Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  ‘Gary couldn’t settle for anything mediocre, and I think certain things started to bother him,’ says Mark Nauseef, who spoke to Moore the day after he left the tour. ‘He had high standards in terms of tuning and rhythmic timing. When things would slip a bit, it caused aggro. I sensed real disappointment in him more than anger. It bothered him that his buddy was in self-destruct mode, and I know it bothered him the way he left, but he just couldn’t carry on.’

  ‘I was so hurt,’ said Lynott. ‘I could see from the business side of it how we’d lose by it, but also on the friendship side.’4 The two men would not speak or play together for a further four years.

  The US record company was losing patience. In the States, as well as taking limousines door-to-door, Lynott insisted on the band flying between shows, two good reasons why Thin Lizzy’s American tours always ran at a loss. Their management relied on Warner Brothers writing off the costs as a marketing expense. That was a question of goodwill, and goodwill was wearing thin. Earlier in the year, Lynott had demanded that all 150,000 pre-release copies of the Black Rose sleeve be withdrawn and replaced because Jim Fitzpatrick’s painted rose on the cover was the wrong shade of dark purple. To rectify this minor detail would have cost a fortune and delayed the release.

  ‘It was another Philip thing: prove it to me,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘In the end I told Philip that we did it, but actually we only printed up another 10,000 copies in the different colour. I made sure the band saw them, and we left the rest.’ During the same US tour Lynott kicked up a fuss with the American label over access to the VIP area at a concert. ‘He swore at one of the girls and did a big star trip,’ says Morrison. ‘I walked into Warner’s the next day and doors were slamming all the way down the corridor. I could see the record company getting alienated.’

  Thin Lizzy played four shows as a three-piece, with Scott Gorham stretched to the limits, while they organized a replacement. Midge Ure received a call in London from the management and within forty-eight hours was on stage in New Orleans playing ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. ‘I learned two songs on Concorde – it flew too fast,’ he says. ‘The problem was that every Lizzy song had a harmony guitar part, so it was hairy for the first few nights.’

  In 1976, while Ure was a member of glam-rockers Slik, a convalescing Lynott had sent over a signed copy of Songs for While I’m Away for him before one of the band’s London concerts. By the time Ure joined former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock in the Rich Kids, they had become close, yet he remained a surprising choice for Thin Lizzy. Ure had been working on the first Visage album when he was invited to the States, and had just joined Ultravox, a band in the process of regenerating from post-punk to electronic art-pop. His recruitment turned out to be another of Lynott’s magpie moves. By the time Thin Lizzy arrived in Japan on 24 September 1979, Dave Flett, formerly of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, was playing guitar, and Ure had started playing keyboards.

  ‘What the hell were synthesizers doing in Thin Lizzy?’ says Ure. ‘I kept asking. This was a farce, I shouldn’t have been there. You couldn’t hear them out front and they didn’t add anything, but Phil saw it as a toe-hold in that little world. It was fear driven. Every artist always thinks that their last hit will be the final hit, and you’ll get swept away on the next wave, whatever that happens to be. I think that’s why he got involved with Sid, Paul Cook and the Greedy Bastards, and then with me and the electronics.’

  Lynott may have been thinking more about his solo record than Thin Lizzy when he suggested that Ure join the band. At soundchecks in Japan, he heard the keyboard player toying with a new, surging synthesizer motif, and his ears pricked up. ‘Phil said, “What’s that then, Midgie-poo?”’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘So he nicks it and suddenly it’s his new solo single.’

  The riff turned into ‘Yellow Pearl’, completed with Ure in Lynott’s home studio in Kew. It was included on Solo in Soho, his long-gestating solo album which was finished in the last months of the decade. In June 1979 Lynott had spent two weeks in Nassau, in the Bahamas, with producer Kit Woolven and a handful of musicians, including Scott Gorham and drummer Mark Nauseef. Days generally involved lounging by the pool at the hotel on Paradise Island, before going to Compass Point Studio around eleven o’clock at night.

  The bones of ‘Ode to a Black Man’, ‘Jamaican Rum’ and ‘Talk in ‘79’ were recorded here, but the bulk of the work was completed back in London at Tony Visconti’s Good Earth studios in Dean Street, just around the corner from the Thin Lizzy offices above the French House pub. Lynott spent a lot of time in the area. ‘He would give girls the office address,’ says Chris Salewicz. ‘He’d say, “Ah, the old Dean Street address, the old favourite. Hur hur.”’

