Cowboy Song

by Graeme Thomson

  ‘We employed thirty-two people, with seven or eight people on full-time salary, plus the band, and a road crew on retainers,’ says O’Donnell. ‘Queen had that, but they were touring arenas in America. We were Hammersmith Odeon.’ Even at their peak, the money coming in just about covered all their overheads. With sales in decline, cash-flow became more problematic. ‘Philip would say, “I don’t understand …” and I’d say, “But your guitar tech is on call 24/7, he’s your drug dealer, for God’s sake!” I told him to hire ‘em and fire ‘em. “Oh, can’t do that.” It became untenable.’

  A story ran in Sounds, shortly after the announcement that the Thunder and Lightning tour would be the last, claiming the split was a scam designed to gee up the band’s flagging fortunes. After a respectable pause Thin Lizzy could announce that – due to popular demand – they were going to continue after all. In effect, their final act was a high-stakes game of truth or dare; one final PR stunt, which badly back-fired. Chris Morrison confirms this was the general plan. ‘I said, “You can always reform the band at a later date.” I think this was a mistake, but I saw a way out of our financial problems. We announced the break, it was on BBC News, and the tour sold out very quickly.’

  By this point, Lynott was having second thoughts, but the idea had already gathered momentum. In effect, Thin Lizzy broke up by mistake. ‘It was one of those stupid, stupid management ideas,’ says Darren Wharton. ‘As far as I was concerned it really wasn’t supposed to be the end. I know Scott wanted some time off, Scott had some huge issues, but [breaking up] was the worst thing that could have happened to Phil. It was just really badly handled.’

  Whatever the impetus for the announcement, once the idea settled it met with little serious opposition among the nucleus of Thin Lizzy Ltd. Gorham was adamant that he had to leave before he died. Downey was exhausted and disillusioned, while the management had had enough. Morrison was focused on Ultravox. Former tour manager John Salter tried to keep the wheels turning, but they had all run out of energy and patience. Some mornings Lynott would be on the phone to the office for three hours straight, relaying a constant loop of threats, demands and ultimatums, until the only option was to hang up on him.

  ‘Philip became incredibly difficult,’ says Chris O’Donnell. ‘He tracked me down once on a Bank Holiday Monday, when I was out with my girlfriend. He came in raging, saying he’d been ringing the office all day. I told him it was a Bank Holiday. He said, “There’s no Bank Holidays in my life, pal.” I was beaten up and tired and bored. I didn’t mind Philip ringing me every single day of my life and chipping away at me when we were building something positive, but it became negative. Album-tour-albumtour, without any review. It just didn’t work anymore.’ Before Thunder and Lightning was released, O’Donnell officially severed his ties.

  Only Lynott seemed tormented by the decision to disband. ‘My attitude was that we could save it, but nobody else in the band thought it was gonna happen,’ he told Sounds in March 1983. ‘Apart from the fans nobody seemed interested in us. The record company and the management were taking us for granted … Now we’re getting all this attention by saying we’re breaking up, it’s shown how popular we really are. It’d be funny to say “You want us back? Okay, we’ll come back” … I’m cheeky enough to get away with it, but at the moment it’s definitely the end … I don’t think I could look at myself in the mirror again if we carried on.’1

  In an interview with Hot Press in April 1983, the same sense of regret is apparent. He talked about being ‘driven’ to make the announcement, and going through with it only to save face. ‘Now if we said we’re gonna stay together it would just look like it was some publicity thing, which isn’t on, so I think we’ll break up [but] I feel I’ve let the supporters down. I’m the leader of the band and I feel I should have been able to lead them through this.’2

  ‘I never got the impression that Philip was on board to end the band,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘It broke his heart, and I think he felt an immeasurable sense of failure. It was his soul, music. It’s one thing if other people regard you as a failure, but when you regard yourself as a failure – that hurts. I got the sense for the first time that he had actually given up.’

  The farewell tour began on 9 February 1983 in Scarborough and covered the UK, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Japan. Tickets sold well, and the crowd response was warm and affectionate. More and more dates were added as the management saw the chance to reduce their debt before winding things up. ‘It was an extremely painful tour to do,’ says Gorham. ‘It seemed to never end.’

