Earlier today I wrote what I will forever consider my most boring post ever and in honor of this momentos occasion I am revisitng my worst post ever: it was a mess of piece of writing. The opening paragraph didn’t work and the direction I was trying to pull the story in, I wanted to tie Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are back in Town’ to the Manchester Mafia the Quality Street Gang, wouldn’t be pulled.
The story of Thin Lizzy is the story of Phil Lynott. A hard rock bass player with a romantic heart and a taste for a melody who drank and drugged himself to death by the age of thirty-six. Before punk hit Thin Lizzy were a journeyman hard rock band who kept on pulling off the unlikeliest of hit singles, during punk they were part of the rear guard, all but irrelevant in a world of loud fast rules, and by the advent of new wave Lynot had teamed up with former Sex Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones to form the Greedy Bastards.
Lynott, born of an Irish mom and a Brazilian dad was raised in Moss Side in Manchester, as nasty a place to live as you can imagine: all street gangs, hookers and drugs. Lynott moved to ireland and was raised by his Grandma and it was there he would form his first band. Here is the way it works. If youre an egomaniac youre lead singer, if youre a social animal you play guitar, if youre an introverted mass murderer you play bass and if youre shy you play drums. Lynott was introverted by being black playing a white mans game (how many black hard rock stars can you name even today?) he was pushing himself backwards and forwards at the same time: the urge was so opposite, to stand out while still being hidden.
It took four years for Lynott and thin Lizzy to break. At the beginning the hard slog of being an opening band has its own rewards but as Juliana Hatfield more than adequately explain in her memoir When I Grow Up, life on the road searching for a future you never quite get to is very, very tough. Suicidally tough.
For Lynott 1973 was the end of the beginning, a cover of the tradional “Whiskey In A Jar” and for four years it was all over but the cashing in of the checks and the penicillin shots. And the hits kept on coming “Rosalie”. “The Boys Are back In town”, “Jailbreak”, “Don’t Believe A Word’, “Dancing In the Moonlight (Got Me In The Spotlight), “Waiting for An Alibi” “Do Anything You Wanna Do”. He was trying to give Springsteen a run for his money, deeply melodic hard rock (though seldom power ballads) with self-reflexive seductions: “Don’t believe I wrote this song for you,” Lynott warned. “There might be some other silly pretty girl I’m singing it to.”
“The Boys Are Back In Town” is the zenith of Lynotts career. Played in sports stadiums everyday it has a powerful riff and a great, indelible melody. It’s pretty perfect: the chorus, the verse, the bridge right on top of block chords under drums and riffs. The rumors in manchester was this was about the Quality Street Gang. Well dressed sons of local gangsters with an expanding stable of women, friends, many of them cops, guns, and danger. They ruled Greater manchester and if they liked you, you were an untouchable. Lynott and Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate and George Best -any one who was any one knew em. It wasn’t the songs misogyny which suggest Lynott was discussing the Quality Street gang, it was the out of nowhere suggestion that “the drink will flow and the blood will spill”
Lynott himself moved between a prison breaking bad boy cowboy love em and leave em er and a romantic loser getting into a mess over love: “But it’s a habit worth forming if it means to justify the end”. He was the hard rock half bred, the melodic rocker, the irish Springsteen.
And then the hits dried up and Thin Lizzy hit the road and have played on stage ever since. Twenty three years after Phil died and they are still dancing in the moonlight, still on the nostalgia circuit, still playing Lynott’s songs.