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. ‘He was American and he had long hair’: Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham in 1974. 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.
“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, Dublin, in the 1960s.
Lizzy had already released three albums by the time Gorham and Robertson joined, with one UK hit single – a version of the Irish folk standard Whisky in the Jar that reached No 6 in 1972. The three-piece Thin Lizzy in 1973 (left to right): Brian Downey, Phil Lynott and Eric Bell.
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