Original subtitles

It's really good to be back.

And we'll let the show commence.

Its OK when you're in a studio

and there's no one there. You can say, "I love you.”

But, when there's a couple of thousand people there,

I'd much prefer fo say, "I'll knock your head off."

Philip was a dreamer and a lover.

He had such a huge heart.

Smart, he was sensitive.

For a hard rocker, he was very, very sensitive.

He was fun-loving, man, he was a half-full guy.

And talented beyond belief.

He was all those things.

He was young, but how many people accomplish

what Philip accomplished in his life?

What I always feel sad about is that

there's so much focus on the death

and I would love to just know more about the man,

the living man, the happy, amazing, creative,

you know, loving, loving, loveable man.

Well, Philip was utterly unique.

Exotic, exciting, thrilling, and yet Irish as well.

If anybody had been born to be a Rasta,

Phil Lynott was born to be a Rasta.

The man was red hot, he was on fire.

You just wanted to be near him.

Literally the best hard rock entertainer

I've ever seen, ever.

One of the greatest songwriters of all time.

He was fearless in his song writing.

He wrote pieces of lyric music

that touched people's hearts.

He brought poetry into rock music.

He had all the moves,

but he was very sincere with the audience.

He knew how to connect with them without... It wasn't an act.

It was Phil.

He was a very, very complex person.

This is a man that it's going to take you years to get to know.

Someone who will constantly surprise you.

He was a kid living in Dublin.

Living with his grandmother.

Being the only Black kid in Ireland at this point.

He was just trying to tell us who he was.

He was a very intelligent, cultured man,

in spite of all the razzamatazz.

He knew the power of the words.

Philip was just writing his life.

He was writing the story of his life.

Green grass.

A girl who used to live across the road.

Rain, my granny.

And me in short trousers.

When I went over to England,

I was seventeen, and I got myself in trouble.

And a big, tall Black gentleman became the father of Philip.

And, in those days,

if a girl had a baby without a ring on her finger,

she was soiled goods.

And I got battered and beaten because I was the mother

of the Black baby.

Philomena Lynott went through

an extremely difficult number of years

before she made the decision that Philip would be better

back in Dublin with her mother and father.

I asked my mother would she help me,

and my mother took Philip,

and it was heart-rending fo leave him.

14-15 months between us, like,

we grew up basically as brothers.

Definitely did have an English accent.

He soon lost that.

You hear him, he's real Dub.

Crumlin was a very special place.

Big families, there was nine of us.

There was no such thing as contraception then, you know.

Two bedrooms and an outside toilet.

There was two double beds in the back room

and two double beds in the front room.

School, of course,

that was just pandemonium.

I remember exactly the first morning

walking through the gates.

There was a crowd of chaps there.

Like, you just didn't see Black people in Ireland in the '50s.

And then the name came out.

"Hey, blackie!"

"Hey, blackie!"

You know, and, my, the hairs on the back of my neck.

And I just said, "Philip, come on,

let's get stuck into this."

And we went over.

And we were in more fights, the two of us,

around the first few weeks in school,

but that was the end of it.

They just stopped it after that.

So, yeah, those were the days.

I don't think he had an easy childhood.

And it must've been bloody hard for him,

if you think about it.

Being the only Black kid in the school

and having a mother that visited from England.

But he adored his mother

and he would've done anything for his mother.

I certainly always saw

a very strong connection between

the rebel spirit that Philip had

and the rebel spirit that Philomena had shown.

He reflected an extraordinary love of Philomena

in his song writing.

A child who is separated from the parent

that has brought them up for the first seven or eight years,

that is obviously going to have a huge impact.

At that time,

Ireland was very much an oppressive state.

In many ways, precisely the opposite

of the land of opportunity.

But there was a sense that rock and roll mattered.

Show bands dominated music in Ireland.

Dancehalls everywhere

and people dancing seven nights a week.

Big ballrooms in the middle of nowhere.

No alcohol and the opposite sex.

Kind of a teenage show band.

It was a very innocent thing when you think back on it.

There's a bunch of fifteen or sixteen-year-olds

going around the place and getting paid to do it.

We used to call ourselves The Eagles.

Then we heard there was a little Mickey Mouse band in America

called The Eagles.

So, we said we'd better change our name.

And then, of course, when Philip came in,

it was an automatic change to The Black Eagles.

We'd be out travelling, playing second fiddle to the show bands.

And we could be going to Dundalk, or Tramore or Galway.

Then you'd be back home and up for school the next morning.

If Philip was short of something, he was short of confidence.

But he stood out.

Bear in mind, I'm only thirteen at the time

but I knew he had something special.

We make connections

which can have a transformative effect.