  Thunder and Lightning was released during the UK leg, on 4 March 1983, and received its strong chart position – number four – more because of the unique circumstances surrounding its creation than for its quality, which was negligible. It had more energy than their previous records, and appealed to a new fan base of young heavy-metal fans as well as Thin Lizzy die-hards, but the contrast to the band in their heyday was stark.

  Aside from the atmospheric ‘The Sun Goes Down’ and powerhouse ‘Cold Sweat’, the songwriting was rote and the playing blunt. John Sykes was a technically superb guitarist, but he did not offer the light and shade of the twin-guitar interplay. All flash but little feel, his contribution tipped the balance uncomfortably close to outright heavy metal. ‘It was hideous,’ says Midge Ure. ‘Horrible. Sykes sucked everything dry and took all the emotion out of it. It wasn’t Lizzy at that point … The songs became more and more repetitive, they were all interchangeable.’

  The inevitable run of shows at the Hammersmith Odeon later in March was recorded for a desultory posthumous live album, Life, which Scott Gorham concedes he has never listened to all the way through. Lynott insisted on mixing the album, and spent weeks on it, constantly nodding out at the desk. Says Chris Morrison, ‘We were spending £1,000 a day for him to sleep.’ Life took so long to complete that it came out after the tour had ended rather than during it, ensuring it missed its optimum slot.

  The Odeon concerts were an opportunity to round up Thin Lizzy’s gang of former guitar players, and featured guest spots from Brian Robertson, Gary Moore and Eric Bell. Snowy White was not invited; his contribution to Life dates from 1981. Bell had crossed paths with Lynott on a handful of occasions since their parting of the ways early in 1974. With Downey, they had recorded the throwaway ‘Song for Jimmy’ [sic] together in 1980 to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of their mutual hero, Jimi Hendrix. The same year Bell had jammed on tour with Thin Lizzy on a rare run through of ‘Whiskey in the Jar’.

  ‘Fame and drink and drugs absolutely changed the guy,’ he says. ‘At Hammersmith, he hardly acknowledged my existence, though I suppose I couldn’t blame him in a way, because of what I’d done in Belfast. He was like a stranger that I’d never known. I had this photograph in my pocket, a very, very old shot of me and Philip with two girls, taken around the third gig Thin Lizzy ever played. We were all there, tuning up for the soundcheck, and Philip strides in. He walks past me and I say, “Hey, Philip, look at this.” He saw the photograph, says, “Listen, don’t fucking show that to anybody, right?” and walked off. He didn’t want anyone to see the way he used to look. Without the moustache and without the swagger.’

  In July and August, billed as the Philip Lynott Band, he broke off from Thin Lizzy’s valedictory lap to play thirteen solo dates in Sweden, backed by Downey and Sykes, alongside Mark Stanway of Magnum on keyboards and Irish guitarist Doish Nagle, formerly of the Bogey Boys, who was running in the same circles as Lynott and had similar recreational habits. ‘We had a great time,’ says Stanway, who, almost inevitably, ended up staying at Kew Road, off and on, for the next eighteen months. ‘We did a few Lizzy songs and a lot of Phil’s solo stuff, and we did “Sarah”, which he never did with Lizzy.’

  He came back home for Thin Lizzy’s last ever British performance, at the Reading Festival on 28 August. The flashy light show and smoke bombs detonated prematurely, but it still felt like a suitably momentous
send-off. The audience was on their side and howled with genuine affection as ‘the coyote called’ during ‘Cowboy Song’, but Lynott’s once beautifully warm and supple voice strained in the higher register. The reliance on weary old party tricks like ‘Are You Ready?’ and ‘Baby Drives Me Crazy’ told its own story. ‘What really persuaded me that we were right to quit was the amount of our set that’s old stuff we have to play,’ said Lynott. ‘That was beginning to drown our creativity. In the end there was no challenge there anymore.’3 The final song was a poignant, potent, nine-minute ‘Still in Love with You’, introduced by Lynott as ‘definitely the last one, you know?’ It was no longer for a woman, but for the fans. By the end, he was in tears.

