In March 1984, the line-up started rehearsing at the local community hall in Howth, with Doish Nagle joining on second guitar. Brian Downey had a sinking feeling from the start. He and Lynott were both living in Dublin, and on several occasions the drummer drove from the other side of the city for two o’clock rehearsals, only to discover that Lynott was still sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. ‘We’d just broken up Thin Lizzy for lots of strange reasons, and the next thing you know Phil has formed a band that’s not quite as good as what we had. I couldn’t understand that. I wasn’t really enjoying it. Apparently we had an [Irish] tour coming up, but after about a week of this I said to Phil, “We’ve only got four or five songs, we’re not going to have a set together if you keep not turning up.” He said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, they’re only small gigs, we’re only playing to 400 or 500 people.” I said, “Well, it’s not going to sound great. It doesn’t matter how many people are there.” He said, “Oh, we can do all sorts of Lizzy stuff, it will be fine.”’
Downey proposed cancelling the tour until they got it right. ‘He wasn’t prepared to do that. He wasn’t taking it as seriously as he should have been, so I suggested he get somebody else in. There was no animosity, he understood my position. He said, “We’ll always be mates,” and we left it at that.’ In common with Scott Gorham, still addressing his own addiction to heroin, Downey had no contact at all with Lynott during the next eighteen months.
Lynott recruited Robbie Brennan on drums, whom he knew from his 1982 solo tour and from producing his band, Auto Da Fé. Both Brennan and Doish Nagle were using heroin. Stanway and Archer weren’t in quite so deep, but Grand Slam would routinely hit the stage in various states and stages of chemically induced disarray. ‘There was a lot of partying going on,’ says Stanway. ‘I’m no angel, but when it came to the hard stuff I never touched it, but you could certainly tell when Phil had been on it. Glazed eyes, he’d forget words …’
The tapes from their tour of Ireland in late March and April 1984 confirm Downey’s belief that Grand Slam were nowhere near ready. The set list was an expedient mix of Thin Lizzy songs, Lynott’s solo material, a couple of new compositions and a medley of Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. Lynott was playing ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ again, out of professional necessity. His voice was ravaged. He couldn’t get near the high notes on ‘Sarah’. Compared even to the final Thin Lizzy shows or his solo tour of Sweden the previous summer, far less Live and Dangerous, the sense of a talent in decline was acute.
Booked into clubs and hotels in Lifford and Portrush, in Strandhill and Kilkenny, the mood at the shows was often raw, the room heavy with the febrile ambience of local tribes out for a big night rather than a memorable musical experience. Lynott seemed almost to have come full circle. His former Skid Row band-mates, Brush Shiels and Noel Bridgeman, had settled back into the local scene. They were playing around Dublin, touring Ireland occasionally and making a good living. Like Eric Bell, they had made peace with the more urgent ambitions of their youth. To play well, for the love and the joy of it, was enough. Lynott professed to friends that he would be happy ‘doing the pubs’ again, but he was accustomed to a more elevated altitude.
Before he had formed Grand Slam, Shiels had offered to help. ‘I said, “Why don’t we go around the country and do a few numbers? You only have to play for half an hour and I’ll give you X amount of money.” I was doing very well.’ Lynott agreed – ‘that’ll pay for the windows in the garage, hur hur hur’ – but then decided he would rather do it under his own steam. ‘The unfortunate thing was, he was playing down the road from me, and there was nobody at his gig because it wasn’t Thin Lizzy and he was in the wrong venues,’ says Shiels. ‘You can’t just turn up and play some little place and expect everyone to follow. He tried it, and it was a disaster.’
The loss of status was truly humbling. Lynott was still shouting ‘Are you out there?’ as though commanding the stage at the Hammersmith Odeon, but it was like a man roaring into a deepening void. ‘I remember him telling me about playing up in Donegal, and there were thirty-two people,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘How do you cope with that?’ Paying a social visit to another pub venue, in the spirit of generosity Lynott made an impromptu offer to come back soon to play a show, only to be told by the owner, ‘I don’t think we’d get a crowd.’ ‘That hurt,’ says Jim Fitzpatrick. ‘Later in the car, I said, “That guy’s a prick,” and Philip said, “Jaysus, I get that all the time now.”’
