An Irishman at 75 - Village Magazine

October-November 2024 71

An Irishman at 75

By Adam Behan

n the grand scheme of Ireland’s

cultural history, the 1970s was the

decade in which music rocked. Van

Morrison released Moondance to

international acclaim. Rory Gallagher

went solo and was named the best guitarist

in the world by Melody Maker. Horslips

brought their distinctive brand of Celtic-

rock to just about every ballroom on the

island. Bob Geldof gave Irish rock an anti-

establishment voice. And countless bands

rode the punk and new wave movements of

the late 1970s, among them the

Undertones, the Lookalikes, the Radiators

from Space, and of course U2.

But none of these is quite as emblematic

of the rise of Irish rock music as Phil Lynott,

who would have turned 75 this month. The

lead singer of Thin Lizzy, he remains the

quintessential Irish rockstar for many, a

kind of national icon of the sex, drugs and

rock ‘n’ roll mantra.

As a man and a musician, though, he

was much more complex than that, and as

Ireland today witnesses surges in racism

and xenophobia, Lynott is just as relevant

now as he ever was for thinking about what

it means to be Irish.

Try to imagine Ireland without its history

of rock music. That is the country in which

CULTURE

Phil Lynott

is the

emblem of

the rise of

Irish rock

Thin Lizzy began rehearsing in early 1970.

Apart from exceptions like Skid Row (a

band Lynott was brieﬂ y in) and the local

beat scenes carved out in Belfast and

Dublin, Irish popular music was at this

stage still dominated by showbands.

There was little appetite for rock music,

and there is no better example of that than

the country’s ﬁ rst outdoor music festival,

which took place in Richmond Park in

Inchicore on 4 September 1970, headlined

by British rock band Mungo Jerry and

featuring Thin Lizzy and other Irish groups

like Granny’s New Intentions.

Where the Isle of Wight Festival had only

days previously attracted hundreds of

thousands of fans, a mere 1,500 people

attended Richmond Park, a fraction of the

expected 5,000. It was quickly written oﬀ

as a ‘ﬂ op’, and ‘a “happening” that never

happened’.

Seven years later, everything had

changed: Thin Lizzy headlined a day-long

outdoor festival at Dalymount Park in

Phibsborough on 21 August 1977, with

reports estimating as many as 15,000

attendees. Bill Graham, music journalist

with Hot Press, called it “the best Lizzy set

I’ve ever seen”. Indeed, it was the same set

that formed the basis of the band’s wildly

successful album ‘Live and Dangerous’,

recorded in 1976–77 and representative of

the live show they toured for the best part

of four years, which for critics captured “all

the excitement, power and sheer

exuberance” of the band, its “macho

characteristics” and the “unrelenting

power of their gigs”. But the day was as

much Lynott’s personal triumph as it was

the band’s definitive homecoming.

Reviewers described how Lynott “hardly

had to move a hair to control proceedings”,

and that the crowd was “totally at one with

their hero”.

In fact, the entire event became a

celebration of Lynott himself, who had

turned twenty-eight years old the previous

day. It was dubbed “Phil’s half-day festival”

in the press, and after Thin Lizzy’s ﬁ rst

encore of the night, cries for more turned

into a huge chorus of “Happy Birthday”.

It might surprise some that this version

of Phil Lynott – the rock god, the

charismatic frontman – was, even then, a

relatively recent creation.

Reports of Thin Lizzy gigs as late as 1973

describe not Lynott but guitarist Eric Bell

as the band’s lead musician, and Bell

recalls that Lynott was “pretty shy on

stage” and that he himself was “more out

the front” in the band’s early years.

Suzi Quatro, who supported Slade on

their British tour in 1972 alongside Thin

Lizzy, remembers that Lynott “was not in

your face like he was later, not at all”.

It is conventional to separate Thin Lizzy

into two eras: the ﬁ rst as the three-piece

band made up of Lynott, Bell and drummer

Brian Downey that broke through with

‘Whiskey in the Jar’ in 1973; the second as

a four-piece that achieved widespread

commercial success with ‘Jailbreak’ and

‘Bad Reputation’, consisting chieﬂ y of

Lynott, Downey, and guitarists Scott

Gorham and Brian Robertson. Perhaps

more than anything else, these two eras

are deﬁ ned by two quite diﬀ erent Phil

Lynotts: the ﬁ rst poetic, reﬂ ective and

reserved, the second macho, brash and

loud.

Indeed, ‘loudness’ was one of the

deﬁ ning traits of the brand of hard rock

Thin Lizzy were cultivating, hitched to the

kind of uncontained masculinity Lynott

Lynott.indd 71 03/10/2024 14:35

72 October-November 2024

imagery, and if there is a single, deﬁnitive

example of this trend, it is the cover art for

‘Live and Dangerous’: Lynott poses on his

knees in tight, black spandex trousers, his

legs spread, his chest revealed, his bass

guitar in hand, his head thrown back, and

his mouth agape as if releasing a cry of

pleasure. There is no line here between

musical and sexual ecstasy.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that, in a

still staunchly Catholic, conservative

Ireland, the press began to scrutinise

Lynott’s personal life at the same time as

he was expressing himself in sexually

provocative ways. Between 1978 and

1980, Lynott was making front-page news

across Ireland for reasons far removed

from his music-making, including being

shot at while in his limo in Memphis, for

being flown to the United States for

emergency eye surgery after a bottle attack

while signing autographs, and apologising

for allusions to letter bombs in adverts for

‘Live and Dangerous’. Irish reporters, it

seems, became quite interested in

provoking Lynott, painting him as a

deviant, and no more so than around Thin

Lizzy’s recreational drug use.

