Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  It was one of numerous incidents, scrapes and misadventures that signalled a slow dissipation. Lynott was now taking cocaine habitually. In the spring of 1981, he had appeared on The Late Late Show. With his mother in the audience, he outlined his new status as a reformed family man, and spoke lovingly about life in Sutton with his wife, children and Philomena close at hand. Wily host Gay Byrne smiled with what looked like benign scepticism.

  Eamon Carr accompanied Lynott to the show. Beforehand in the dressing room, he had witnessed an extraordinary scene. ‘Philip was fastidious about his appearance,’ says Carr. ‘He’s gone into the toilet, the door’s closed, and he’s in there for a while. He comes out and he fixes that little bit of hair on his forehead so it hangs down, and he turns to me with his hands out and says, “Well, how do I look?” I say, “Great, but have a look in the mirror.” And there’s a big trickle of blood coming down from his nostril …

  ‘So he’s leaning over the sink, tidying himself up, snorting the cold water with practised ease, then suddenly there’s a knock on the door. “Three minutes!” The flow couldn’t be stemmed, so he went back into the cubicle again and got a big wad of toilet paper. Plugs are made, and inserted right up into each nostril. He stands there for a while and everything seems to be okay. He doesn’t seem to be in any panic, because he’s sort of buzzing, so it’s, “Okay, let’s go. Ready to rock!”’

  Carr watched the interview from backstage on a monitor, transfixed. ‘I thought, any minute now these gigantic plugs of toilet paper are going to erupt like Krakatoa. He managed to get through it, but it was very nasal. At one level it’s almost comical, but it’s also tragic. From thereon it wasn’t nice. It deteriorated, and I got a sense of things going terribly awry.’

  When friends met him in London and Dublin, they often left saddened. ‘I remember being with him once in World’s End [pub] in King’s Road,’ says Steve Lillywhite. ‘We were having a nice conversation, then this greasy little low-life guy came in. He looked at Phil, Phil looked at him, and the urge for that lifestyle overtook his conversation with me. He just said, “Right, I’m going to go.”’ When Lynott bumped into Tim Booth in the Dockers pub down by the Quays, it took him almost half a minute to recognize his old friend from Dr Strangely Strange. ‘That was disconcerting and upsetting,’ says Booth. ‘We had been reasonably good friends. He was a different kind of a person at that stage. He became a much harder individual.’

  Work on Lynott’s second solo album was hampered by his appetite for old-fashioned chemical excess slipping towards something more troubling. The control room at Good Earth was frequently full of people uninvolved in the making of the record, many of whom gave the impression of exploiting Lynott’s largesse. On one occasion, he counted around the room. Concluding that there were 12 people present, he chopped out twelve lines of cocaine. Looking at each person in turn, Lynott proceeded to snort every line himself. ‘Everybody got the message and moved out of the control room,’ says Kit Woolven. ‘He sat next to me and clenched the edge of the desk. His hands went pure white, he was holding the desk so tightly. It was slightly terrifying. That was unusual, but not unexpected.’

  While Solo in Soho had been a happy and harmonious experience, this project became a struggle. Lynott’s time-keeping was terrible, and his behaviour erratic. It became hard to gauge the emotional metabolism of a man who would buy a crate of whiskey on St Patrick’s Day for everyone to share, but would fly off the handle if somebody playfully pinched a chip from his plate.

  He would ask Woolven to play a twenty-minute reel of rough mixes of songs and then promptly fall asleep. The sound of the tape clicking off at the end would wake him up, at which point he would ask for it to be played through again. He would then fall asleep. This could go on for hours. Where once he had welcomed ideas from all sources, now he told his co-producer: ‘I don’t pay you to think.’

  ‘It was so sad,’ says Woolven. ‘He went from being this very determined, positive, talented person to someone who wasn’t any of those things, really. He’d lost the charisma and he wasn’t fun to work with. I think he’d lost his spark, but that’s what heroin does.’

