In 1980 he produced and played on a single of Jimmy Driftwood’s country classic ‘Tennessee Stud’ with his former Orphanage foil, Terry Woods, recorded at Windmill Lane in Dublin. In the same studio the following year, he cut a version of Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’ with Brian Downey and the Lookalike’s Sean O’Connor. Terry Woods’s ex-wife, Gay, had formed a band called Auto Da Fé, and Lynott later produced three of their singles, ‘November, November’, ‘Bad Experience’ and ‘Man of Mine’.
He befriended Clann Éadair, an amateur folk group comprised of local fishermen and working men who played traditional tunes in the pubs around Howth. ‘He used to come in for a pint,’ says the band’s piper, Leo Rickard. ‘We had a regular residency at the Royal Hotel on a Sunday morning, and he’d walk down with the girls after church and bring them in, get them crisps. It was only a small village, so it was kind of a big deal when he came in, with the big hair and the silver jewellery. People were in awe of him, particularly the women. Everyone wanted to chat with him, get a photograph or an autograph, and he liked it.’
Lynott would sit in with Clann Éadair from time to time, to play something new he had written or a traditional standard. Occasionally they had a high-spirited bash through ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. He offered to produce an album by the band, a project which inched to completion between the early 1980s and his death. One of the musical high points of Lynott’s lean final years was ‘A Tribute to Sandy Denny’, the song he wrote and recorded with Clann Éadair, released as a single in 1984. It’s a gentle, stately folk ballad, sung with mournful understatement, a world away from the end days of Thin Lizzy. When the single was released Lynott hustled the band a spot on The Late Late Show and appeared with them to sing it, dressed like a bad parody of a rock star but singing from the heart.
‘He was very good, because we were nobodies,’ says Rickard. ‘Philip was very genuine, civilized, down to earth and nice … He was an out and out “Dub”, and very proud of that. Some big rock stars create an aura about themselves and it’s very hard to talk to them, but Phil never had a problem with that. He didn’t throw tantrums. He enjoyed the trappings of stardom, but around Howth he was just one of the lads.’
There would be parties for local friends and musicians, and occasionally something a little more full-blooded. ‘Oh, he was a good man for a party,’ says Rickard. ‘There might be forty or fifty people in the house on a Saturday night, but that didn’t happen too often. When he came home he’d want to spend time with the family and rest.’
Helen Ruttle lived close to Glen Corr, and introduced herself to Caroline Lynott one day on the beach. ‘We started palling around together,’ she says. ‘My daughter Sarah and her Cathleen were a year apart. They had the same birthday, so we used to celebrate together. Philip was great with all the kids. My son Simon was the only boy in the group, and Philip was very nice to him. He’d take him away off into the study and say, “Come on, the lads …” When he was away on tour, he’d come back with presents for everybody. He’d bring Tintin books for my son, because he had a little red in his hair. The girls got beautiful clothes, whatever they wanted, they always seemed to fit perfectly. He was a great dad and a nice character.’
At Kew Road, too, visitors would sometimes stumble on scenes of simple domesticity. Lynott’s grandmother Sarah would be in the front room watching James Bond movies at ear-splitting volume. Philomena would be running in and out. Phone calls, bustle, family life. ‘We made home movies with the kids, watched the football,’ says Mark Nauseef. ‘We wouldn’t even talk about work till much later in the evening. We would eventually go out to the studio in the garage and do some recording, but mostly it was all about the family. He was beautiful at home. I saw another side to him than I saw on the road. He was laid-back and happy.’
Lynott talked fondly, if ruefully, about being the father of two girls. ‘I’m going to be jealous,’ he said. ‘At the moment, I’m hoping I’ll be liberal, but I also know there’s a streak in me that would scare the life out of the fellas. I’m looking forward to it.’8 One of the many notable musicians to appear on Solo in Soho was the English guitarist Snowy White, who played on ‘Dear Miss Lonely Hearts’ and the title track. White was the latest Thin Lizzy recruit, brought in to replace Dave Flett. He was a blues player, reserved by nature, temperate in his habits, laconic and economical in style, who tended to perform with minimal movement. The anti-Brian Robertson. He was a terrific guitarist, but a strange choice for Thin Lizzy. For the ever-competitive Lynott, White’s major selling point was that he played with Pink Floyd on tour. Chris O’Donnell pointed out that he had also played with Cliff Richard.