  They travelled on to Germany for three final concerts, finishing at the Monsters of Rock festival on 4 September 1983. Brian Robertson was there with Motörhead, and gathered with all the other musicians at the side of the stage. Roadies cried, fans roared, but Lynott now seemed detached and numbed by it all. It didn’t quite feel real. ‘We said goodbye at the airport and that was the band – finished,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘There was no big hullabaloo. It was, “Okay, guys, see you again sometime. Take care. Bye.”’ It was a Monday morning, autumn was in the air, and after almost thirteen years of constant activity, Thin Lizzy was over.

  One day, Caroline Lynott had a T-shirt made for her husband. It read, simply, ‘WHERE’S GUS?’ ‘Because Philip woke up and that was the first thing he said,’ says Helen Ruttle. ‘Gus was there to do everything.’

  Life at Glen Corr, says Ruttle, ‘was not a normal family situation’. When Lynott was away, often either Dennis Keeley or Graham Cohen, who had worked for Philomena since the early days in Manchester, would move uninvited into the house with his wife and children.

  During the three years that they had lived in Ireland, Lynott’s marriage had deteriorated. While he spent most of his life either on tour or in Kew, his wife spent much of her time in Glen Corr with the two children: Sarah was now aged five and Cathleen three. Increasingly, they lived divided lives. ‘Philip once said to me, “My marriage broke up because you work me too hard,”’ says Chris Morrison. ‘I pointed out that he moved Caroline to Ireland so he could get laid by every woman he’d meet in London. I don’t think that helped.’

  The move to Sutton was partly intended as a retreat from the rigours of life on the road and the incessant demands of London, but Ireland was not the fairy-land of Lynott’s more poetic imaginings. Dublin offered no easy refuge from reality. In the early 1980s heroin flooded the city, from the tower blocks of Ballymun to seaside villages like Howth. Lynott was not protected from his own appetites simply by taking an hour’s aeroplane ride west, and neither were those closest to him.

  The mood around Glen Corr became less happy and healthy. As with Kew Road, at times the house was filled with strangers and casual acquaintances, sometimes staying for one or two weeks at a time. They were often unsavoury and occasionally intimidating, and would not easily be persuaded to leave. Bono from U2 had recently moved with his new wife, Ali, into a cottage in Howth, just along the road from Glen Corr. He would bump into Lynott and was always charmed but slightly wary. ‘He was so kind to me and gentle about our band,’ he said. ‘He’d say, “Do you want to come down for dinner?” And I didn’t. I didn’t know what to do, because he had that look.’4 It may have been for the best. Although he was always polite to Bono in public, Lynott’s private comments about him were often far from complimentary.

  Caroline Lynott sought some semblance of a social life in her husband’s long absences. ‘We had to be a little bit circumspect,’ says Helen Ruttle. ‘He was the jealous type. Nobody was to look at Caroline.’

  ‘My phone would ring at one or two in the morning asking where Caroline was,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘I said, “I’ve just dropped her home, she was out with us.” He was really fucking angry: “Who else was there, who was talking to her?”’

  ‘His head went,’ says Noel Bridgeman sadly. ‘I remember going down to his house to play a football match for the craic … There was a cut-out caricature of himself at the hall door, and another one at the top of the stairs. It was very strange. When we were leaving, my car was parked out the front, and Caroline’s car was there. He said to me, “Is your car better than Caroline’s car?” A very, very strange question. I just remember saying, “Ah, not at all, Philip, don’t worry about that.” He was acting very strange. Paranoid.’

  There were instances of dishonesty and deceit on both sides, complicated by drug dependency, alcohol, distance, mistrust and too many people becoming involved in their lives. ‘In the end there were a lot of negatives between the two of them,’ says Frank Murray. ‘Both of them were bad for the other in certain ways.’

  Jim Fitzpatrick remained close to the couple in the period where their marriage faltered. ‘I remember having a really long heart-to-heart conversation with Caroline in the Cock Tavern. She was going off the rails herself, she was dealing with break-ups, sorrow and panic. Things had got a bit nasty. It was a quagmire, with a lot of competing interests. It was an extraordinary painful period, two people you care about being torn apart from all sides.’

  Shortly afterwards in 1984, while her husband was away, Caroline Lynott wrapped the children in duvets, put them in the car and handed the keys to Glen Corr to a neighbour. They caught the next ferry to England and returned to the Crowther family home at Temple Court in Corston, near Bath.