The lesson he had first learned via the lukewarm reception given to his solo albums was now hammered home even more brutally. ‘It’s difficult when you leave a very successful scenario thinking you’re the main guy, and people will still flock to see you,’ says Midge Ure. ‘It doesn’t work that way. Call it Grand Slam and nobody’s interested. It’s the same with Mick Jagger. It’s the same with Midge Ure. The brand is bigger than any individual. He would have been frustrated and annoyed that he wasn’t the centre of attention anymore.’
One of several new songs Lynott had written was called ‘Military Man’. It depicts a man in a combat zone, estranged from his loved ones, angry, frightened, confused and resigned to fate. Ostensibly a soldier’s song, it also sounds like a despatch from the emotional frontline, a chronicle of Lynott’s personal battle. ‘If you see my children, tell them I miss them,’ he sings. ‘I am writing from war.’
Lynott had a sound in his head for his new band, a flinty hybrid of rock and rhythm. ‘Military Man’ edges towards it, but another new song, ‘I Still Think of You’, perhaps came closest to what he envisioned. It recalled the wiry mix of hard rock, funk and electronics of Prince’s recent albums, 1999 and Purple Rain. He was listening to the nascent hip-hop of Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash. He loved what ZZ Top had done with their 1983 album Eliminator, streamlining their traditional petroleum blues-rock with the aid of synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines. He noted that Michael Jackson had hired Eddie Van Halen to play guitar on ‘Beat It’. He would have loved the collaboration between Aerosmith and Run DMC on their 1986 single ‘Walk this Way’.
More often, the tenor of the songs he was writing was reflective, often close to despairing. As he did during ‘Military Man’, on ‘Sisters of Mercy’ Lynott called out to his father and mother with a naked need. ‘Harlem’ possessed something of the sweet, sighing spirit of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’, but while the musical mood is all silk and red roses, the words are stark. Originally called ‘Crumlin’, Lynott lifted the first verse from a poem Brush Shiels had written in 1968. Changing it to ‘Harlem’, the song took on a darker hue, reliving that uptown limo ride in 1978, from Willy DeVille’s apartment to oblivion. ‘I have often wondered, weary and depressed / Lord help me now, I’m wrecked, reckless / In Harlem / There’s a warning.’
Even when Lynott added words to Clann Éadair’s ‘A Tribute to Sandy Denny’, he somehow managed to turn a eulogy for a late folk singer into a lament for himself: ‘I’m heartbroken, torn down/ Oh Sandy, is there more to life than this? / Oh Sandy, I reminisce.’
Some of the new material displayed flickers of vintage Lynott. Riding a boardwalk bounce reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Spirit in the Night’ and ‘Kitty’s Back’, as well as his own ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’, ‘Gay Boys’ was a sympathetic if clumsy character study of a same-sex relationship between Billy and Joey. On stage, he improvised a rather less politically correct rap about picking up a woman who turns out to be a man – ‘I was disgusted’ – throwing in a reference to Boy George for good measure. ‘I’ve always got on well with gay people,’ he said at the time. ‘I hate talking about them as if they were a different species. I find the thought of what they do behind closed doors offensive, but, as people, as mates? Great.’2
‘Gay Boys’ had wit and zip and zest, but ‘Nineteen’, ‘Look in These Eyes’, ‘She Cries’, ‘I Don’t Need This’ and ‘Dedication’ were more characteristic of Gr
and Slam’s inability to rise above rigid, generic hard rock. Most of their material was middling, often co-written with Mark Stanway, sometimes with Doish Nagle and Laurence Archer. Only a handful were composed solely by Lynott.
On ‘Military Man’ he sings, ‘Papa, take a look at your boy, he’s fighting.’ In the autumn of 1984, Laurence Archer claims that Lynott was heroin-free for three months. Lynott also told Frank Murray that he had been off the drug for eight weeks. ‘He never went into rehab,’ says Chris Morrison. ‘He stopped by himself.’
