This fine telling of the messy life of Thin Lizzy’s charismatic frontman is studded with moments of bathos, but one particularly sticks in the mind. In the early 1980s, with Lizzy’s best days firmly behind them, Phil’s boyhood friend Noel Bridgeman stopped by the Lynott residence in Ireland, only to find a “cut-out caricature” of the singer in the hallway; and when he reached the top of the stairs, a second cardboard Lynott greeted him. Bridgeman, who had played with Lynott in the pre-Lizzy Dublin band Skid Row, remarks that “it was very strange”.
The cut-out Lynotts might have struck Bridgeman as odd, but won’t surprise anyone who gets to page 312 of Graeme Thomson’s Cowboy Song. For by the 80s Lynott had become a living caricature of himself – of the Rocker, the cocky and exotic character he created in the 1973 song of that name. He had invested so much in that romantic street-Gypsy persona, he no longer had any idea who he really 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. 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. “Anybody can be anybody in rock’n’roll,” Lynott said in 1977. “It allows for all these people to exist within it and live out their fantasies.”
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. 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. But then rock’n’roll wouldn’t exist at all were it not for wounded misfits trying on multiple masks for size. David Bowie, who shared producer Tony Visconti with Thin Lizzy, could have vouched for that.
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). Fate steered him towards the hustlers and criminals he romanticised as “Johnny”, “Rocky” and “Romeo”. 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. For all his hedonism, he was equally addicted to the workaholic discipline of keeping the band on the road. “I believe in the rock culture,” he said. “That is, spending six months of your life travelling to gigs and the other six months playing.”
Members of Lynott’s abject post-Lizzy outfit Grand Slam referred to him as Sergeant Rock, and bandmates and managers alike talk in Cowboy Song of his remorseless attention to strategic detail. Thomson suggests that Lizzy’s most enduring testament may be 1978’s Live and Dangerous double album – with its pulverising versions of “Jailbreak”, “The Rocker”, “Don’t Believe a Word”, “Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed” and “The Boys Are Back in Town” – but he also makes clear how doctored and polished those “live” recordings were, with Lynott redoing many of his vocal tracks and basslines with producer Visconti.
The discipline gradually forsook him as he fell in with junkies such as Johnny Thunders, Willy DeVille and Sid Vicious (with whom he was using heroin just a fortnight before the death of Nancy Spungen). Though he briefly – and almost successfully – aligned himself with the punk insurrection then toppling 70s bands such as, well, Thin Lizzy, Lynott failed to move beyond that decade, or indeed beyond the melange of metal, AOR, sub-Springsteen street operatics and Celtic chest-thumping that had served him so well up to that point.
Not even his marriage in 1980 to Caroline Crowther, let alone the arrival of two baby daughters, halted his decline and fall into addictive squalor. By the mid-80s he was scrabbling around trying to work out where he had gone wrong. His patented “Are you out there?” intro had sounded rousing at the Hammersmith Odeon, but it rang hollow in a half-empty bar in Kilkenny. It must have been tempting to shout back “No”.
Ultravox’s Midge Ure, improbably parachuted into a Thin Lizzy US tour after occasional Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore bailed out on Lynott, tells Thomson he feels guilty to this day that it “didn’t even occur” to him to suggest a Lizzy reunion at Live Aid – an event that might have made all the difference to Lynott and his ex-bandmates Brian Downey, Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. But you could equally point to Bob Geldof, the fellow “Dub” who, like U2, had been so inspired and encouraged by Thin Lizzy’s proving an Irish band could be a credible force in rock’n’roll. It is Geldof, after all, who tells Thomson that Phil “couldn’t imagine a life not in leather trousers, with a limousine taking him to work every day”.
Had Lynott managed to ride out the inhospitable 80s – and had he got clean instead of dying of pneumonia and septicaemia, aged 36, in Salisbury hospital – there is no telling what Thin Lizzy might have managed as a heritage act. Crowther’s afterword about her errant bad-boy hubbie and their “beautiful, strong, funny, creative and loving girls … of whom he would be so very, very proud” brought tears to my eyes. Put on “Sarah (Version 3)”, the heart-meltingly lovely ballad Lynott wrote for the elder of his daughters and remind yourself of the shy, poetic charmer behind the bass-thrusting caricature who ran aground on rock’s self-fuelling mythologies.
• Barney Hoskyns’s Small Town Talk is published by Faber. To order Cowboy Song for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