The fact Philip connected with Brian Downey at school

was something that mattered hugely

to the way in which his life and his career developed.

One Monday morning, me and Brian Downey were called down

fo the headmaster and he goes, "What do you wanna do?

Do you want a good, steady trade and job

and be able fo support a wife and children

or do you want fo be a dirty rock musician?"

I remember when he joined Skid Row

Brush Shiels would say, "Get out in front there, Philip,

and take the jigs."

And he picked Philip 'cause he was a looker.

I'm a big Harry Belafonte fan,

I says, "Who's this guy? He looks good.

If he can sing, then we're in business."

So, I went in and I said to him, "What do you like?"

And he says to me, "I like Paul Simon,

"I Am A Rock"."

I said, "Ah, nothing..."

Then he says, "I like Nico and The Velvet Underground."

I says, "No, nothing like that.

Like, you wanna be Jimi Hendrix, that's where we're going."

That was a great line-up.

Gary Moore had arrived down from Belfast

at the age of sixteen,

to become the guitar player in Skid Row.

He'd go on to have a relationship with Philip over the years,

as a sideman and as a rival.

This was a band that had pedigree.

The ideal training ground, really, for performance.

He wasn't singing on key that well.

But then it turned out that he had a very bad tonsil in his throat.

So, his ma brought him over to Manchester

to get his tonsils done.

When he came back, I had to let him go.

He came on my honeymoon, he was one of my best pals.

I took it very badly and he took it very badly but it had to be done.

There's no turning back with these things.

You knew, for Phil to survive,

I told him, "You have to play an instrument."

And I promised that I'd teach him how to play.

And the next day he was up at my house

to start the bass lessons.

That was it, away he went.

The beginning of Philo.

The first thing you need to know about the bass is

it's that big heavy thing that hangs down between your legs.

The bass is this secret weapon, it's where the power comes from.

It locks in a groove with the drum Kit.

The drums and the bass give you that nice, sexy

wiggle of the hips.

And then all the other girly stuff sits on top.

But we are the men of the band.

Philip became a very accomplished musician,

so it was a weapon in his hands.

Da-da!

This is where it all happens, folks.

I remember the first night I ever went out in Dublin on my own.

I went round all these pubs,

"Do you know any bass players and drummers?"

"Sorry, we can't help you."

I thought, "You silly bastard. What have you done?'

And then I met Eric Wrixon

and we ended up going to the Countdown Club.

Next minute, this band walked on the stage

and Philip was the singer and Brian Downey was the drummer.

Laugh at this or not, but

a wise man makes his own opportunities.

And I'd said, "Right."

I got up, sort of staggered over to the changing room door

and knocked on it.

"Come in."

I forgot to mention this. It was my first trip on acid.

I couldn't talk to them.

I was giggling at everything I said.

And they thought I was an escaped nutter or something.

And I said, "Yeah, I'm actually looking for a bass player

and drummer and I can't find anybody

and my money's running out..."

And Phil said, "Right, we'll form a band with you, Eric,

on two conditions.

Number one: I wanna play the bass."

And I said, "OK, can you play the bass?"

He said, "I'm getting lessons from Brush Shiels."

"OK, what's the second?"

He said, "I wanna do some of my own songs."

And when I heard Philip's songs,

I imagined my own guitar playing in them.

I just knew.

Philip started his early writing career

as a kind of poet, and that's what he was.

The songs come from inspiration,

but I don't really check out where the inspiration comes from

cause thats getting foo close fo the mark.

You write about what you know

and Philip wrote about his life in Dublin.

There was a cinema called The Star.

And all the kids went there.

They showed all the cowboy movies.

Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy,

all those movies, so we used to go there.

The whole point of Philip's existence

was this miasma of different cultural interactions.

Comic books,

you had Irish myths and legends:

the children of Lir, Cuchulain.

You had cowboys, he was obsessed with cowboys.

And Philip found his own niche in the middle of all that

with the mythical as well as mystical.

He liked everything from the Lone Ranger

to Gnasher and Dennis the Menace

in the Beano at the time.

The first Lizzy variant was a four-piece.

Eric Wrixon on keyboard.

And essentially he was let go

simply because they weren't generating enough money.

Philip said, "Traffic got a house together,

the Allman Brothers got a house together,

Crosby, Stills and Nash have got a house together,

and they're doing it because they can work on their music

all day every day.

You're living it."

Philip had tuned in to the idea

that you could express yourself through music

and he found a voice.

Philip had this amazing energy about him.

I'd be sitting on the sofa with an acoustic guitar

and Brian Downey doing this.

Philip would say, "I've got this idea.

What was that you were playing?"

And I'd play it, and he said, "No,

too bluesy. No, too jazzy. Too folky. Too rocky."