He appeared live on ITV’s breakfast show, Good Morning Britain, on 13 October 1984, talking about his problems in the manner of a man who had survived a narrow escape. ‘I don’t particularly think I was an addict, I messed around with it enough and I know enough addicts,’ he said. ‘Secondly, I don’t think the battle is over. It never ends. The frightening thing about heroin is – and without wanting to glamorize the drug at all – it’s very enjoyable to take. It cuts off reality if you’ve got a lot of problems.’3
He’d been up all night, arriving at the TV studio straight from a Grand Slam gig in Great Yarmouth. It was eight o’clock in the morning and he was a little ‘delicate’, as he tended to put it, but he held things together. To the obvious discomfort of his fellow guests, who looked horrified, he continued to explain how good heroin could be until dependency kicked in. His point was sensible and valid: to address the low, it’s necessary to acknowledge the high, even if the pastel nursery-world of breakfast television may not have been the most sympathetic environment in which to air these views. ‘Mentally, the battle will continue for the rest of my life,’ he concluded.4 Later, Meat Loaf joined him on the sofa, espousing meditation. An amused Lynott explained that he unwound these days by watching Manchester United play on the television.
He talked publicly about the good work of Narcotics Anonymous and pledged support to anti-heroin charities. He also talked to the Evening Standard about his brush with the drug, which he again referred to in the past tense. Partly this was an attempt to signal to labels and agents that he was not damaged goods, but he was also trying genuinely to address the problem. ‘He was really delighted, proud as punch [that he had stopped],’ says Murray. ‘He did that by himself. Then [Jimmy Bain] came along to a party one night and shared his stash with Philip. I saw him, and he was gone again.’
Lynott worked hard at Grand Slam. Following the calamitous Irish tour, the band improved. Rehearsing at E’Zee Hire Studios in north London, Lynott drilled them for eight hours a day. ‘I heard stories that some of the lads were referring to him as Sergeant Rock,’ says Noel Bridgeman. ‘He’d be marching up and down, giving out fuck to the band and the crew.’
They toured Britain throughout 1984, invariably billed as ‘Phil Lynott’s Grand Slam’ and, on one particularly optimistic occasion, ‘Thin Lizzy (now Grand Slam)’. By the time they played two shows at London’s Marquee in mid-June, intended as a showcase for prospective record companies, Lynott had purged almost all Thin Lizzy material from the set, apart from ‘Cold Sweat’ and ‘Sarah’. He opened the show with ‘Yellow Pearl’ and performed a mixture of new songs and solo material.
They faced insurmountable problems. Grand Slam were a drug band attempting to forge a musical bond in a compressed time period. They were inevitably compared unfavourably to Thin Lizzy. Not the Thin Lizzy of Thunder and Lightning, but the vintage model. It was one reason, alongside his own diminished and somewhat démodé personal profile, why Lynott felt their future lay in the States. ‘If we head over there and work on it for a time then we can come back to England and not have to face the usual crap that gets flung in my direction,’ he said. ‘I’m not fashionable here anymore so once we complete this tour that should be our next move.’5
They never made it to the States, and would not get signed in Britain. The promotional blurb in the music papers’ listings sections promised a ‘major deal’ pending, but none was ever offered. Chris Morrison and Mark Stanway are among those who feel that Lynott’s unreliable reputation preceded him. Had he been making truly quality music, however, it would scarcely have mattered.
By the time of Grand Slam’s final show at the Marquee on 4 December 1984, Sounds reviewer Andy Pell was not alone in hearing mere competence and ‘mediocrity’. There was some rancour over songwriting credits. The band drifted away from Lynott, and Chris Morrison stopped bankrolling the project. ‘We pushed on and recorded things but it just never happened, and it got to the point where it just wasn’t going any further,’ says Mark Stanway. ‘Phil started to work with one or two other people on studio projects, and I went back to Magnum. It ran its course. He was down-hearted that it didn’t happen because he had put a lot of time and effort in.’
Back at Kew Road, he indulged in the traditional distractions. His old Dublin friend Tom Collins was staying with Frank Murray in London, working on Neil Jordan’s film A Company of Wolves. One day, they dropped in to see Lynott on the way back from Shepperton. ‘The house appeared to be full of hangers-on,’ says Collins. ‘Phil was in bed. We were supplied with some Jack Daniel’s and he appeared about an hour later with this goddess. She worked at Stringfellows, so off we trotted later on to drop her off. Of course, Philip got the red-carpet treatment. He was spending quite a lot of time there, I think.’
