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The rise and fall of Thin Lizzy: 'No one was going to be sitting in the shadows with this band' - The Guardian

The rise and fall of Thin Lizzy: 'No one was going to be sitting in the shadows with this band' - The Guardian

The rise and fall of Thin Lizzy: 'No one was going to be sitting in the shadows with this band' - The Guardian
Oct 22, 2020 2 mins, 25 secs

They were the quintessential rock band, captured in their prime on a new box set.

If you want to see the platonic ideal of a rock band, go to YouTube and search “Thin Lizzy Rainbow 1978”.

You’ll find the band’s classic lineup – Phil Lynott, Brian Downey, Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson – in full flight, and even the degradation of old dubbed recordings can’t diminish their power.

Gorham and Robertson flank Lynott, the trio in motion, the two guitarists criss-crossing and taking to the monitors, Lynott in the centre, bass held high, a beautiful, heavy-lidded man half seducing his audience and half assaulting it.

For a couple of years, by this point, Lizzy had been one of the most exciting rock bands around.

“Until that first show, no one had even talked about what we were actually going to look like on stage,” Gorham says.

“He was the only black guy in the whole school,” Downey says.

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.

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.

The following year, Gary Moore – who replaced Robertson in 1978, and was an on-off member of the band over many years – flew home partway through another US tour, to be temporarily replaced by Midge Ure.

Gary leaving the band halfway through a tour was the death knell for Thin Lizzy in America, it really was.

And then, according to Gorham, 1979 saw heroin swamp the band.

In the hotel, Phil called me up and says: ‘Come on down to my room, I got something I want to show you.’ I had dabbled with heroin in California before I came, so England was saving me.

First, he says, Lynott’s hepatitis in 1976 was caused by using a dirty needle; then, that Moore’s departure in 1978 was down to his disgust at the heroin fug around the band.

Robertson says heroin had been present in Thin Lizzy throughout the years as a quartet, and “they were keeping it low key, but the management knew”.

You’ll find a band trying to haul itself through the set, fronted by a man whose voice has thickened and coarsened beyond its years (by then he was in his mid-30s)?

“The band had had a reputation for being impeccable live,” Downey says.

Downey didn’t need to; he only tried heroin once (“the buzz was great, but the next day was the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life”)

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