  ‘Philip simply couldn’t deal with it,’ says Fitzpatrick. ‘We walked on the beach a lot. I remember one time, it was the most personal conversation I ever had with him, and it was essentially him saying that he was going down the tubes – mentally and physically. It was an immensely sad conversation. It wasn’t tearful, but it was stark.’

  The fact that his wife and the mother of his children was the privately educated daughter of a television celebrity had always aroused a degree of tabloid interest. News of their separation led to reporters and photographers hanging around 184 Kew Road. ‘When the press were parked outside Phil would say, “Come on, let’s go to your place for the weekend,”’ says Mark Stanway. ‘We’d drive up to my house in Wolverhampton and he’d play with my kids, kip on my settee. He was a family man behind it all. He was as soft as anything, and he lived for his kids. It could all be quite normal – but just not often enough.’

  After the break-up, Chris Morrison organized a legal separation hearing. As part of the settlement, Caroline was given provision to buy a cottage in Bath, and Lynott was granted regular access to his daughters under supervision; his chaperone was usually either one of Caroline’s sisters, Philomena or his cousin Monica, who was now living and working as a teacher in London, close to Kew Road. Whenever he saw his children, he made a concerted effort to be lucid, bright and upstanding. When Sarah and Cathleen left, he would retreat to his bedroom at Kew Road and often not emerge for the rest of the day.

  The relationship was not irreparably damaged. They cared for each other and remained in contact. His friends and family believe he would never have pushed for a divorce or contemplated remarrying. ‘Phil loved his family, loved his daughters, loved his wife – there’s absolutely no doubt about that,’ Brian Downey told me. ‘He was always talking about them and showing photographs. I just think because of the marriage break-up he was a bit devastated. I’ve experienced it myself, and it’s horrible to go through. I think that took a toll on his health. He just didn’t have the wherewithal to deal with it.’

  16

  ‘Philip’s big problem,’ says Frank Murray, ‘was, “What do I do next?”’

  Lynott had been in a band since he was thirteen. Singing in the Black Eagles, Skid Row and Orphanage had helped him establish his identity as he emerged from the void of his early childhood. Being a member of a group had given shape and significance to his sense of otherness. As Thin Lizzy evolved, the band became his primary means of defining himself, the scaffolding which propped up his perception of who and what h
e was. Darren Wharton is far from alone in believing that ‘Phil wasn’t a whole person without Thin Lizzy’.

  Which explains why, despite the obvious pitfalls, he resolved to form another group almost immediately. ‘He couldn’t imagine a life not in leather trousers,’ says Bob Geldof, ‘with a limousine taking him to work every day.’

  There was also pride, or perhaps hubris, forcing him back on the horse. ‘I wanted to prove to myself that I could play live,’ he said.1 One might have thought that proving it night after night for fourteen years was enough, but that would have been to underestimate the constant questioning voice beneath the bravado. ‘I saw him as being this huge rock star, and yet he said, “I always feel like I’m trying to make it,”’ says Kit Woolven. ‘“I feel like I’m in this little Irish band that’s come over, and we’re trying to make it in England. It never leaves you.” He had all those insecurities. They don’t go, you just gloss over them.’

  Within months of the final Monsters of Rock show in Germany, at the end of 1983 Lynott called Brian Downey to discuss the prospect of forming a new band. ‘I said, “Well, it’s a bit early!”’ says Downey. ‘I was thinking of taking a couple of months out to be with my family. He got a bit impatient. He said, “Well, do all that, and once you’re back we can give it a try.”’

  In the interim, Lynott recruited for his new venture, which was as yet unnamed but eventually would be called Grand Slam. The original line-up was Lynott, Downey, John Sykes – three-fifths of Thin Lizzy – and Mark Stanway on keyboards. The plan was almost certainly to reform his old band by stealth. Almost immediately, however, Sykes left to take up David Coverdale’s offer to join Whitesnake. He was replaced by twenty-one-year-old guitarist Laurence Archer, who had been playing in Wild Horses. ‘Phil was very down about John leaving,’ says Stanway. ‘They were very close.’