with a spliff in one hand and a glass of whiskey in
the other”.
“It took away from the vibe a bit,” Downey told me.
The other thing that “took away from the vibe”
was that Phil, usually so meticulous with his songs,
already so in character by the time he got into the
studio, now took forever with his vocals, would
fumble the bass, then want to leave early for the
newly opened Le Palace nightclub in nearby
Montmartre – the French answer to Studio 54,
where the band had their own VIP area, complete
with an open-ended bar tab and the intimate
company of every high-class escort in the vicinity.
“I went there with them one night and woke up
the next morning with this stunningly beautiful
girl I couldn’t even remember meeting, I was so out
of it” recalled a mutual friend. “All paid for by Phil.”
The real price for such louche attitudinals,
however, was an album studded with diamonds
but neck deep in cliché and bish-bash-bosh
padding. The jewels first: Waiting For An Alibi,
Lizzy’s last great rocker, part Boys Are Back, part
patent Lynott leather, destined to become their
biggest-selling single after Boys. Check the YouTube
clip of them performing it on The Kenney Everett
Video Show and yearn to be back there, Phil and
Scott doing their so-cool bro-show as a be-shaded
Moore snarls into the camera and fires rockets
with one hand, all the while the necessarily under-
clad girls from dance troupe Hot Gossip standing
around like exotic sugarplums from Le Palace.
Opening track – and second hit single – Do
Anything You Want To was Phil-as-Elvis, Brian’s
drums rumpy-pumping as Scott and Gary bugle
along. It was... infectious, if throwaway.
Then Sarah – third hit single and the real surprise
package, being a Gary-and-Phil song that could- should – have been on one of the other’s solo
albums. Both Gorham and Downey had been
replaced, by Mark Nauseef and Huey Lewis,
although it was Scott who put in the only
appearance other than Phil in the
subsequent and gently twee video.
The rest veered between the
occasionally brilliant but generally
over-wrought – Got To Give It Up, yet
another far-from-home melodrama,
powerful yet over-familiar, one off
the peg; the completely over-the-top
title track, Róisín Dubh (Black Rose):
A Rock Legend, a portentous seven-
minute opus that begins with
a blustering Celtic riff, Phil up
a mountain beseeching the sprits to ‘tell me the
legends of long ago’, then charging off into every
clichéd Irish reel you ever heard, before descending
not into a meaningful crescendo but a series of
weak Lynott jokes – the ‘joy that Joyce brought to me’,
how ‘Oscar, he’s going Wilde’ and ‘George knows Best’,
even a flat ‘Van is the man’, and, most cringe-worthy
of all, ‘Ah sure, Brendan where have you Behan?’
What, for fuck’s sake, were we meant to make
of all that? I’m Irish, and even I still choke on my
Guinness having to fidget through it.
Then there were the tracks that were simply not
good enough. The chunder blundered out to fill
the gaps: the cod punk of Toughest Street In Town;
the pale thunder of Get Out Of Here; the flaccid funk
of S&M; the... God-knows-what of the utterly
lifeless With Love.
Nevertheless, when it was released on Friday,
April 13, 1979, Black Rose equalled Live And
Dangerous by jumping to No.2,
kept from No.1 this time by The
Very Best Of Leo Sayer. But while
Black Rose was certainly not the
very best of Thin Lizzy, it would
become a decent epitaph for a band now teetering
on the brink of self-destruction.
They had always been a band on the edge of
burnout but they had always managed to pull
through, guided by Phil Lynott’s unstoppable
passion and immense drive. Now, though, as he
became a victim of his own success, so gone that
Downey now wonders “how he even made it on
to the stage some nights”, Lizzy hit a steep descent
that would finish them off just four years later.
Moore was the first to bail, just weeks after
Black Rose was released, infamously halfway
through yet another spoiled US tour. “I left the
band basically because I just couldn’t stand it any
more,” he later told me. “I was the really annoying
one in Thin Lizzy, because I was straight and
people didn’t like that.”
He spoke of how the whole Lizzy crew were
into heroin too on that fateful final tour, recallingBig Charlie, Phil’s personal roadie, bragging about
“putting a line of smack out for the big fella the
other night... It seemed that the Lizzy tours never
really came to an end. They just carried on at
Phil’s place. It just turned into this continual over-
the-top party situation. And I think he lost control
at that point.”
Out of control, raging incoherently at his
ex-friend’s ill-timed defection, the black rose
suddenly losing its lustre, Lynott would continue
to try to rebuild Thin Lizzy while at the same time
forging a solo career for himself, but things were
never quite the same again.
Years later, chatting with Phil about Gary leaving
that time, and the number of times Lizzy blew it in
America, I asked, rather stupidly, if he had any
regrets at all.
He did his familiar ‘hur-hur-hur’ chuckle. “Oh
yeah,” he wheezed. “But that’s like regretting you
never fucked Kate Bush. I mean, watcha gonna do
about it now?”
I’m still thinking that one over. We all are, those
of us who lived under the spell of that short-lived
AVA but still beautiful black rose.
LON
/PH
OTO
SHO
T
Live and dangerous at
Hammersmith Odeon in ’78.CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 63THIN LIZZY