Released on 2 June 1978, Live and Dangerous reached number two in the UK charts, kept from number one thanks only to the omnipresent cultural phenomenon that was Grease. The live version of ‘Rosalie/Cowgirl’s Song’ became a top-twenty single. Its enduring huge success masked more immediate problems. The bulk of the record was recorded in 1976, and only two tracks – ‘Southbound’ and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ – represented material from the past eighteen months. The rest of the tracks were written pre-1977, although ‘Are You Ready?’ and ‘Baby Drives Me Crazy’ had not been released on any previous singles or albums. They were party songs, exclusively reserved for show time.
Lynott was not the only band member who chafed a little at having to reproduce the album’s historic track listing night after night on the Live and Dangerous tour of the summer of 1978. Notwithstanding the addition of ‘Bad Reputation’, ‘Don’t Believe a Word’ and a new song, ‘S & M’, the set adhered closely to the one they had been playing for two years.
It seemed rather odd to be touring a live album in the first place, but then touring was what Thin Lizzy did. That was also becoming a problem. ‘We were … on the road all the time, there never seemed to be any real downtime,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘I place that firmly on the shoulders of the management: they always said, if you ever come off the road, people will just forget about you, and that put the fear of God into us. We’d be out there for six, seven months at a pop.’
Gorham and Lynott were their own worst enemies. After a fortnight without any shows they would be jumpy, itching to get back. It had become their reality. In Lynott’s case, the band dominated everything. If he had downtime, he would be on the phone to Morrison and O’Donnell to discuss the next move or to air grievances. His mother told him he was working too hard.
‘He was the songwriter, the singer, everything,’ Philomena Lynott told me. ‘When they finished making a record I would ask, “Where’s Brian [Downey]?” and he would say, “He’s gone fishing, Ma.” Brian had two sons and he loved fishing. Philip never had time to do that. He had to think of the next album, the next tour. No time to sleep. When things went awry in the band it was up to him to find replacements.’ He would, occasionally, concede that he felt pressurized. ‘It’s tough to be on top of all this, man,’ he confided to Nigel Grainge one night as a party unfolded around him.
The Live and Dangerous tour ended on 22 and 23 June with two nights in London at the 12,000-capacity Empire Pool, now Wembley Arena. It was the biggest indoor venue Thin Lizzy had ever headlined, supported by Horslips, the Irish band that included Lynott’s old friend and Tara Telephone co-founder, Eamon Carr. ‘Philip grabbed me and took me aside, not to chop out lines, but to take a rain-check,’ says Carr. ‘It happened a few times over the years. It was a case of, “Look where we are!” I used to love that, actually, because it was almost like he was marking his progress, and I was someone he could measure his success by … It was strange and touching. I’d never realized there was that kind of sentimentality in him.’
Lynott didn’t want to play Wembley. He felt it was too big, too impersonal, and that the ‘supporters’ would get a raw deal. He was persuaded to change his mind by one of Britain’s leading promoters, Harvey Goldsmith, who convinced him that American agents needed to be shown that Thin Lizzy could handle these kinds of venues if the band were to have a shot at re-establishing themselves in the States. To this end, Creem’s rock critic, Richard Riegel, was flown over. ‘They opened with “Jailbreak”,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘Phil walked out through the smoke and the sirens, banged his bass and the roadie had forgotten to turn on his amp. He recovered, but I didn’t go near the dressing room that night. I know he saw every roadie one by one.’
Despite the opening-night hiccup, Riegel’s feature-length review reported that, yes, hepatitis and recent albums had slowed the band’s trajectory in the US, but Thin Lizzy was fighting fit and arena-worthy once again. Almost before his words hit the page, the ground around the band tilted once more. Perhaps the saddest part of Live and Dangerous was the fact that within six weeks of its release the line-up that it celebrated – Lynott, Gorham, Robertson and Downey – permanently broke up.
Brian Robertson had been merely tolerated since the incident at the Speakeasy. Chalkie Davies recalls that Lynott had been plotting his departure for some time. ‘I remember Philip telling me well in advance that Robbo would be gone, and the next thing I remember Gary [Moore] was at Anson Road with Brush Shiels.’ Robertson’s behaviour backstage at the Wembley concerts – he was drunk, stoned and abusive to the road crew – was the final straw. His last stand was in Ibiza, on 7 July 1978.