I said, "What do you frickin' want?

It's all I know. You've heard it, you know."

And he'd say, "Yeah, that's when you start."

You could see Philip developing as a lyric writer

and he was sort of folky, mystic,

part of that folk tradition that was happening at the time.

There was more honesty in his writing in the early days.

Much more innocent.

He hadn't had a taste of the bigtime yet.

Philip created a cast of characters.

He was looking at the people he knew.

And he was including them in his songs.

It was a summer, so you know how summers stretch.

You always think they're much longer than they actually are.

They had a little summer house, a conservatory thing

attached to the side of the house.

They said I could basically stay there

providing I made sure there was bread and cornflakes and all that stuff.

We got on incredibly well.

There was nothing physical at all, it was just verbal.

And then after that something had changed.

The first time I heard, I was a bit worried

he was improving a bit too fast for my liking.

"Be afraid". I mean, that's kind of worrying, isn't it?

"Be afraid".

I had a ferocious side in those days, I had a temper.

I had an awful lot going on in my head, I wanted answers to everything.

I spent my entire life asking why, when,

what am I doing here, who am I?

And I think he had a similar thing going on.

At one stage, during the time I managed the band,

we took a break, and it was around Philip's 21st.

We decided we'd go to London for the holiday.

And Philip said to myself and Brian,

"My mother says my dad works there as a barber.

So, I'd like to see if I can find him.

This is both a sad and funny story in a weird way.

But anyway, we went onto the road and there were loads of barber shops

and Philip went in and myself and Brian stayed outside.

And Philip came out and he said, "No, no, no."

So then, we only went down about two or three shops

and there was another barber shop

and the same thing happened: "No, no, no."

Anyway, after about the fifth one, Philip came out

and said, "Fuck this."

And we just went off.

I suppose it might've been to do with our age

or how men maybe, or young men behaved at the time.

It didn't really occur to me

that, "Oh, God, he's looking for his dad."

Or anything like that, that was just something he was doing.

But he just kept saying, "I'd really like to find him."

It was like he resigned himself to it very rapidly.

He wouldn't be the kind of person that would want to spoil our day.

So, we just came out of there and we just went off.

I think we went to Kensington Market and bought some bell bottoms.

Even though he was an easy-going kind of bloke,

there was a drive there

that he'd start setting his sights on things, higher.

He didn't wanna hang around too long around Dublin.

That guy had ambitions.

I don't know anybody who doesn't want to move forward.

In that time, most people left, and to get anywhere, you had to leave.

There's a big wide world out there.

Never mind England, there was America.

So, no, he wanted to go.

He wanted to record, he wanted a recording deal.

He wasn't getting that in Ireland.

He was on a different path,

a path that he'd known from a young age.

He loved Dublin.

Dublin was home.

You know, it was where the heart is.

He was in love with Dublin.

He loved being a Dub.

Up the Dubs.

It really was an extraordinary love affair.

How do you write that? You have to be there.

You have to live there before you can say that.

There's that wonderful line it where he says,

"And that sea with blowing hair".

You know, he just encapsulated what it was like to stand there

and to look at this strip of land just disappear.

And the loved ones you leave behind.

A lot of people think we just waltzed over to England all of a sudden.

No, it wasn't like that at all.

We had to start from the very bottom,

all over again, 'cause nobody knew who the freak we were.

One of the top bands in Ireland.

Now we'll go and conquer England.

I don't think so.

Thin who?

When we got to London, there were signs saying:

"No Irish, no Blacks, no dogs".

There was no way that he would think because he was Black or Irish,

he was lesser than anybody else on the planet.

But he needed to prove it to himself.

It was very, very difficult.

Philip had one room in London which he shared with his girlfriend.

I lived in this horrible attic.

And Brian Downey had no windows.

And a guy that made porn movies next door to him.

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, everybody thought we were like fucking royalty.

I didn't know anything about them until I was

booked as the opening act

on Slade's first ever nationwide tour.

That was the first time I met Phil.

He was not in your face like he was later, not at all.

In fact, they worked very much as a three-piece.

At this point in time, Philip's pretty shy on stage.

I was more out front than him.

Maybe he was finding his feet. I know I was.

On that tour, Thin Lizzy had a bit of hostility.

And I remember Noddy mentioning it a few times.

"Don't worry, doesn't mean anything.

They're just our crazy fans and they wanna see us

and nobody else," and blah blah.

But that must've been hard for them.

Phil, God love him, went up to the mic, he says,

"For fuck's sake, give us a chance, will you?"

And they just started: "We want Slade!

We want Slade!

We want Slade!"

And we walked into our changing room defeated.

And, next minute, the door bangs open

and Chas Chandler walks in, who is Slade's manager.