  The summer of 1982 found Lynott in New York, battering on the door of Johnny Thunders’s Room 216 at the Chelsea Hotel with a bag of heroin – he called it ‘birthday cake’ – for them to share. For his solo tour of Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands with the Soul Band in October 1982, Lynott invited Jimmy Bain along to play a second keyboard in a group that arguably didn’t even require the first one. ‘Bain was there for the dope,’ says Brian Robertson, who jammed with the group at their show in Varberg on 15 October. ‘He was bad news. It said: “Bain: keyboards and vocals.” He can’t play keyboards. He stood there like Linda McCartney.’

  The tour, on which Lynott played a twin-necked guitar that allowed him to alternate between bass and rhythm guitar, was in support of The Philip Lynott Album, released on 17 September 1982. Like its predecessor, it was a diverse, disparate and sometimes experimental piece of work. Lynott is listed as playing bass synthesizer, timpani and cymbal, CR 76 computer drum machines, guitar, Irish harp, keyboards, percussion and his eldest daughter’s space gun.

  After being commissioned as the Top of the Pops theme tune in 1981, the remixed ‘Yellow Pearl’ had become a top-twenty hit in the interim and was included on the new record in its shorter, punchier version. There were two songs inspired by his children. ‘Cathleen’, a sugar-sweet ode to his second daughter, ‘a beautiful Irish girl’, and ‘Growing Up’, a fictionalized account of father-daughter growing pains. Lushly melodic, the pair came swaddled in strings and saxophones. ‘Ode to Liberty (The Protest Song)’ was delivered as a Dire Straits-meets-Bob Dylan pastiche, a point underlined by having Mark Knopfler add his unmistakable guitar lines.

  The clear stand-out track was ‘Old Town’, co-written with Jimmy Bain, and perhaps the best and brightest song Lynott wrote in his later years. With its classic chord changes, baroque piccolo solo – consciously mimicking the Beatles’s ‘Penny Lane’ – and a lovely midnight-blue breakdown in the middle, ‘Old Town’ returned Lynott to the field of pop craftsmanship, albeit one that graphically illustrated the damage to his voice inflicted by cocaine. When Eamon Carr and Brush Shiels met for a drink, they would sometimes joke about how Lynott appeared to be ‘bending’ rather than ‘spending’ his money in the old town.

  It’s a break-up song, but it’s also a Dublin song. The seed of the idea dated back to a session in Windmill Lane in 1981, when Lynott was recording his version of ‘Dirty Old Town’. ‘Brian Downey and I were the rhythm section, Phil was playing twelve-string, and we hit on something,’ says Sean O’Connor. ‘We played through a few things afterwards, and one of those ideas was what eventually became “Old Town”.’ David Heffernan’s panoramic video transformed the song into something like an elegy for Lynott’s home city, trailing him as he strolled around Grafton Street, over the Ha’penny Bridge, along the Liffey and through Herbert Park. At the end he pulled up his collar and wandered along Howth harbour towards the lighthouse. It felt like a story that had begun with ‘Dublin’ thirteen years earlier was ending.

  Lynott’s working title for the album was ‘Fatalistic Attitude’, but the record company blandly packaged up the ten songs as The Philip Lynott Album in the hope of lending it a commercial sheen. In the event, the record was even less successful than Solo in Soho, and ‘Fatalistic Attitude’ came closer to capturing the lingering mood of deflation. The frantic post-punk funk groove applied to ‘Together’ seemed only to accentuate the song’s spirit of gnawing unhappiness. The gloom was even more obvious on the original, unreleased version. ‘Oh God forbid if I should never see my children,’ sings Lynott, in the midst of grimly documenting a marriage in decline.

  ‘If you view a solo album as being a portrait of a time in somebody’s life, then it does that,’ says Kit Woolven. ‘Things were going awry.’

  15

  Channel 4’s new live-music magaz
ine show, The Tube, was the antithesis of the BBC’s venerable rock programme, The Old Grey Whistle Test, and its be-whiskered late-night ruminations. If The Old Grey Whistle Test conveyed a mood of mellow virtuosity, The Tube was a ninety-minute sugar rush, all youthful clamour and rakish camera angles. Broadcast at Friday teatime and presented by Paula Yates and former Squeeze keyboardist Jools Holland, it was messy but fresh, in love with music but determined not to take it all too seriously.