Lynott had recently appeared in a television advert for Virgin airline’s first transatlantic flight. In the commercial, a young woman, sceptical of the opulence promised by Richard Branson’s new air route, shrugs, ‘I suppose it could be full of rock stars.’ On cue, Lynott sits down next to her, smiles at the camera, and says, ‘Sometimes.’ On 22 June 1984, he was invited to fly on Virgin’s inaugural Atlantic crossing to New York, a hedonistic celebrity jaunt which included Holly Johnson, Steve Strange and Boy George. When he arrived, Lynott went straight to the VIP area of the Limelight club, partied on Virgin’s tab all night, and returned to the UK the next morning.
Helen Ruttle was in London visiting a family member and was staying at Kew Road. ‘There was this beautiful American model type in the house in the morning when I woke up,’ she recalls. ‘She had met Philip at the party in New York and come back with him. All she had with her was a toothbrush and a credit card. I was so impressed! I remember him saying, “Oh Jeez, are you going to say something to me missus?” I said, “Why would I upset Caroline?” They were split up by then.’
He hoped they might be reconciled, but his mood appeared fatalistic. He had reconfigured ‘Harlem’ into ‘If I Had a Wish’ (also sometimes known as ‘One Wish’), a smooth soul ballad with a new and almost unbearably resigned lyric.
I had a wish, my wish came true
I lost it all when I lost you
Lost in my loneliness
Drowned in my selfishness
Wrecked in my helplessness
The only artists of any stature with whom Lynott worked in 1985 were two old friends. Lynott had known Huey Lewis since his band, Clover, had supported Thin Lizzy in 1976. Lewis’s harmonica can be heard on Live and Dangerous, on ‘Baby Drives Me Crazy’, and he had contributed to Lynott’s solo albums.
He was now fronting Huey Lewis and the News, who had broken through in 1984 with their third album Sports, which included four US top-ten singles. In January 1985, Lewis set up a week-long session at Record Plant Studios in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Lynott prepared to travel over with Grand Slam guitarist Laurence Archer, but he was in disarray. He had lost his passport so many times that the Irish Embassy refused to issue another one. He was also having visa problems due to his drug history. In the end, Archer flew on ahead and Lynott arrived a few days later after his circumstances had been straightened out. The delay meant he could only contribute to two songs on what was intended to be a three-song session.
Where once Lynott had imposed his will on every piece of music he recorded, here he was a passive presence. With the set and the scenery already built around him he was, in effect, a glorified sess
ion singer. The lead track, ‘Still Alive’, was an old Clover song, taken from their 1977 album Love on the Wire. It was chosen for its street-survivor lyrics, part of Lewis’s plan to re-introduce Lynott as The Rocker. He and his team had completed the backing track and Lewis had recorded a guide vocal, very much in the vintage Lynott style. The results were well-meaning, a cagey approximation of Thin Lizzy’s twin-guitar attack fed through Huey Lewis and the News’s slick MOR pop-soul.
Lewis coaxed Lynott through a series of vocal sessions later described by his co-producer, Johnny Colla, as ‘painstaking’.6 In the end, a usable version of the song featuring Lynott’s lead vocal eluded them. The second track, ‘Can’t Get Away’, was an unremarkable soft-rock song written by Archer, which had been performed with Grand Slam.
Lynott returned to London with two half-finished tracks. This somewhat meagre return was at least sufficient to interest Polydor Records. John Salter and Chris Morrison now struggle to recall the details, but both believe Polydor offered Lynott a singles deal with an album option. He needed to prove himself. ‘They didn’t feel he had the material,’ says Morrison.
Lynott recorded piecemeal and without focus for much of 1985. It wasn’t that he had stopped trying. He may actually have been trying too hard. There was more than enough material for a third solo album, but not quite enough quality. The results included cliché-ridden hard rock (‘Freedom Comes’, ‘Hard Times’), synth-based sketches (‘Partner in Crime’, ‘Catholic Charm’) and a handful of tracks he had been playing around with since 1983, written with Junior Giscombe, the young London soul singer who had enjoyed a top-ten UK single in 1982 with ‘Mama Used to Say’. They had met in a club and had co-written and demoed new material at Kew Road, including the excellent ‘He Fell Like a Soldier’.
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