Okay, now here’s a bit of fun for you all. A live music review from 15th November 1975. Yes, I know I’ve been a bit sluggish in getting it to publication, but these things take time.

I am just turned 15, sitting with a group of my mates in the Champness Hall in Rochdale Lancashire. I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was – and probably still is – a rather austere Methodist church hall, one which I knew well as the meeting/marshalling point for the hated annual test of will power and patience that was the Scouts’ and Girl Guides’ St. George’s Day parade. Tonight, however, it plays host to a very different gathering.

Champness Hall, Drake Street, Rochdale

All around me a sea of sickly denim and patchouli oil is headbanging. There is a band on stage. Despite, (or perhaps because of) the stage clothes, the coloured lights, the expensive looking guitars and seemingly endless stacks of Marshall amps and speaker cabinets, they look incongruous, uncomfortable even, on the high irregular stage, which is slap bang in its centre boasts a stairway with banisters.They are the steps that allow access from the congregation to reach the pulpit. Behind the group an imposing set of organ pipes dominate the back wall ( Note the refusal to stoop as low as using these as an excuse for unsavoury jokes and puns) Lit by reflected colour from the stage lighting, they look like stalactites and stalagmites forming a surreal backdrop to the whole affair. I bet it’s the oddest venue on this tour.

The lead singer has just addressed his audience and the band launch into the opening riff of the next song. They don’t look uncomfortable any more. Once they start to play, all swagger and poise, menace and noise they make it clear they own the place. The lead singer teases and goads the audience between verses. At the risk of using a cliché, inside the hall it becomes an assault on your senses, and in particular on your hearing … I SAID PARTICULARLY ON YOUR HEARING. The sound is shocking. All the mid range tones are lost in a kind of ‘acoustic soup’, the higher frequencies are sent thrashing around only to be echoed back off the organ pipes, while the bass guitar, bass drum and snare punch your chest so hard it hurts. But it is charged, the atmosphere is electric!

The band, a four piece, is here playing the 21st night of a 39 date European tour to promote their fifth album, which features a cover photograph of the band. This is the arresting image, enlarged and reproduced on a life size scale which greets you as you enter the venue. The record company, Vertigo, are keen to push the album in order that it may prompt for the band, who originate from Ireland, the breakthrough they desperately seek. In fact, during the course of 1975, as well as recording the album the group had, by the end of the year undertaken five (five!!) tours. These have included dates in the US (supporting Bachman Turner Overdrive, Bob Seger, ZZ Top and Joe Walsh) Europe (Germany, Holland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway) Eire and the UK. Including the Reading Festival, I make it 131 nights in total. Last night they were in London at Thames Poly (Now probably the University of Deptford or somesuch) Tomorrow, Newark (that’s Notts not New Jersey) and the day after, Swansea. A punishing schedule, not least when the band’s propensity for making touring as … how can I put it? … as enjoyable as possible … is taken into account. However, back to our gig.

As I said, the lead singer has just addressed his audience. Dripping with sweat, in his left ear he wears a large silver hoop that intermittently catches the light, and with a lop-sided grin from said ear to the other he sheepishly looks up from under long lashes, and the curls of black hair that hang rakishly down over his left eye.

“Anybody in here got any Irish in ‘em? …”

 The response is drowned out as the black singer, tall and gangly, in leather trousers and a sequined top drops to a squat clamping his black bass guitar (a Rickenbacker 4001) between his thighs and makes as if to ‘machine-gun’ his audience with it. Meanwhile the guitars break into the staccato opening to ‘The Rocker’.

Yes! It’s Thin Lizzy.

Thin lizzy!

