“That is, spending six months of your life travelling to gigs and the other six months playing.” “I believe in the rock culture,” he said. For all his hedonism, he was equally addicted to the workaholic discipline of keeping the band on the road. When 1976’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” made bona fide stars of Lizzy mark two – and brought them a passionate, near-tribal following – Lynott finally found the role that shielded him from his most painful feelings. Fate steered him towards the hustlers and criminals he romanticised as “Johnny”, “Rocky” and “Romeo”. I suspect Lynott never set out to become the cartoon hard-rock superhero he morphed into after Lizzy’s breakthrough version of the traditional Irish song “Whiskey in the Jar” (1972). David Bowie, who shared producer Tony Visconti with Thin Lizzy, could have vouched for that. But then rock’n’roll wouldn’t exist at all were it not for wounded misfits trying on multiple masks for size. Was he a poet or a hoodlum, a Dublin mythologist or a post-psychedelic stud? Was he the shy, sensitive charmer many friends remember or was he a predatory Lothario? Thomson makes clear that he was all these things – or perhaps really none of them. In many ways the early music of Thin Lizzy – on albums such as the tellingly titled Shades of a Blue Orphanage (1972) – is Lynott’s most interesting work, since it more accurately reflects the magpie diversity of his influences. “It allows for all these people to exist within it and live out their fantasies.” “Anybody can be anybody in rock’n’roll,” Lynott said in 1977.
THIN LIZZY COWBOY SONG YOUTUBE PATCH
Haunted by his abandonment by his Guyanese father and wounded by separation from his Irish mother, Lynott’s attempts to patch together an identity from comic-book superheroes, mythical Irish warriors and potent musical precursors (including such “black rock” icons as Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee) make perfect sense when one grasps what an extraordinary fish out of water he was. So who was he, really? Thomson’s painstaking account of what went into the making of Philip Lynott suggests the singer’s entire life was designed to avoid that question.
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