  On 28 January 1983, Lynott stumbled over this new frontier like a man suddenly unsure of his bearings. Thin Lizzy played ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, as well as ‘The Sun Goes Down’ and their new single ‘Cold Sweat’, both taken from their forthcoming album, Thunder and Lightning. The flashing neon Thin Lizzy sign flared behind them, Lynott threw his shapes in the shortcut black and chequered bolero jacket he favoured these days, and it all passed off well enough, but the tone of his dressing-room interview jarred. Obviously the worse for wear, looking puffy and dissolute, his attempts at roguish humour came across merely as condescending, charmless and faintly ridiculous. The young female interviewer looked at first taken aback, then bored, then swiftly moved on, a reaction which served as a neat summation of the prevailing public attitude towards Lynott and his band.

  A few days’ later, their pre-recorded performance of ‘Cold Sweat’ was cut from Top of the Pops after a drunken Lynott told the producer, Michael Hurll, to ‘fuck off’ – twice. Around the same time, during an interview with Melody Maker, he demanded that the journalist furnish him with amphetamines, then boasted of gangland contacts in Manchester who could have the man shot. The Asgard Hotel in Dublin had recently burned to the ground, and Lynott put it around town with a wink that it had been torched deliberately as an insurance scam.

  In extremis, the knowing swagger had slipped into wounded, churlish bravado. Thin Lizzy’s career in the United States was long over. In Britain, it was the age of Duran Duran, Wham! and Spandau Ballet, of New Order and the Smiths. The Jam had just quit at the top of their game. In Ireland, U2 had kept growing after Slane Castle and were about to break big with a new, rather devout form of Celtic rock, which would define the tenor of the decade back home. They started having hits, as Thin Lizzy stopped. Fervour was in; ragged intemperance out.

  Lynott seemed unable to wean himself from the symbols that screamed unadulterated rock and roll: the come-here leer, the sleeveless jerkin, the studded wristband and belts from the Pleasure Chest, the ‘chick’ talk, gypsy chic and Valentino moustache. It was a reductive representation of a man with so much more to offer. Lynott’s rocker persona had become a caricature, and he was trapped inside. ‘It becomes a gimmick,’ says Chalkie Davies. ‘That’s the sad thing, the Fellini aspect of it all.’

  The music was in a similar state of limbo. Snowy White had left in the summer of 1982, unable to adjust to Thin Lizzy’s temperamental time zone. Lynott had now brought in John Sykes, a twenty-three-year-old English guitarist who had made two albums as the lead guitarist with Tygers of Pan Tang, another New Wave of British Heavy Metal band.

  The new recruit promptly moved into Kew Road, living there alongside Darren Wharton and Gus Curtis. Sykes’s first act was to play on Thunder and Lightning. Much of the principal recording was done at Pete Townshend’s Boathouse Studios in Twickenham, less than a mile from Kew Road. The proximity between work and play was perhaps the worst move on an album full of bad choices.

  At times, the ambience of Lynott’s London home was closer to a boarding house for oil-rig workers on shore leave than a den of iniquity. They would argue over who had eaten the last of the cheese, take it in turns to make bacon and eggs in the morning, and kick around a football in the garden. At night they would hit the town or entertain indoors.

  At other times, it was almost an ordinary family home. The various lodgers tried to keep their distance when Lynott’s wife and children were over from Ireland. ‘He was always happiest when he was with the kids and Caroline,’ says Wharton. ‘Obviously something happened along the way, but as far as I could see every time I looked at them, they were great. They made a beautiful couple.’

  More often than not, however, the house was now the epicentre of a slow drag on Lynott’s health, focus and productivity. The band would arrive in the studio early in the afternoon. He might not turn up until eight or nine o’clock in the evening. ‘The condition he was in was just shocking,’ says Chris Tsangarides. ‘It was really, really bad. I would frequently call up the management and tell them that such-and-such a geezer was hanging around the studio, knowing that he was a drug dealer. [Once Phil] turned around and said, “There are spies amongst us,” and started laughing. I turned around and smiled at him. Yup, there sure was. Me, basically. I’m telling on him, and he appreciated that, because he knows I’m trying to do something about it. But he’s too far gone down that road to bother.’