Moreover, not only is it Lizzy, but the definitive Lizzy, which first exploited the distinctive twin guitar harmony playing of Brian Robertson, a seventeen year old whizz kid from Glasgow, and Scott Gorham a Supertramp ‘reject’ from California. When pressed to explain his choice of Robertson/Gorham Lizzy’s charismatic frontman Phil Lynott grinned slyly  and  said:

‘Chalk and cheese’

The volatile Robertson and terminally laid back Gorham, are together with Lynott and drummer Brian Downey  responsible for one of the finest musical moments which together with about two dozen others from artists as diverse as The Sex Pistols and Charlie Parker map out the course of my teens. In this case the sublime ‘The Boys Are Back In Town.’

 

 

 

 

Yes! It was Thin Lizzy, on the ‘Rocktober’ tour 1975, which in the context of their career, was “about a minute before they burst through into the big time – very exciting.”
A breakthrough which was to be cemented four months later with the release of the classic ‘Jailbreak’ and in particular, the aforementioned, ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’

Lizzy, that chaotic mass of contradictions that came out of Crumlin, Dublin.

Lizzy, Phil Lynott’s pride and joy, who seemed to follow their own trajectory through the ‘70s and ’80s steering a more mainstream, less po-faced course than many of their contemporaries. The result being by accident or design I don’t know, timeless music.

Lynott and Gorham

Lizzy, for whom as sure as night follows day, life or the ‘business’ seemed to conspire to fuck things up for them at points when other less hardworking bands bands seemes to sail on through. Like the night before embarking on an eagerly – awaited and vitally important US tour. Instead of being tucked up in bed – or packing, Brian Robertson is at the Speakeasy Club in London, when jumping into the midst of a drunken brawl to assist his pal singer, Frankie Miller ‘Robbo’ gets glassed in the hand, severing a nerve, an artery and narrowly missing a tendon which would have finished him as a guitar player for ever.

Exit Robbo, back into the band comes Gary Moore for a while. ‘Robbo’ returns when his injuries have healed, unofficially. He’s not talking to the band. ‘… and so it went on …

It’s just the kind of band Thin Lizzy were.

Lizzy: Downey, Robertson, Gorham, Lynott. Flawless live

Anyway, enough of that. Tonight is about Lizzy as they were. Flawless on stage. For some reason the song ‘Suicide’ made a big impression. I recall being struck by the ferocity of Lynott’s attack on the song. The sheer physicality of his singing. Lynott was the first singer I can remember who actually looked like he meant it.

He (and the band) had some bottle. Remember it was the mid ‘70s. Racist jokes were still, sad to say, considered ‘acceptable’, even in mainstream culture. Meanwhile Northern Ireland festered as Republican and Loyalist atrocities followed a dismal pattern, which became almost as sickeningly ‘acceptable’. This was the backdrop to Lynott as a patriotic black Irishman taking his music to a British audience.

After the gig I remember on the way out being given a Thin Lizzy sticker by one of the road crew which I proudly stuck on my school bag and hauled it around  School for a couple of years. I loved them! They were my band.

One not very interesting  and little known fact about this Rochdale gig was that it was the last  time Phil Lynott used the distinctive Rickenbacker bass, as one of the roadies dropped it on some stairs, the neck breaking clean away from the body. Which is why from about this time onwards you see Phil playing the black Precision with the mirror scratchplate.

I was really genuinely delighted for them, that ‘Jailbreak’- which came not long after the ‘Rocktober’ tour was the success it became. They deserved it. Even if not everyone agreed. I recall seeing around this time, the lyricist/ songwriter/composer Sammy Cahn (‘Three Coins In The Fountain’) interviewed by Michael Parkinson. He was asked in typically lugubrious fashion about the craft of songwriting today. Cahn replied, saying how he thought standards had fallen.

“For example … “ and then  he told Parkinson all about a song he had overheard in which the singer just shouted the words ‘The Boys are back in town’ over and over again.’ (sic) I remember thinking ‘No! … you have chosen the wrong song there Mister.’ In fact he couldn’t have picked a worse example. ‘The Boys are back in town’ is a terrific, vivid evocation of a mythical space and time inhabited by ‘the boys’: all testosterone and bravado, equally mythical, who can be found on ‘Friday night, dressed to kill, down at Dino’s Bar and Grill.’ A wonderful construct.