Shortly after White’s arrival, Midge Ure left Thin Lizzy to focus on Ultravox, a band which travelled with Egon Ronay guide books rather than a retinue of drug dealers. Ultravox had signed to Thin Lizzy’s management company, which caused Lynott some disquiet. While Thin Lizzy were touring Australia in October 1980, he demanded that Chris Morrison come over immediately for a meeting. ‘I flew for twenty-four hours and he said, “I’m giving you six months to drop Ultravox and Visage and [just] manage us,”’ says Morrison. ‘He went on at me for an hour and then never spoke to me for the next three days, then I flew back.’ Shortly afterwards, Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ and Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ became huge hits, and the matter was quietly dropped.
Ure’s replacement on keyboards was Darren Wharton, brought to Lynott via Joe Leach, one of the Quality Street Gang. Wharton was seventeen and playing at Tiffany’s nightclub in Manchester with Bill Tarmey, an actor and club singer famous for portraying Jack Duckworth in the long-running ITV soap Coronation Street. ‘I didn’t get it and I didn’t think it would work one iota,’ says Chris O’Donnell of Wharton’s arrival. ‘You find yourself losing patience. A friend of Phyllis’s from Manchester? Give me a break. If we really need a keyboard player let’s get a top session guy.’ Scott Gorham liked Wharton, but he too was unconvinced that there was any need to have him there. Much of the time the keyboards simply added a third harmony line on top of the two guitars.
The line-up featuring White and Wharton made two albums. Chinatown, released in October 1980, and Renegade, released in November 1981, are widely regarded as the nadir of Thin Lizzy’s career. ‘There’s some great tracks on both, but Phil’s songwriting seemed to be slipping a bit,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘All that pressure was getting to him and the drugs were starting to take effect … For some reason we were becoming a little bit unfashionable as well.’
Thin Lizzy aligned themselves to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, an evolving strain which filtered the power of 1970s hard rock through the aggression of punk. ‘I remember Phil going on about how Lizzy weren’t rock enough when the New Metal thing came along and all the rock bands started sounding really thrashy,’ says Midge Ure. ‘He thought Lizzy sounded weak, but they weren’t that kind of band. They were soulful, they wrote great songs. I think he was scared to let it slip through his fingers. The songs started taking a back seat to the production, and that was a big mistake.’
The shift was defined by ‘Killer on the Loose’, an unlikely top-ten hit in October 1980. In the song Lynott adopted the persona of a sexual predator: ‘Don’t unzip your zipper,’ he sang. ‘You know I’m Jack the Ripper.’ At the time the notorious case of the Yorkshire Ripper dominated the British news. Peter Sutcliffe, a serial killer who targeted prostitutes, murdered the last of his thirteen victims on 17 November 1980, and was finally arrested early in 1981. The video for ‘Killer on the Loose’ featured Lynott wandering around a back-street stage set in a trench coat while prostitutes writhed provocatively around him. A newspaper spun into view, noir-style, bearing the headline: ‘MYSTERY KILLER ON THE LOOSE’.
The conflicted examination of decline detailed in ‘Sugar Blues’ followed in the tracks of ‘Opium Trail’ and ‘Got to Give It Up’. By now, heroin was a habit. ‘Phil had broken the taboo of doing it, and he liked doing it, so it became serious quite
quickly,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘By Chinatown, it was a problem.’
At the album launch party, Frank Murray pulled Lynott aside. ‘We had this huge row about it,’ says Murray. ‘I remember I was breaking down crying. I was just pleading with him, “Philip, you’ve got to stop this.” He had the balls to tell me he was okay, he wasn’t really doing anything. I was like, “Philip, you’re talking to me. I know exactly what’s going on.”’
The title track, too, was a none-too-veiled reference to heroin, and demonstrated the detrimental effect the drug was having on the quality of his writing:
Chinatown, it’s a different scene
There are people there, they are so obscene
If you see what I mean
Then they’ve sold you the dream
As a lyricist, Lynott was beginning to struggle. He frequently relied on a rhyming dictionary. The final Thin Lizzy records are littered with pile-ups of multiple rhymes, many of which make phonetic rather than literal sense. When he did attempt to engage with a specific concept and put across a coherent point of view, he struggled to rediscover the poetic power and atmosphere of old. Jim Fitzpatrick had read a book, The Cowboys, concerning the destruction of the buffalo in America and its catastrophic impact on the culture of the Plains Indians. He passed it on to Lynott, who sought to condense the story and its sentiment into a song. The result, ‘Genocide (The Killing of the Buffalo)’, from Chinatown, was a mess. ‘I felt [his lyrics] deteriorated horrendously,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘His mind wasn’t making the connections it used to make. The lyrics were out of character, but he was out of character with himself. Drugs give you a severe dose of ignorance and bad manners. He stopped being the nice, considered guy he was.’
