Bliss it was to be a fan of Thin Lizzy fifty years ago, in November 1975. Phil Lynott referred to fans as “supporters”, an apt term given Lizzy were followed with a level of partisan fervour generally reserved for football teams. And they were on a sharp upward curve.
This set covers 1974 to 1975, including remasters of Nightlife and Fighting, demos, alt takes, remixes, and live performances. It’s the origin story of the classic “twin lead guitar attack” lineup, driven by pugnacious Glaswegian Brian Robertson and laid-back Californian Scott Gorham. This is a band in transition, a good band becoming great.
Thin Lizzy were unhappy with Nightlife. The songs felt too soft-edged, the production tame. Robertson clashed with producer Ron Nevison, whom they regarded as a fur coat-clad dilettante. Gorham called it “our cocktail record”.
Fighting was a deliberate counterpunch: harder, grittier, a shift from cocktails to snakebite. Not that the contrast’s absolute. Spirit Slips Away’s languid melodics chime more with Nightlife’s tone than Fighting’s. Sha La La’s thunderous funk slams as hard as anything on Fighting. Tracing the tonal oscillations across these two formative albums is one of this set’s joys.
Lizzy’s macho histrionics were stylized, and accompanied by a broad wink. Received wisdom says Phil Lynott’s mask of tough-guy posturing concealed a sensitive, poetic soul. But like Nightlife and Fighting, he too ebbed and flowed, his opposing aspects struggling for dominance.
Saying Lynott made Lizzy special is reductive, but he brought far more than most frontmen. A black Irishman with gigawatt charisma, his songwriting fused identity and autobiography with Hollywood movies, comic books, Irish history, literature, and Celtic mythology. Plus the odd bar brawl. His bursts of chauvinistic swagger were accepted as tongue-in-cheek; women sensed vulnerability in him. Rogues don't come much more loveable.
Satisfaction eluded Lizzy when attempting to capture the visceral assault of their live sets in the studio. (Live and Dangerous is another kettle of riffs, but let’s note in passing that Tony Visconti’s claim that he basically created Lizzy’s live album in the studio from overdubs, has long been definitively proven to be total bullshit.) This set’s closing disc, a recording of their November 1975 gig at Derby College, offers a flavour of the raw excitement Lizzy generated live, even way before their peak. The three opening songs - Fighting My Way Back, It’s Only Money, and Wild One - are worth the price of admission. Which, incidentally, was 99 pence, or 89p for students.
The coruscating Fighting My Way Back maps out a manifesto for a band getting back on track. It’s Only Money is gnarly, nasty, exhilarating. Wild One, which Henry Rollins called “perfect”, showcases Lynott’s exponential growth as a songwriter. It also has him getting away with lines that from anyone else would seem risible Oirishisms: only Lynott could sing “Oh, sure you’re a wild one”, in a heightened Dublin accent, and still sound cool.
Ireland is a complicated place - I know: you come here for the insights - and Lynott had a complex relationship with it, particularly the eternal Irish paradox of needing to leave somewhere that’s an essential part of who you are. Add to that his mother, Philomena, leaving Ireland for England then sending the mixed-race seven year old Lynott back to Dublin to be raised by her family. All of this seeped through Lynott’s psyche and fed his carefully honed, deceptively nuanced lyrics.
Disc five contains most of the set’s previously unreleased material, although “unreleased” gets murky with Lizzy, due to the labyrinthine nature of their catalog, plus compilations such as the BBC sessions and the monumental Rock Legends box, sets which are now out-of-print and expensive.
Highlights include acoustic demos of Wild One, and the Nightlife track Philomena, a tribute to Lynott’s mother in which, tellingly, he leans as hard as he ever did into the Irish accent. Bob Dylan, who once called Lynott a “fucking genius”, would‘ve tipped his Huck Finn cap to a phrase for leaving your island home as idiomatically laconic as “when you’re far across the foam”.
Belfast guitar prodigy Gary Moore, who flitted in and out of Thin Lizzy like Ignatz Mouse in the panels of the old Krazy Kat cartoon strip, impresses. Likewise Brian Downey’s lithe, jazz-inflected drumming. Lizzy’s heaviness never eschewed melody. The songs bristle with hooks. Fighting outtake Try a Little Harder is achingly beautiful. An extended take of Showdown, featuring some fiery soloing, runs nearly seven minutes yet feels like half that.
Nightlife never sounded as bad as the band thought. For this set’s remix, engineer Richard Whittaker aimed to add “clarity, definition, depth and weight - especially on Phil’s vocals”, and to my ears he’s succeeded. Lynott's unique voice was yet another of his strengths: warm, rich, seductive.
On a ferry from Dublin - “across the foam” - to England, Thin Lizzy fortuitously encountered John Peel, who, charmed by Lynott as people generally were, arranged the first of many BBC sessions. Standouts here include blistering renditions of Suicide and Rosalie.
Jailbreak’s Cowboy Song appears in embryonic form at Derby; Lynott dubs it “Derby Blues”. This grungy epic ignites the crowd, yet Lizzy don’t pause, ripping straight into the loping surge of Little Darling, a deep cut from Vagabonds of the Western World. (Don’t make the mistake, as many do, of ignoring the Eric Bell era.)
Seventies critics could be sniffy, but Punk never laid a glove on Thin Lizzy. The contrived, vomit-caked subversion of The Sex Pistols seemed theatrical next to their genuine edge, on stage and in person. John Lydon or Sid Vicious may have sneered at Lizzy’s look - the stack heels, long hair, and sequinned shirts - but they were intimidated by the band’s authenticity. Lydon would have run a mile from a fracas at an eight year old’s birthday party, let alone a bar fight.
As Rollins pointed out: “The band was real, which is, I reckon, why they were very much respected by punk rockers. They were as streetwise as any punk could hope to be. A band headed by a half-black guy who had to fight all through his life? That’s punk rock right there.” Or as Brian Robertson put it: “Thin Lizzy were the original punks”, and if the Pistols had given them any attitude “we’d have just nutted them, and they knew it”.
Lizzy had rotten luck in America, origin of much of their iconography. They never had a No.1 single or album in the UK or the US. Even today they’re damned with faint praise, as “one of the best hard rock bands of the 70s”, etc. Discard those qualifiers like stems and seeds. Thin Lizzy are a jewel in the crown, a bullet on the belt, of rock music. They were authentic, soulful, multifaceted, and led by a magnetic avatar of proto-punk street poetics. They tower over the run-of-the-mill rock and metal groups they often get unfairly lumped in with.
Artistically committed, Lynott had the courage to expose his sentimental tendencies. Yes, he sang about motorcycles and flick-knives and warm .45s; but he sounded least ironic, most himself, when it was hearts not bottles being broken. The elegiac, star-crossed romanticism of Still in Love With You, later to become a live favourite, has a whiff of Yeats’s Maud Gonne to it.
In the Krazy Kat strip, empathetic Irish police officer Pup calls Kat’s life “warped with fancy, woofed with dreams”. So it was with Lynott, who discovered that dreams coming true can prove hard to live with. Heroin dragged him down, strangled his creative energies, and then took him from us in only his mid-30s. But half a century on from the recordings that make up this set, the communal dream lives on. It’s still a great time to be a Thin Lizzy fan. Releases such as this one do their legacy proud. Our whiskey jar runneth over.
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