V
alentino was in a cold sweat. Placed all his money on that
last bet. A nervous wreck, looking for something to help
him forget.
Paraphrased, that was Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott,
obliquely summing up his own situation in the band’s
1979 hit Waiting For An Alibi. Not that you’d have known it meeting him
back then. “He had more swagger than anybody I’d ever known,” Bono
recalled, after U2 had opened for Phil’s occasional party scruffs the Greedy
Bastards at McGonagle’s in Dublin. But there was also something else –
“a mood around [him]” – that gave an unnerving wrinkle to that swagger.
It wasn’t just the side effects of the heroin habit he’d been building for
the past two years, that snarky, downslide emotional-zero junkies quickly
perfect; that need to keep their need hidden. This was something else.
This was rock’n’roll suicide.
“He’d changed a lot by then,” the late Gary Moore told me. “He’d seen how
stars like Freddie Mercury and Rod Stewart behaved – very demanding and
over-the-top, almost as a test of people’s loyalty – and he emulated that.”
Attending a party organised by Phil at a private members’ club around
this time, he asked me at one point: “Are ya enjoying yerself?”
“Yes,” I said. “But not as much as you, I reckon.”
“Ah, sure,” he said, in that easy-come Dublin brogue. “Nobody’s
allowed to enjoy themselves that much.”
It was the drugs. But it was also fame, the famous friends, the sex and
the sex with the girlfriends of famous friends, the money – although never
as much as everyone assumed he had, including Phil himself, but the
money tossed around anyway on limos and smart houses, and on people
employed, it seemed, just to hang around, keep him company, keep the
craic going.
“He had that romantic idea of the rock’n’roller, living outside the law,”
said Scott Gorham. “And Phil was a magnet. He loved having people
around. You’d go to his house and there’d be people there all the time!”
Scott recalled how Hammersmith Odeon stopped people being in the
wings at shows because of Lizzy. “It wasn’t a gig unless we had fifty people
on each side. It wasn’t a gig unless both sides were just partying away. We’d
go in and do five nights in a row with a hundred people on stage with us.
Finally the fire marshal said it had to stop because it was so dangerous.”
This was the backdrop to the making of Black Rose: A Rock Legend, the
last of the almost-great albums of the classic Thin Lizzy period. This was
the backdrop to the beginning of the end.I
n mythology the black rose appears across many cultures and hidden
histories. The Irish drew strength in their wars with the loathed
British from the lyrics of The Little Black Rose, a folk song-poem from
the 17th century. To wit:
‘The Erne will be strong in flood, the hills be torn
The ocean will be all red waves, the sky all blood,
Every mountain and bog in Ireland will shake
One day, before she shall perish, my Roisin Dubh.’
There was also a fairy-tale aspect to the black rose: the deep, dark
purple of the ‘black’ inspiring feelings of mystical exultation, a wondrous
journey from one world to the next. And of course the black rose was also
a symbol of death and mourning, of fond farewells. Or death as new
beginnings: transition, transformation.
Phil Lynott saw the symbol as uniquely Irish, a blood-oath of defiance,
of the choice between freedom and death. He did not yet understand
that the latter was so often the price of the former. That Phil himself was
a black rose, different colours, made dark.
He was on his way to finding out, though.
As Scott Gorham observed: “Phil was just one of those guys. You
always knew the party had started when he walked in the room.” He
smiled and shook his head. “He wasn’t just tough, he was indestructible.
Wasn’t he?”Black Rose was not just the last of the
almost-great albums of the classic
Thin Lizzy period, it was also the backdrop
to the beginning of the end.Words: Mick WallGET
TY
The start of the end of the road: Thin Lizzy
in Paris during the recording of Black Rose
in ’79. Left to right: Brian Downey,
Phil Lynott, Gary Moore, Scott GorhamCLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 59