  They found themselves in a £1,000-a-day studio trying desperately to pull material together. During further recording at Lombard Studios, in Dublin, the mood scarcely improved. Eamon Carr was working night sessions there with Irish group the Golden Horde. One morning, just as Carr was leaving, the payphone in the hallway rang and he picked up the receiver. ‘It was a woman’s voice asking whether Philip or Gus was there,’ he says. ‘I said nobody was there yet, and I could feel the voice getting a bit disgruntled. “Leave them a message: Brian Downey won’t be coming in.” “Will he be in later?” “No, he won’t be in at all.” “Oh, okay.” You could smell straight away that chaos reigned.’

  ‘I think, really, Phil’s heart had gone out of it,’ Downey told me. ‘Some of the members, including myself to be honest, were becoming a little bit impatient with the whole thing. It was becoming harder to do. We were getting on each other’s nerves. We’d been together a long time, and relationships started to go a little bit pear-shaped in the band, including between myself and Phil. It was strained. Certainly Phil felt the strain. I know that for a fact because he told me.’

  Around this time, Jim Fitzpatrick went for a long walk with Lynott and Gnasher along the Burrow beach. ‘Phil said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like? There are thirty-five people and their families depending on me to turn up for a gig every single day, and I can’t do it.” He felt he was being thrown to the wolves.’

  Thin Lizzy had always been rather too beholden to the public relations machine for their own good. Tony Brainsby delighted in creating and circulating stories that had only a passing relationship with reality. As far back as 1973, several publications reported that Lynott’s career was in immediate jeopardy due to his hearing problems. ‘Deaf – never to hear again,’ Music Star announced solemnly in December 1973. ‘Never to hear the funky sounds of rock. Never to listen to the soaring notes of a favourite piece of classical music.’

  Somehow he struggled on. When Chalkie Davies accompanied Thin Lizzy to the United States in the mid-1970s, he was asked to filter back any juicy gossip that might keep the band in the British press. ‘Tony Brainsby always used to say, “If anything goes on, just let me know.” I never did, of course. They thought they needed all that when they were away.’

  Lynott could be a willing accomplice. ‘He’d say, “I’m going to do this tomorrow, that’ll get me in the Daily Mirror,”’ says Kit Woolven. ‘And it worked. He knew how to keep playing it.’ In interviews he would outline the latest movie offers he was surveying. One was going to be the next Raging Bull. Another was similar to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? He was going to play Jimi Hendrix on at least three separate occasions; in the event, his acting career extended to a stilted fifteen-second cameo opposite Lenny Henry on the BBC sketch show Three of a Kind. There was always a hustle, always an angle, always drama. Lynott wasn’t just involved in a fight; he was going to lose an eye. ‘There were a million stories concocted around Phil and Lizzy,’ says Midge Ure. ‘Usually around the time when ticket sales aren’t going so well.’

  The end of 1982 was one such occasion. Thin Lizzy had a UK tour bo
oked to start in early February 1983. Less than half the tickets had been sold. The press were disinterested. Band morale was low. The finances were beyond grim. Resigned, Thin Lizzy announced that their next album and tour would be their last.

  There was an overwhelming consensus – largely unspoken, but powerful nonetheless – that they needed to stop, at least temporarily. Scott Gorham was battling his own serious addiction issues and had already endured an unsuccessful stint in a rehabilitation centre. The band didn’t sound great. They were getting loaded before shows, making mistakes and not caring. ‘It was just a shit attitude to have,’ says Gorham. ‘After all this work we’d put in and now we don’t want to get on stage unless we’re fucked up? I told Phil this at a meeting at his house: “This is wrong, we’re just dragging the name into the gutter, and I think we need to walk away.”’

  In one of his occasional bouts of back-me-to-the-hilt brinksmanship, Lynott had also recently threatened to quit in a fit of pique over the record company’s refusal to pay for a gatefold sleeve for Thunder and Lightning. On this occasion, to Lynott’s surprise, Chris Morrison agreed that ending the band might be a good idea. But they would have to do it properly, he counselled. A farewell tour was a financial necessity. According to Chris O’Donnell, Thin Lizzy were half a million pounds in debt to the taxman, trucking companies, equipment-hire firms and other creditors. They had been living beyond their means for years.