The two remained friends and Lynott harboured a degree of regret over how things had turned out, not just professionally, but personally. Robertson was only eighteen when he joined Thin Lizzy and was given little guidance or advice about how to pace himself. At times, those around the band felt he was goaded into going too far. One legacy of his time in the group was a serious and lasting alcohol problem. When Sean O’Connor of the Lookalikes was touring with Thin Lizzy in 1980, he recalls that ‘there was not one day went by when I wasn’t offered coke by numerous people. I didn’t take drugs and Philip was incredibly protective. I saw him pin a guy against the wall once and say, “If you ever offer Sean coke again I’ll fucking have you killed.” He would say to me, “I don’t want another Robbo on my hands, or on my conscience either.”’ Darren Wharton and Midge Ure also credit Lynott for keeping them away from drugs when they were part of Thin Lizzy.
Gary Moore joined again, this time as the permanent second guitarist. Privately, Brush Shiels told Lynott that there was no way Moore would last the distance.
To lose one Brian can be counted as misfortune; to lose two suggested a deeper malaise. When Thin Lizzy departed for America for a ten-week tour beginning on 8 August 1978, they did so without Brian Downey, Lynott’s ever-reliable rock since the days of the Black Eagles. Downey had decided he wanted out. He was tired, overdoing things and concerned about the escalating drug scene in the band. He had a young family, which he barely saw. He was also disillusioned by the music.
‘The direction seemed to be completely lost,’ he said in 1979. ‘It was very strange with the Live and Dangerous set. We’d recorded it two years earlier and we then had to go and promote an album which was two years old.’1 Downey left and went underground, retreating to a cottage in rural Cork. He spent his time fishing, listening to music, and trying to re-engage with a vague memory of normal life. It was the kind of pause that Lynott never allowed himself. He was furious with the drummer, and regarded his departure as a traitorous act. For a time it wasn’t clear whether Downey would want – or would be allowed – to return, but he was back in the ranks by the end of the year.
Rather than cancel another US tour, he was replaced at short notice by American drummer, Mark Nauseef, late of the Ian Gillan Band. Such was Thin Lizzy’s momentum, the personnel changes didn’t make much discernible difference to the power of the live show. ‘Every night we hit,’ Nauseef recalls. ‘Every single night. Phil was a great manager of the unmanageable. He ran a tight ship. He knew all of our personalities and knew exactly how to steer everyone so that we were all pumped each night and ready.’ While in Memphis, Lynott booked the band into Sun Studios and they recorded a handful of early rock-and-roll classics. At soundchecks they worked up a new song, ‘Waiting for an Alibi’, and quickly threw it into the set. ‘He loved to get the fans involved,’ says Nauseef. ‘They actually became part of the writing process.’
After leaving the United States, the band embarked on their first trip to Australia and Japan. On 28 August they played a free concert to a vast sea of humanity (the myth puts the number at 100,000; more sober accounts suggest it was closer to 30,000) on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. The show was filmed by Seven Network, broadcast on Australian radio, and subsequently released on numerous semi-legal bootleg albums and films. Lynott’s songs had made it all the way around t
he world.
In March 1978, Caroline Crowther became pregnant. With the baby due just before Christmas, they made plans to move out of Anson Road, which was not set up along the lines of a conventional family home. Bob Geldof would visit regularly with Paula Yates. ‘It was drug city,’ he says. ‘Endless coke.’ Lynott had recently bought a huge video camera – it was so big he wheeled it around in a supermarket trolley – and one night decided he was going to make a video for the Boomtown Rats’s new single, ‘She’s So Modern’. ‘Me and Chalkie stood behind his sofa,’ says Geldof. ‘Phil put “She’s So Modern” on the record player, me and Chalkie [sang], and you can hear Phil going, “Hur-hur-hur. Roight, now let’s do this one,” and then you hear, snnniiiiifff.’
