Thin Lizzy posed in New York in 1977: Scott Gorham, Brian Downey, Phil Lynott, Brian Robertson (Photo by Richard E. With The Boys Are Back in Town in the Billboard chart and Lizzy on the road in the US, they had to fly back home after Lynott contracted hepatitis. I went: ‘The Boys Are Back in Town doesn’t sound like a commercial single to me.’ How wrong could you be?”Īnd this, the moment of greatest triumph, is where everything started to go catastrophically wrong. Until one of the record company execs had the idea of The Boys Are Back in Town. “We were asked: ‘What do you think would make a single?’” Downey recalls. They had it perfect by 1976’s Jailbreak album, and its single The Boys Are Back in Town, which finally achieved Lynott’s aim of getting a US hit, albeit by accident. It was as simple as: you pick a melody, then you pick a harmony.” Scott didn’t have a grasp of scales at the time. It was something that developed instinctively, according to Gorham. “I had only been playing guitar for three years.” But together – after one failure of an album, Nightlife – they gradually worked out a way to play gorgeous, harmonised guitar lines that managed to seem languid and elegant, even when the band was pressing hard on the accelerator. “At this point, Brian was way more accomplished than I was,” Gorham accepts. But Phil was thinking about world domination, about getting to America.” It was nothing to do with the guitar playing. “Scott – we didn’t really want him in the band. Robertson, though, has a different version of events. Gorham says Lynott decided he would never again be let down by a guitar player – which proved to be a vain hope – and decided to get two in, so there was always a spare. Until, that is, their guitarist Eric Bell drunkenly walked offstage in Belfast on the last night of 1973, in the middle of the set, never to return to the band – although the Bell years are represented on a new six-CD/one-DVD box set, Rock Legends, containing all the Lizzy UK singles, dozens of demos and a disc drawn from a couple of 1980 live shows. The pair were in bands, then in bands together, one of them finally becoming Thin Lizzy. Singer Phil Lynott rehearsing in London, 1973. "He was the only black guy in the whole school," Downey says. Their roots stretched back to Downey and Lynott's time at the Christian Brothers school in Crumlin in the 1960s. And this docu is a nice add to the library! Wel done.Lizzy had already released three albums by the time Gorham and Robertson joined, with one UK hit single – a version of Whisky in the Jar that reached No 6 in 1972. For me, Thin Lizzy will always have a place in my life. That was maybe the only thing I missed: Phil's influence on other musicians. It is a very personal movie and all the comments stay very personal. A lot of songs passed through the docu, even songs I didn't know yet. Who was this guy that was always blasting through my speakers? The documentary is very complimentary to Phil, and not without reason. Phil was a big part of my life, but I didn't know much about him. Having that said, I was tremendously excited to see this documentary. I bought albums as a teenager, I even somewhat followed Phil's solo career. I discovered Thin Lizzy like it was a band releasing new songs. And although born in 1990 in the Netherlands, that was not the only song I knew. I grew up with Thin Lizzy because my parents named me after the song Rosalie. 'All these old rockers.' mumbled a guy a few feet away, with his Thin Lizzy shirt on. Also very special because the entire audience was double my age. Very special, since it was the first movie I saw in this pandemic. Yesterday I saw this documentary in the cinema.
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