Lynott’s third book, published in 1980 and rather grandly titled The Collected Works of Philip Lynott, was a compendium of his first two volumes of lyrics, covering 1970 to 1977. ‘You can’t just go on getting better and better,’ he told journalist Paul Du Noyer shortly after publication. ‘Reading the book, I can see that in recent years I have for some reason given up on the heavy love lyrics, the marathon pieces, whether it’s because I’ve been too busy gigging, or too busy getting a new guitarist, or whatever the problems of the last year and a half … I have to sit down now and write, and I haven’t done that lately … Plus a lot has happened to me, I think, like getting married and having the kid, stuff like that. So all I can say is that I may have forgotten about it for a while but I’ll be getting back into writing far more. I won’t go for the quick rhyme.’9
On tour, at least, Thin Lizzy retained a piratical swagger. Darren Wharton observed the dynamic. ‘You wouldn’t want to cross him, he was obviously the boss and everybody knew it.’ Taking their lead from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, some of the road crew had taken to greeting Lynott with a jaunty ‘Morning, Saviour!’ ‘But he still had a great sense of humour. There was always that childlike element. A twinkle in his eye. He loved a joke and we had some great times.’
On 14 June 1980, after the concert in Southampton, Lynott was hit with a bottle at his hotel. ‘There was a wedding reception going on and we all went up to the bar,’ says Scott Gorham. ‘I guess Phil winked at some girl, and about two minutes later a glass came flying out of the crowd and hit him full in the face. The whole thing kicked off – it escalated out into the parking lot, police and ambulances came, a couple of people got hurt pretty bad. It happened a few times. People wanted to make their name by picking a fight with him.’
Irish power-pop group the Lookalikes supported Thin Lizzy on the Chinatown tour. Their singer and guitarist Sean O’Connor was befriended by Lynott, travelling with him in the Mercedes between shows. Lynott sat with a two-pound bag filled with cocaine, which he would attend to more or less constantly, digging his thumb into the contents and applying it to one nostril, then the other. ‘He used to live on about two hours’ sleep a night,’ says O’Connor. ‘He was a really sweet, genuine guy if he liked you. He could be very kind, he would give you the shirt off his back and he gave me lots of good advice about the show and our act. But if he didn’t like you, you’d better keep away from him, because he could be very nasty. You would reap the wrath and the fury.’
There was a growing sense that, musically, the wheels were beginning to spin. An NME review concluded that ‘the beat goes on, but nowhere in particular’.10 ‘For the most part the set didn’t change,’ says O’Connor. ‘It was all choreographed, Philip’s announcements were all the same. It was a worked-out show.’
The fact that Thin Lizzy’s American adventure ended between Chinatown and Renegade added to an increasing sense of gloom. The tour that concluded in Los Angeles in late December 1980 proved to be their last. The band had a small and enthusiastic fan-base in the States, but their albums and singles had made no inroads since Live and Dangerous, and the cost of touring was no longer a viable one. ‘You get what you deserve,’ said Lynott. ‘That’s the way it goes. There’s no bad luck attached with us in America, we had a great time, [but] I don’t wanna fail. I don’t like the word failure associated with Thin Lizzy.’11
Once upon a time playing a single show at the Hammersmith Odeon had been a thrill; now three or four nights at the same venue seemed routine. Motivation became a problem. Thin Lizzy had two showcase concerts scheduled for the summer of 1981. They headlined a multi-band bill at Milton Keynes Bowl on 8 August – ‘it rained, only 10,000 came, I got there early and got drunk,’ was Lynott’s blunt assessment12 – and then travelled to Ireland to play at Slane Castle eight days later, the first of many notable concert events held at the Boyne-side estate of Lord Henry Mountcharles.