  Visconti was busy with other projects and had grown slightly weary of man-managing Lynott and Thin Lizzy, however much he liked them. Lynott, for his part, sought someone more pliable. Visconti was a disciplinarian with an ego. His engineer, Kit Woolven, was less experienced and more amenable. ‘For very large periods of time it was just me and Phil in the studio for days,’ says Woolven. ‘We’d meet up about midday and work through until three, four o’clock in the morning. Just the two of us trying ideas, experimenting with things. It was very enjoyable. He was very charming, very amusing, and we became really good friends.’

  Released on 18 April 1980, Solo in Soho included Nauseef, Gary Moore, Huey Lewis, Jimmy Bain, Midge Ure, Billy Currie and all of Thin Lizzy among its guests. It was created in a collaborative spirit and for Lynott it marked a return to more playful, multidimensional forms of expression. ‘I think the Solo in Solo record is amazing,’ says Paul Scully. ‘I wasn’t a huge fan of the rock stuff, I always thought Philip was more capable of other things. He was a very poetic man, he could have gone down another road, but he had to be Phil Lynott: rock star. My early memories are of a very creative musical sponge, and a humble person, and I hear some of that on his solo records.’

  The styles include reggae, funk, electronic music, folk balladry, pop and rock. ‘A Child’s Lullaby’, a syrupy hymn to God and daughter, is given a lavish orchestral arrangement. There are Minimoog and ARP synths on ‘Yellow Pearl’, a pulsing, futuristic mood piece with an essentially nonsensical lyric inspired by watching the Yellow Magic Orchestra in Japan and a tepid Manchester United display at Old Trafford (‘Attack, attack, attack… is what we lack’).

  ‘Dear Miss Lonely Hearts’ is clean, chugging power pop. In later live shows, Lynott would preface the song with snippets of Rod Stewart’s ‘Some Guys Have All the Luck’ and the Police’s 1983 hit ‘Every Breath You Take’, gesturing towards certain similarities in chord structure and melody. ‘King’s Call’ featured Mark Knopfler, a friend who would occasionally drop around to Kew Road. It’s a brooding recollection of the night Elvis Presley died, an event Lynott would mark each year. ‘On the anniversary of Elvis’s death we’d sit up and sing Elvis songs all night,’ says Helen Ruttle. ‘We’d be singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and Caroline would just go off to bed – “Ah, leave them to it!”’

  ‘Talk in ‘79’, sparse bass-and-drum Beat poetry, is a cloudy distillation of Lynott’s plan to write short stories that captured the mood and métier of a particular time, place and scene. ‘The Pistols left behind a swindle and a scandal / That nobody wished to handle / Sham 69 were left in a shambles / Generation X was next.’ It’s fair to say he had some way to go, although early improvisations recorded in Nassau were more experimental and adventurous. ‘He did it in one take,’ explains Woolven, perhaps unnecessarily. ‘No words, nothing written down in front of him. You could see the cogs turning. That was the calibre of the man.’

  Solo in Soho is never quite outstanding, merely sporadically enjoyable. Lynott was working on so much material at the time, he seemed unable or unwilling to ensure that his ideas fulfilled their potential, settling too easily for the casual and approximate.

  ‘Talk in ‘79’ namechecks Steve Strange, the glamorous young Welshman who at the time was work
ing as the doorman at the Blitz club in Covent Garden, immediately prior to joining Visage. After recording in Soho, Lynott would often visit the Blitz, observing the blossoming New Romantic movement and its leading lights, including Strange, Rusty Egan, Spandau Ballet and Boy George. Mick Jagger was once refused entry to the Blitz for ‘not being the right kind of person’, but Lynott, the eternal hustler, the undeniable night-creature, was always welcome.

  An awareness of changing tastes and trends lies at the heart of Solo in Soho. He was attempting to freeze-frame a specific time – in his own life and in the wider culture – in the midst of rapid flux. ‘I knew his solo stuff was going to be different but I didn’t realize it was going to be that different,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘I said to him, “Why don’t you do a reggae album, or a funk album?” “Oh no, can’t do that.” It had to be a mix of styles. He wouldn’t listen. Because it was a solo album, he didn’t want to concentrate on one genre. Maybe he should have. He was writing some great funk stuff that I don’t think ever saw the light of day. He’d be in two minds over whether even to record it, but he had all the lyrics and the music, and it was ready to go. I think he had lost confidence.’