Robin MacLennan, the band’s road

Thin Lizzy began

rehearsing in early 1970 in

a land without rock

neutral in expression, standing side-by-

side with his fellow bandmates, and

unremarkably dressed: in fact, he is not

unusually pictured wearing a shirt-and-tie

combination, something more consistent

with showband attire than rock culture.

All of this changes in the mid-1970s,

when Lynott takes on a whole new persona,

typiﬁed by more conﬁdent stances, a

newly-grown moustache and more

glamorous clothing. But the most arresting

feature of this new persona is the central

place occupied by Lynott’s bass guitar,

wielded in all kinds of commanding

positions.

Musicologists have long pointed out the

phallic connotations associated with such

started to develop on songs like ‘The Boys

Are Back In Town’ and ‘Jailbreak’.

There was plenty of pushback against

these new sounds: the Irish Times’ music

critic George D Hodnett often complained

of his need for earplugs at rock gigs, and

as late as 1976 wrote that it was diﬃcult by

“any musical criteria … to see what is

supposed to be so special” about Thin

Lizzy.

His successor, Joe Breen, was more

sympathetic, though even he looked back

on rock in the 1970s as “a crude amalgam

of loudness, distortion and music”. But one

of the signiﬁcant things about Irish rock

music in these years was the way that

“loudness” was reconstituted as a virtue.

More often than not, Irish reviews of

second-era Lizzy bear this out, whether in

their ‘tough, aggressive music’, their

‘powerhouse sound’, or their ‘hard,

screaming guitars’, ‘almost percussive

bass’ and ‘forceful drumming’.

In many ways, it becomes a condition for

praise by the end of the decade. When a

reviewer for Hot Press heard Thin Lizzy at

the Hammersmith Odeon in London in June

1980, he reported that “Disgruntled shouts

of ‘Louder, turn it up’ could be heard amid

the applause after nearly every number”.

In Lizzy’s early days, Lynott made his

mark as more of a lyricist than a rocker. His

creative imagination gravitated towards

memory and adventure: if he wasn’t

narrating scenes from his childhood

(‘Shades of a Blue Orphanage’), honouring

his grandmother (‘Sarah’) or writing odes

to his hometown (‘Dublin’), then he was

exploring scenes drawn from Irish

mythology (‘Éire’) or American westerns

(‘Buﬀalo Gal’). Many of these themes

continued, post-Jailbreak, but

accompanied by a newfound anxiety to

maintain a heavy rock reputation.

Mere weeks after the release of ‘Live and

Dangerous’, Lynott was promising fans

that “the music is gonna get more

aggressive”, despite the fact that their

usual setlist at that point included only one

slow song, ‘Still In Love With You’.

By the time Thin Lizzy appeared on Top

of the Pops to perform his second, better-

known song called ‘Sarah’ (about his

eldest daughter), he was out of his comfort

zone.

Speaking about it to Niall Stokes, the

editor of Hot Press, he said: “I normally

only sing about intimate things when I’m

in the studio on my own, when there’s very

few people around and not a lot of young

girls looking at you saying ‘he’s lovely’ or

‘look what he’s wearing’ like they do on Top

of the Pops. And I found that I was really

embarassed [sic] singing it, ’cos there I was

dressed in leathers – dressed to kill – and

singing ‘I love you’…I mean, I just wanted

to get up on Top of the Pops and do a fast

jump-around number – ’cos at least that

way you can have a bit of fun”.

Lynott-the-rockstar was increasingly in

tension with the singer’s more sensitive

side, the latter most evident in Lynott’s two

published books of poetry, ‘Songs for

While I’m Away’ and ‘Philip’.

Lynott-the-womaniser, on the other

hand, was a side that the singer seemed to

foster more naturally. He cultivated it on

songs like ‘Don’t Believe A Word’, ‘Cowboy

Song’ and ‘Romeo and the Lonely Girl’, and

it is immortalised in his audience pick-up

line on ‘Live and Dangerous’: “Is there

anybody here with any Irish in them? Is

there any of the girls who’d like a little

more Irish in them?”.

He appeared as a judge on the 1978

Miss World competition, and when asked

what marriage had done to him on The Late

Late Show in April 1981, he couldn’t help

but laugh as he responded that it had made

him “faithful to one woman”. But Lynott’s

emergence as a sex symbol is best charted

through the evolution of his image. In early

photographs of Thin Lizzy, Lynott is

practically unrecognisable. He is often

Thin Lizzy began

rehearsing in early 1970 in

a land without rock

Lynott.indd 72 03/10/2024 14:35

October-November 2024 73

manager, failed to present in court in

London on a DUI charge in August 1977,

and subsequent reports of his convictions

emphasised his previous three-year

driving ban and charges of possession of

cannabis and methylamphetamine.