Later, they attempted to write a song for That Summer!, a 1979 film starring Ray Winstone with a New Wave soundtrack. ‘We sat on two stools,’ says Geldof. ‘It’s now about two or three in the morning, and we’re off our heads. We start writing this Beach Boys’ pastiche because the film was called That Summer! The words were: “It came a little late, man / But now it’s here, it’s great, man / I can hardly wait / Because this summer’s here at last.” It was fucking terrible, and we thought it was a work of genius. I fell off the stool, and literally crawled up to the loo and started to tremble and throw up. I didn’t know what lines we were doing, and Phil clearly had given me a line of smack. I think he knew he’d given me a line of smack, because he then tried to get into bed with Paula. She told him to fuck off, as I crawled back into bed, trembling. That was typical of him. That roguish quality, the glint in the eye. You might think you’d be pissed off, but it was so obvious. “Oh right, man, hur-hur, sorry about that!” It was so blatant, so ludicrous.’
Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen were also regular guests at Anson Road. ‘Sid seemed to always end up at Phil’s house for some reason,’ says Brian Downey. ‘Every time I went around he was there in the corner, out of it.’
‘I remember [Gary Moore] saying there was bloodstains up the wall where Sid and Nancy had been jacking up in Phil’s toilet,’ says producer Chris Tsangarides, who worked with Moore and Lynott in 1978. Chalkie Davies insists punk’s enfants terribles were not such troublesome house guests. ‘Philip had the big old Sony video player, and they would just sit transfixed in the living room and watch old Elvis Presley movies. They were good as gold, they respected Philip. I remember Philip trying to teach Sid some bass lines, and Sid said, “I’m not interested in any of that crap, I’m in the fucking Sex Pistols!”
‘People think when I lived with Philip it must have been non-stop partying. No. We slept. People came over, but I don’t remember ever having a party. [Paul] Cook and [Steve] Jones might come over, Mick [Jones] and Joe [Strummer], but it was five or six people at most. Admittedly, we didn’t unpack very well. Our suitcases were always at the bottom of the stairs, but life at Anson Road was not what people expected. Life off the road was quiet, because you were exhausted.’
In the autumn of 1978, Lynott bought 184 Kew Road, a two-storey, five-bedroom house opposite the Lion’s Gate entrance to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, near Richmond in the far reaches of west London. It cost £250,000. He was in the United States and remained hands-off during the entire process. Crowther found the house and the Thin Lizzy office arranged the mortgage. Lynott didn’t actually see the property with his own eyes until he owned it.
The house was protected by high walls and an electric entrance gate. There was room for parking at the front and sizeable gardens at the back, and a garage, which Lynott soon converted into a make-shift recording studio. Chalkie Davies moved in for a short period after leaving Anson Road, but left after their daughter was born. One of Lynott’s Dublin friends, Gus Curtis, was installed at Kew Road, more or less full-time. Having bought a blue Mercedes 450 SEL which he couldn’t drive, Lynott put Curtis on the payroll as his driver, both on and off tour, a position that encompassed almost every task imaginable.
For all that he was a man of the ‘street’, Lynott was not necessarily a man of the world. ‘The office was there to be all things to all people,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘He had no concept of banks or cashing a cheque. He would get his money by calling us, and we would bike over £500 in cash. Cash was what he understood. We invested £100,000 in Gilts [Government bonds] but he got a bee in his bonnet because his accountant told him they were only worth £80,000 at market value at that time. He freaked out. We told him they were long-term investments – ”What the fuck? I need money now!” – and he sold them at a loss. So we didn’t get involved in that anymore.’
Kew Road used solid-fuel heating, which confused him when he first moved in. He asked Caroline to call the Thin Lizzy office, where O’Donnell explained they would need to buy fuel. ‘He wasn’t really a domestic guy,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘I knew he had money, because I had money, but he had this 1930s kitchen that he never redecorated, and I found that kind of odd. You’d open his refrigerator and there wasn’t a hell of a lot in there.’