  ‘Róisín Dubh’ had been his last flirtation with explicitly Irish themes. ‘I’m getting off that kick now,’ he told Irish DJ Dave Fanning in 1980, admitting to being sensitive to criticism that he had overplayed his hand. ‘But I’m also tired of doing it. I think I milked it to death.’5

  ‘Ode to a Black Man’ on Solo in Soho was a bellicose blues shout on which Lynott positioned himself as a ‘bad black boy’ and bumped fists with Stevie Wonder, Dr Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Malcolm X, Robert Mugabe and Haile Selassie. ‘I was living on the wrong side,’ he sings, ‘But now I’m here.’ It was hardly a weighty manifesto, nor a particularly coherent one, but it was an illustration that he was becoming more roots aware. Chris Salewicz recalls telling Lynott, ‘You’re not very black,’ and Lynott replying, ‘Well, I can’t be grooving around South Africa, Chris!’

  Across both his solo albums, Lynott displayed a willingness to engage with black musical forms only rarely evident within Thin Lizzy. Alongside the ever-present blues base there was reggae (‘Solo in Soho’), funk (‘Talk in ‘79’, ‘Together’, ‘Gino’), calypso (‘Jamaican Rum’) and lush, upbeat soul on ‘Tattoo (Giving It All Up for Love)’ and ‘The Man’s a Fool’. ‘I think maybe he felt he missed out on that, growing up in Ireland,’ says Brian Downey. ‘He got into a lot of black culture, and he loaned me loads of albums. I tried to get as many funk beats as I could off of those records.’

  Friends noticed that he started socializing much more frequently with a black crowd. Recording with Thin Lizzy in the early 1980s, Chris Tsangarides recalls times when ‘a lot of his black friends would pitch up, and around this bunch of American and English black guys Phil would change a bit’. In 1982, Lynott’s first solo touring group was called the Soul Band and featured Jerome Rimson on bass and Gus Isidore on guitar; it was the first and only time he formed a group of predominantly black musicians. ‘He started really embracing those roots,’ says Midge Ure. ‘All of a sudden that side of Phil became very important, whereas previously I think the Irish side had been most dominant.’

  Solo in Soho was not a commercial or critical success. It entered the lower reaches of the top thirty in Britain and disappeared after six weeks, while lead single ‘Dear Miss Lonely Hearts’ barely reached the top forty. ‘Simultaneously satisfying and frustrating,’ wrote Bill Graham in his review in the generally supportive Hot Press, before concluding that the album ‘certainly could fall victim to disturbing the band’s more conservative fans whilst being over-speedily dismissed by the trendsmiths’,6 a description which almost perfectly describes its fate.

  In diversifying, Lynott fell between the cracks. The NME’s savage review of Solo in Soho, which depicted him as a man desperately striving to remain relevant in a post-punk world he didn’t understand, drove him to frothing fury. ‘The guy reviewing it, he totally fucked up,’ he said. ‘He didn’t know what he was talking about. He had it in for me, you know? … I read between the lines and the guy was a total fucking arsehole. If he had have said that to me face I would have stuck him out there and then. Simply because an insult is an insult, not criticism.’ In the next breath, he added. ‘I honestly feel that I do listen to criticism, other people’s points of view, and bear them in mind and make a decision.’7

  ‘One or two [reviews] were a bit dodgy,’ Brian Downey recalled. ‘He was a bit sensitive to that, and I think that might have set him back a bit.’ The coolest kid in Dublin, the biggest star in Ireland, was acutely aware of a change in status. One of Chris Morrison’s managerial maxims is that paranoia drives the music business. Paranoia that your next record won’t be as good as the last one, paranoia that somebody else will have the hit that was destined for you, and paranoia that the world just doesn’t understand. It’s a spur, but it’s also corrosive.