But more often the focus was on Lynott

himself: much of the coverage of Thin

Lizzy’s Dalymount Park gig in August 1977

stirred controversy around the afterparty

Lynott organised for his birthday rather

than the band’s performance.

‘Six held in drugs raid on pop party’, ran

the front-page headline in the Irish

Independent on 22 August 1977, leading

an article that described a “drugs squad

raid” on a party organised “by pop group

leader Phil Lynott” at which, it was alleged,

“thousands of pounds worth of cannabis

and cocaine” were seized.

Music journalist Máirín Sheehy, writing

in Hot Press, was quick to point out that

Lynott’s name was “the only one mentioned

in the article”, the obvious implication

being that he alone was responsible.

Irrespective of the exaggerated quantity of

drugs discovered and a subsequent

apology by the newspaper, the story was

picked up across the country, is only one

in a long list of subsequent drug-related

reports on Lynott.

The point is not that such reports were

without foundation – Lynott had been

drinking heavily and smoking cannabis

since at least the early 1970s, and by his

death in 1986 he was addicted to heroin –

but that Lynott was singled out publicly in

ways that others were not.

He was, to put it mildly, not the only Irish

musician taking drugs in the 1970s, and

yet he was especially entangled with them

in the public eye by the summer of 1980: in

February and April of that year, he was in

court twice on charges of cocaine and

cannabis possession, both appearances

widely reported in the Irish media.

It’s possible to watch footage from the

RTÉ Archives of Lynott being driven out of

Dublin District Court in 1985 while being

hounded by the press, only months before

his death.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll: it’s not as

simple as it sounds, but it gets more

complicated. It is untrue, as it is sometimes

claimed, that Lynott was ‘the only Black in

Ireland’ when he was a child, and it is also

untrue that he did not face any racism,

though in general he was certainly as much

a part of the Crumlin community in which

he grew up as his family, friends and

neighbours.

His childhood peers have recalled

various taunts of ‘Bl*ckie’, ‘B*luba’ and

‘S*mbo’ that Lynott faced at school, as well

as the physical ﬁghts they sometimes

occasioned. There were certainly relatively

few people of colour in Ireland compared

to today, and this in turn made Lynott’s

ethnicity a profound marker of diﬀerence.

Terry O’Neill, Thin Lizzy’s ﬁrst manager,

recalled that “in the early days, with Philip

in Ireland, if you went into an ordinary shop,

it was a bit like a cowboy movie when the

piano player would stop and everybody

would [stare], because they’d never really

seen a Black person before”.

And as his proﬁle as a musician grew,

Lynott’s ethnicity became a point of interest

in the Irish press: he was variously referred

to as ‘a coloured boy’, or as ‘black but [with]

the thickest Dublin accent you ever heard’.

He was not just a ‘Dubliner’ but ‘a black

Dubliner’. He was not just a Dublin rockstar,

but ‘the only black Dublin rock star’.

These references were, of course, not

always explicitly racist, though I have come

across at least one reference to Lynott as

late as 1979 in a major Irish regional

newspaper as “a d*rkie”.

Lynott himself preferred to downplay

questions of race when asked – his

biographer Graeme Thomson observes that

Lynott likened it to having “big ears” – but

this does not mean that such experiences

were actually trivial.

The musical evidence is captured on

‘Black Boys on the Corner’, the less-known

B-side to ‘Whiskey in the Jar’. “I’m a little

black boy”, sings Lynott, “and I don’t know

my place”.

It is hard to remember Lynott today

without thinking about the recent uptick in

racism, xenophobia and anti-immigration

sentiment associated with the far right in

Ireland, which has left its mark in the form

of torched buildings, death threats and

riots.

If the 1970s was a generally repressive

time in which to express oneself as an Irish

person, how would someone like Phil Lynott

– a mixed-race man of Irish and Guyanese

descent born in West Bromwich, England –

feel about expressing himself now?

Author Emma Dabiri and rapper Denise

Chaila have both spoken about the racism

they encountered growing up in Ireland,

and we need to look no further than the

online abuse directed at sprinter Rhasidat

Adeleke in June to see a ﬂagrant recent

example.

Lynott, it seems safe to conclude, never

faced the like. And while it should never be

incumbent upon a single person to ﬁght a

societal problem, Lynott’s legacy can serve

as one among many reminders to those who

seek to police Irish identity that it is not

rigid, but capacious.

Adam Behan is a research fellow at Maynooth

University, and is writing a book on the

history of Irish popular music 1970–2000.

Thin Lizzy are usually separated into

a ﬁrst-era three-piece band of Lynott,

Bell and Downey that broke through

with ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ in 1973; and a

second era as a four-piece that achieved

widespread commercial success with

‘Jailbreak’ and ‘Bad Reputation’

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Lynott.indd 73 03/10/2024 14:35