If Dalymount Park in 1977 was their formal coronation as Irish rock royalty, Slane Castle was a kind of farewell. They had pushed open the door; now the young pretenders were rushing through. When Thin Lizzy had played at the RDS Arena in Dublin with the Lookalikes in June 1980, the support band sold more merchandise than the headliners. At Slane, a crowd of 18,000 congregated for a bill that also included U2. Lynott descended from the skies in a helicopter, clutching Sarah in his left arm as he strode across from the landing point to the backstage area. His wife, daughters and friends watched the concert from the side of the stage. Thin Lizzy were not quite at their best but the sense of occasion won the day. It would be their last appearance as uncontested kings of their own domain. U2 were snapping at their heels and would shortly surpass them.
If the live shows suggested a group happy to settle for efficiency rather than innovation, Renegade confirmed it. While making the album, once again the lines of delineation were muddied. ‘I’d go into the studio and say to Phil, “Who’s in tomorrow?”’ says producer Kit Woolven. ‘If it was Scott and Snowy, I’m going in with my Thin Lizzy head on. We’d be about halfway through the day and Phil would go, “Let’s stick up [a solo track].” Snowy White was actually quite irritated with this, but I found it irritating too because I wanted to try and make sure that the solo album sounded one way, and the Lizzy stuff sounded another way. If you’re flipping between things all the time, it’s quite confusing. Also, Phil was becoming more irrational, he wasn’t the fun person that I used to work with during Solo in Soho times. He was changing because of the amount of substance abuse.’
It was eventually agreed that Chris Tsangarides would come in to produce Renegade, and Woolven would concentrate on Lynott’s solo material. Even then, work in the studio was often far from clear-cut. ‘I didn’t really know what was what until we finished and I found out what was going to actually make up the record,’ says Tsangarides.
Lynott’s solo album was held back until 1982 to clear space for Renegade, released on 15 November 1981. Writing credits were shared throughout the band; only two tracks were written solely by Lynott. Synthesizers were now an integral part of a sound that was increasingly lacklustre and sterile, while Lynott’s voice showed obvious signs of wear and tear.
If the album was artistically weak, if not wholly lacking in merit, commercially Renegad
e was a fully fledged disaster. A misguided cover of Billy Bremner’s ‘Trouble Boys’, championed by Lynott in the face of much resistance from the management, was released ahead of the album and limped to number fifty-three. It was promptly dropped from the record. A second single, ‘Hollywood (Down on Your Luck)’, reached the same lowly position in March 1982. Renegade peaked at number thirty-eight, their worst showing since Fighting, and the first album since that time not to certify at least silver.
Thin Lizzy spent a further three months at the end of 1981 on tour, and went out again from February to May 1982. Across the board, band unity was slipping. It had become apparent that Snowy White was not working out, on or off stage. ‘He was a great guy and everybody really liked him,’ says Darren Wharton. ‘I just don’t think he felt that the style of Thin Lizzy was conducive to his guitar style. I think after Renegade there was a point where he had basically had enough.’ In February 1982, in Denmark, Brian Downey was attacked by a bouncer and Mark Nauseef was called in as a replacement until he recovered. Compared to the live-wire band of 1978, ‘this was a whole different thing,’ says Nauseef. ‘It was tough, trying to bring synthesizers into Thin Lizzy, but Phil was still trying. His health at that point was what got me. It was clear that he wasn’t as well as I had known him.’
Depression. Boredom. Disappointment. All that downtime, from Inverness to Bremen. Nature abhors a vacuum. Heroin fills it with cotton wool. Lynott wasn’t the only one suffering. On 7 March 1982, in Porto, Scott Gorham went on stage unable to play and barely able to stand. He was unceremoniously bundled back to Britain the following morning to address his own addictions. Sean O’Connor filled in during his absence, playing out of sight behind the backline equipment to maintain the illusion that Thin Lizzy remained a functioning band.
During the period where Thin Lizzy began to fracture, Lynott’s drug dependency went from a private preoccupation to a more public problem. He had been busted on the morning of 13 November 1980, by drug squad officers posing as Gas Board workers in order to gain access to 184 Kew Road. They found two wraps of cocaine in a jacket in Lynott’s bedroom, a quantity of cannabis in his Mercedes, and a cannabis plant growing in the conservatory. According to Chris O’Donnell, ‘the police didn’t know who they were busting. They weren’t out to get Philip Lynott. There had been a public complaint that too many people were slamming car doors at four and five in the morning and it set off alarm bells.’ The case came to court on 20 August 1981, Lynott’s thirty-second birthday. The fine of £200 set down at Kingston Crown Court was only the start. Lynott had paid Charlie McLennan £2,000 to swear in court that the cocaine, and the jacket it was found in, belonged to him.
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