  Solo in Soho portrayed the softer side of a man who, amid bouts of unreconstructed hedonism, was lullabying his young child to sleep with silly love songs and was, by the time of the album’s release, a married man. ‘He fell in love, and we got those records from him,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘He tried to pretend that he was still macho, but he wasn’t, really. He had changed. Once he met Caro that was it, and then the children. He became a different person, but he struggled to balance the two.’

  He married Caroline Crowther on Valentine’s Day 1980, at the St Elizabeth of Portugal Church in Richmond, less than half a mile from the house in Kew Road. His bride was almost four months pregnant with their second daughter. ‘Knowing the kind of guy that he was, it was always in the back of my mind, is this going to last?’ says Scott Gorham. ‘He was hard to pin down completely, but I’m pretty sure Caroline knew what she was walking into. I know he loved her dearly.’

  His stag night at the Clarendon in Hammersmith was the full rock-and-roll blow-out – strippers, Lemmy and all. Midge Ure, Billy Idol, Brian Robertson and Jimmy Bain were among those also in attendance.

  On the day, the bride wore white and the groom a dark pinstriped suit with a white shirt, striped tie and button hole. He carried Sarah in his arms and looked shy and handsome. Scott Gorham was best man, the road crew wore suits with cowboy boots, and the ensemble sang ‘Lord of the Dance’. At the reception at the Kensington Hilton, Leslie Crowther and Chris O’Donnell gave speeches. The former’s proved the more memorable. ‘He was very funny, he endeared himself to the rock-and-roll audience,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘He said, “Philip came to ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage, and I said, ‘You might as well, you’ve had everything else!’”’ Bob Geldof’s partner, Paula Yates, wrote it all up for Record Mirror.

  Shortly after returning from honeymooning in Rio de Janeiro, the couple bought a second home in Ireland. Since 1969, the country had offered generous tax breaks to artists domiciled there, while any income on songs or records created in Ireland avoided being taxed at the more punitive British rate. More importantly, Dublin offered Lynott a chance to root his family and consolidate domestic life in a city he had never really wanted to leave. ‘He got in his head that he wanted his kids to grow up in Ireland,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘That was his romanticism.’

  Before the birth of their second child they bought Glen Corr at auction for £130,000. A long, low, modern dormer bungalow at 10 Claremont Road in Sutton, Glen Corr was on the Burrow Road, which connected the city to the picturesque Howth Head peninsula. Imposing iron gateposts led to a short driveway and substantial but not ostentatious grounds. The front garden was protected by tall trees and hedges, while the rear backed on to the dunes, the Burrow beach and the Irish Sea. ‘Glen Corr was a summer house,’ says O’Donnell. ‘Really, you were buying the land and the access to the beach.’

  They moved in before the birth of Cathleen Elizabeth Lynott on 29 July 1980. Not long afterwards, Lynott bought White Horses, a house loc
ated nearby in the well-heeled fishing village of Howth, for his mother and Dennis Keeley. Gus Curtis, his wife Maeve and his family also lived very close. Jim Fitzpatrick moved into an apartment on Burrow Road, and started organizing football matches on the beach with old friends like Brush Shiels, Noel Bridgeman and Terry Woods.

  ‘We had some fantastic times,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘When they came to live in Ireland I used to spend loads of time with them. It was great for Philip to hang out properly and walk along the beach, which he had a habit of doing. He was trying to get himself fit, and I was under the illusion that he was off drugs.’ He became an unmissable addition to the local community, instantly recognizable as he strolled around the village and along the beach with the latest family member, a German Shepherd named Gnasher, or rode his bicycle in rock-star shirt and skinny tie. He told friends that he had cycled to the top of Howth Summit. His wife would laugh and say that he’d barely made it out of the drive.

  ‘He would cycle up to the church and back,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘He was promenading again, he liked to be seen around. He had a whole neighbourhood of friends around here, a support system. We had parties down at the house. He did live a rather idyllic life, and he started reaching out to other musicians.’

  In the years he spent back in Dublin, Lynott cultivated relationships with numerous local bands and artists, from the renowned to the unknown. He bought the Asgard Hotel in Howth for Philomena to run. It cost £300,000 and was intended as a ‘thank you to his mum’, says Chris O’Donnell. ‘But it wasn’t a great investment, and they realized that.’ Situated on Balscadden Road, during its brief lifespan the Asgard had a nightclub which hosted dances and live music. Lynott would turn up from time to time to boost trade and chat to the bands.