‘No. 77 Sunset Strip’ was the name of a US detective series from the 60’s starring Efrem Zimbalist Junior. Lynott wanted to see what was actually at No. 77. So while in L A on Lizzy’s first tour of the States, he went to take a look. It turned out to be a ‘supper club’, the former haunt of showbiz legend Dean Martin. It was a brilliant combination of the idea of the ‘gang’ with its meeting place, whose name was a derivation of Martin’s own. It existed: though not in the form it appears in the song. I have never been there but I can imagine exactly what it was like. Great songwriting. And there was plenty of it over the years, even towards the end, ‘Sarah’ and ‘Old Town’ for instance, I think are quality gear. Okay, a bit sentimental maybe, but nothing wrong with that.

The Rocker

Coda

It is more than twenty five years since Phil Lynott died a miserable death, a long way from the assured frontman I saw captivate his audience as skilfully as you like. Far be it from me to cause controversies or open old wounds, but there is one thing that I think ought to be mentioned before we leave the ghosts of November 1975 in peace.

‘Why are you wearing that T shirt?’

This one?

It is November 2009, I am in Charing Cross Hospital hospital. The voice belongs  the bloke in the bed opposite me, who I won’t name. (I’ve forgotten it anyway) He was leaning on his elbow, looking like death warmed up, nodding his head in the general direction of the distinctive Lizzy logo on my tatty black Thin Lizzy T shirt.

‘Is it because you like the band or the shirt?’ He said.

After I’d got over the mild effrontery I felt at having been thought of as so shallow that I would wear such a garment simply because of its aesthetic attributes. I replied:

‘Well, I loved the band, and I like the shirt’

As I said this I glanced down at his shirt, it was decorated with the thick black hoops of a ‘Pirate – style’ shirt. (Favourite band, I later found out? The Pirates!) High up on Charing Cross Hospital’s eleventh floor Neuro ward we developed quite a rapport.

He continued ‘I only ask because I worked for Phil Lynott for the last couple of years of his life. I was his Personal Assistant. It’s amazing, he and the band are more popular now than ever. Often I see people wearing shirts, carrrying bags or whatever with Lizzy designs on them, yet they could have never seen the band. They’re too young.’

I was keen to learn more, but unfortunately my comrade in arms was really not in a good way, and was having to spend large portions of his day hooked up to a drip, and unable to move, nauseous into the bargain. So as inquisitve as I was I eased off on the solid wall of questions I had targetted at him and let him have a break.

One thing he did say though – and bear in mind it seems as if Lynott’s death was probably not a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’

‘He needn’t have died. If I’d have had my way he’d be alive today’

‘You mean you would never have been able to get him clean, there were too many people eager to supply him… and if he wasn’t even listening to his mates … He’d have had no chance? …’ I said.

‘No, I don’t mean that. I mean at the house that Christmas. They didn’t want any fuss, anyone to know, so they took him to that bloody drug clinic place near Salisbury. They didn’t know how to treat him, not properly, not in his condition. I wanted him taken to the nearest A and E.’ (Probably Kingston, a few minutes drive away as opposed to the middle of Wiltshire, where he was eventually whisked.)

Do I believe him? I don’t know … and who were ‘They’? The family? Other than that, I’m saying nothing, except that as many others before him and no doubt many still to come, Phil Lynott was a victim of his own belief in his ability to control drugs. I wish Phil, like Iggy Pop, had made it through and survived. I think he would, as Iggy is, be ‘quietly massive’ and thoroughly enjoy basking in the glow of warmth and affection that still exists for him from those who knew him, loved his music, plus those – and there are many, for whom he paved the way.

And if he chose to earn a few potatoes selling car insurance? Then so what.

And how about that? A whole article on Phil Lynott which doesn’t use the phrase ‘Wild Man of Rock’

… Till now… Doh!

The Official Thin Lizzy Site

The Thin Lizzy Guide

© Andy Daly 2011