THE RISE AND FALL OF A ROCK WARRIOR
With his leather trousers and wild hair, Philip Lynott was the quintessential rock star... but it wasn’t always that way
In August 1977, the day after Thin Lizzy headlined a gig at Dalymount Park, styled as Dublin’s first official open-air rock festival, Philip Lynott sat in the Brazen Head pub basking in the afterglow of a triumphant show fronting Ireland’s most successful band. He caught sight of a headline in a national newspaper: ‘SIX HELD IN DRUGS RAID ON POP PARTY.’ His name was given prominent mention in the article which detailed how ‘thousands of pounds of cannabis and cocaine were seized’.
In a rage, he marched to the newspaper offices and traded blows with the editor. He shouted: ‘My f ***ing granny saw that and it’s not f ***ing true. I didn’t have any f ***ing drugs.’
The friend who accompanied Lynott relates that the singer was searched and found to be clean at the party but‘ obviously it was completely true [that he had drugs], he just got somebody else to carry them’.
It encapsulates much of what the name Philip Lynott conjures up. The rock star, the drugs and a man keen to not let any whiff of a bad reputation find its way to the matriarch of the family who raised him.
Philip Parris Lynott was born on August 20, 1949 in West Bromwich, in the English midlands to Philomena Lynott; his middle name was his father Cecil’s surname. He later split with Philomena and had little part in shaping the complex man who became a rock legend.
Philip’s earliest years with his mother in a home for unmarried mothers in the Birmingham suburbs, and later when they moved to Manchester, are documented here. But they are recorded in greater detail and invested with more emotion in his mother’s book,
My Boy: The Philip Lynott Story.
The author, Graeme Thompson –who has written acclaimed biographies of Kate Bush and George Harrison – moves the story forward to Dublin in 1957 where Philomena brought Philip in the weeks before his eighth birthday. He was raised there by her mother Sarah, ‘the gran’ in a two-up, two-down at 85 Leighlin Road, Crumlin, in Dublin.
Neighbours assumed he was adopted, ‘a story’ the author notes ‘the family had little appetite to correct’. It was an era when money was generously given to help ‘the black babies’.
Liam O’Connor, one of Philip’s classmates at Scoil Colm CBS, recalled, ‘if you paid two shillings and six pence you could “buy” your own black baby for life. We just assumed someone had paid their 2/6 and they had sent Philip over from Africa.’
Thompson quotes Brendan Behan, another notable resident of the area, to attest to the neighbourhood’s toughness. Martin Cahill, aka The General, was in Philip’s year at secondary school.
On the rare occasion that Philip was racially abused he would demand an apology and ‘he fought his corner ably’ recalls another classmate, Brian Downey. He played drums with Philip – his close friends rarely called him Phil – in Thin Lizzy but also his earlier groups The Black Eagles and Orphanage.
The author paints a vivid picture of a boy who channelled his feelings of being an outsider and ultimately embraced his otherness. He was not an outstanding scholar but adored the tales of mythical Irish heroes which informed a significant number of his later songs such as
Emerald and Black Rose. His mum would send presents and ‘spoil’ him on her occasional visits to Dublin from Manchester where she had met Dennis Keeley and set up a hotel known to all as The Biz.
‘His eventual meeting with his own father proved a disappointment’
It was frequented by the great, the good and the gangsters who prowled Manchester at night. Songs such as The
Boys Are Back In Town and Waiting For An Alibi were inspired by characters Philip met there, after he began visiting Philomena whom he came to adore after bonding properly with her in his teens.
When his first serious girlfriend, Carole Stephen, got pregnant they went to Philomena with their plans to elope but Carole had confessed her pregnancy to her army officer father. The child, named Mac Daragh, was adopted by the Lambe family after his birth in 1968. He only found his birth mother and discovered the identity of his biological father after Philip died.
Philip’s eventual meeting with his own father, whom he had imagined as a suave sophisticate, proved a disappointment to him and is detailed poignantly here.
A proclivity for philandering was evident well before Philip became famous. His first live-in girlfriend, Gale Barber, says they became an item on his 21st birthday. He seemed lonely, then she found out he had been with four women the night before.
The book is strong in the retelling of his journey from shy, gangling boy to star. There is invaluable input by Irish music scene stalwarts, many of whom knew him from his earliest public appearances reading poetry, and they prove an invaluable source elucidating the paradoxes and contradictions of his public and private lives.
An exhausting cycle of album-tour-album-tour contributed to Philip’s excesses, his downfall and his death. It was three years after Thin Lizzy’s first gig – in Cloghran, north Dublin on February 16, 1970 – before Whiskey In The Jar became their first hit outside Ireland. It was another three before The Boys Are Back In
Town gave them their second. These were considered huge gaps.
The odd Lizzy hit in later years such as the more hard-edged Killer On The Loose couldn’t prevent their break-up in 1983. Three years after they headlined Slane Castle before 18,000 people in 1981, with new kids on the block U2 among the support acts, Philip’s post-Lizzy group Grand Slam were playing in rock backwaters such as Lifford and Greystones to crowds of hundreds rather than thousands.
The gentle, sensitive poet’s drug and alcohol consumption had made him bitter and paranoid. A bout of Hepatitis in the Seventies had taken a heavy toll on him and his capacity for such substances. He fell ill at Christmas in 1985 and died on January 4, 1986. Events such as the well-supported annual commemoration Vibe For Philo and the citation of the influence of Thin Lizzy on bands as diverse as Metallica and the Kings Of Leon are part of his legacy.
This authorised biography, with an afterword by his ex-wife Caroline Crowther, now Taraskevics, pulls few punches retelling the darker side of Philip Lynott’s rise and fall. It is maddeningly thin on the detail of important events such as Slane – which Philip considered the pinnacle of his career. Some lyrics are wrongly reproduced and theories on what inspired the lyrics stretch credulity at times. However, the author has spoken to practically everyone who was a colleague or confidante of Philip’s in his 36 years and produced an ultimately satisfying portrayal of a rock warrior who sadly did not live long enough to be a survivor.