.’
They were handicapped by the restrictions placed on their light show, soundcheck time, stage boundaries and PA system, but Thin Lizzy still gave Queen a fright in places like Boston and the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island. ‘It was their biggest ever tour, and it went great,’ Gary Moore said. ‘Queen would be sitting at the airport in the morning reading the papers, and we would be getting better reviews than them. It didn’t go down too well. Apparently Freddie was stomping around the dressing room going, “Get them off the stage, there’s too much applause!”’
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