He installed a jukebox in the corner of his study, which looked out onto the back garden. He would go in to write, carrying his notebooks in his new metal briefcase, and then record in the garage. ‘Infamously, it was the only seven-track studio in the world, because one of the tracks didn’t work,’ says Midge Ure, who had known Lynott since the early 1970s and had become a good friend. ‘He never learned how to work it himself, so he kept his sound engineer on a retainer. He never used it that much. I think he just liked the idea that every musician should have their own private studio. It was built by his Irish mates and you could hear the planes flying overhead.’
While enjoying the fruits of his most successful album, Lynott was at the same time forging musical relationships born from his punk ties. Before Thin Lizzy left for the United States in August 1978, Lynott had marked the opening night of Frank Murray’s Electric Ballroom club in Camden by presenting a new band, the Greedy Bastards. Making their live debut on 29 July, members included Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Chris Spedding, Bob Geldof, Jimmy Bain, Gary Moore, Scott Gorham and Brian Downey. The idea had been kicking around since late 1977. It was essentially a chance for a group of social friends to play together without having to formalize the arrangement. Their respective managers were side-lined. The band were paid in cash and journalists had to buy their own tickets.
‘The thing that bugged us was, none of us ever earned any money doing gigs, even though we were having hits,’ says Bob Geldof. ‘So Phil said, “Let’s form a group called the Greedy Bastards.” We’d do a couple of Lizzy [songs], a couple of Rats, a couple of Pistols, and then anything we liked. We’d get cash, and then we divvied it up.’
Chris Spedding – a stalwart session man and sometime solo artist who had played on the Sex Pistols demos – recalls that ‘no fee was offered or given, so that message didn’t filter through to me! I was happy to do it, though. Phil was master of ceremonies, instigating the whole thing. It was the time of punk, and there were a lot of people of the old guard, dare I say, jumping on the bandwagon. I think Phil was one of those. It was the usual schmooze, all the usual people. It was a social night.’
The set was weighted heavily towards Thin Lizzy material, including ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Cowboy Song’ and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, plus the Sex Pistols’s ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘No One is Innocent’ and tracks by, among others, Stevie Wonder, Peter Green and Mink DeVille.
The Greedy Bastards provided the soundtrack to an increasingly hedonistic scene. Of those in Lynott’s immediate orbit, Sid Vicious, Willy DeVille of Mink DeVille, Malcolm Owen and Gary Holton were all heroin users. Jimmy Bain, former Rainbow bass player and Brian Robertson’s new band-mate in Wild Horses, was living nearby. He and his wife, Lady Sophia Crichton-Stuart, daughter of the sixth Marquis of Bute, would become regular visitors at Kew Road. Bain was also a habitual heroin user, and would come to be regarded by many around Lynott as a wholly negative influence.
And then there was Johnny Thun
ders, the man given the dubious, if debatable, credit of introducing heroin to Britain’s punk scene in the first place. Live-wire publicist and general scene-maker, B. P. Fallon – the brother of Lynott’s old friend Peter Fallon – was currently managing Thunders after the break-up of the Heartbreakers, the band Thunders had formed following the demise in 1976 of trashy proto-punks, the New York Dolls. Fallon invited Lynott to play on Thunders’s solo album, So Alone. Lynott duly arrived at Marble Arch Studios in the summer of 1978 with a lump of hash as big as his fist as an ice-breaker. He played bass on the instrumental ‘Pipeline’ and sang on ‘Daddy Rollin’ Stone’ with Steve Marriott, once of the Small Faces. Steve Jones was on drums.
‘That was pretty crazy,’ says the album’s producer, Steve Lillywhite. ‘Thunders had some heroin on a guitar pick and said, “Do you want to try some?”’ During the sessions Lynott was, according to B. P. Fallon, concerned at the state of Thunders – ‘He’s too out of it, knowarramean?’ – but he was, as one friend notes, moving almost inexorably towards the centre of the ‘circle of smack’.
Shortly afterwards, Lynott was on tour with Thin Lizzy in the United States, where they played three nights supporting Blue Öyster Cult at the Palladium in New York on 29 and 30 September and 1 October. ‘When I’d see who was turning up in the dressing room I’d think, oh boy, here we go,’ says Mark Nauseef. In hindsight, the journey Lynott took one night in New York assumes a symbolic significance, a trip over some psychological Rubicon.
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