But he also managed Hendrix, one of Phil's idols.

"What was all that about?

Listen, I'll tell you what, if yous don't get it together,

you're off the fucking tour," and he slammed the door.

And Philip was like white.

That takes a pivotal moment to push you in that spotlight.

Maybe that toughened him up to be who he was, too.

He had to morph into something that would make it.

You have to find a way to get to each person in the audience.

He was blown away by Slade.

Every night, Philip would be standing in the wings

watching Noddy Holder, taking it all in.

He was learning all the time.

That's the way he was, picking up ideas

all over the place.

Noddy Holder's hat had all the little mirrors on it.

He thought that was a great idea.

Philip came in and he said,

"Hey, Harry, look at this."

A mirror that you got for a budgie's cage.

And he says, "I'm gonna shine this in all the chicks' eyes."

He put a mirror right on his guitar,

which caught the spotlight,

and he'd shine it around at the audience.

And eye up the girls, find the really attractive ones

in the audience and light them up.

He'd go, "I hear some of you girls out there

got a little Irish in ya."

And they'd go, "Yeah!"

He'd go, "Would you like a little more?"

The change was totally dramatic.

All the poses, the trousers, the mirrors.

He could hold the audience in the palm of his hand.

He was born to be on stage.

He was a showman.

You see the writing turn and the sound of the band change

and it becomes a lot more affected by '70s glam

and I guess that's where Philip came into his own,

both as a songwriter and visually.

"I am your main man.

If you're looking for trouble, you don't have to go anywhere else."

That's a great statement of bravado

and you have to protect that position as a man,

if you stand up and say that.

But it takes some balls.

You didn't often get real introspection

in Philip Lynott songs.

We tended to be describing a world outside.

He'd tend to be creating characters

who were up to various adventures and misadventures.

I think every writer does that, especially in the music world.

That tenderness, that honesty, that vulnerability

is always hidden by a big noisy band.

And when we stand up there as big bold rock stars,

we need some armour against the world.

And it's quite hard to stand up there

and fully reveal yourself.

I think it may have started out as a game,

but he actually probably did become it

because he had to have a stage persona.

And I think that almost became bigger than he was.

I think the onstage Philip was the Philip

that Philip had in his mind.

There was this constant pulling, this to-ing and fro-ing

between the sensitive poet

and the rock star.

It's just tempting to let the grr take over.

It just is.

Nobody knows what goes on

when you have an ethnic difference

because you're taking blows all the time,

you just let 'em wash off.

Trust me, there were people saying stuff to this guy

that was hurting him to his core.

In the early days, with Philip in Ireland,

if you went into an ordinary shop,

it was a bit like a cowboy movie when the piano player'd stop.

And everybody'd go...

Because they'd never really seen a Black person before.

I think being Black fuelled his ambition.

It sort of gave him an edge.

Boy, did it give him an edge.

There was a very big moment when the decision was,

if you like, forced on the band,

that "Whiskey in the Jar" should be the single.

It was a folk song.

Our manager said, "What was that you were playing

just before I came in?"

And we're looking at him like, "What?

Only messing about with "Whiskey in the Jar'."

And he says, "I think you have a hit there."

We were gonna throw him out the window.

"You want us to record an Irish folk song

and we left Ireland to get away from this music."

In those sort of magic moments

where someone makes the right decision,

people's lives are transformed.

We thought, as a laugh, for all our supporters back in Ireland,

we'd send up the whole singles thing

by doing a rocked-up version.

So, it was a bit of a joke.

And to get us on the way, we've got a band.

They're by the name of Thin Lizzy.

They don't drink whiskey by the glass, they drink it by the jar.

And all of a sudden,

we're on Top of the Pops.

I was like, "Huh?"

In those days, if you were on Top of the Pops, man,

you had it made.

Fu... My heart was... sorry.

My heart was thumping out with excitement

and, you know, I'm looking around.

It is one of those songs that, even if you don't know it,

it makes you happy, it makes you bounce, just gets you going.

We thought "Whiskey in the Jar" was terrible.

And so did everybody, really.

It was so un-them when they had original music.

But it was a breakthrough, So, hey.

You can't knock it.

But anyway, that took off.

And, you know, he probably spent the rest of his life

trying not to play it.

It was opening doors

that had been firmly bolted and padlocked before that.

"Whiskey in the Jar”

"Whiskey in the Jar”

"Whiskey in the Jar”

Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Germany,

a little bit in France,

we just played ceaselessly,

week after week after week after week after week.

I was slowly cracking up.

Here I am, in a band that I was so proud of.

And we had to mime on all these TV shows.

So, you start wondering why you're doing it.

I started getting very drunk because all I'm doing is miming.

Apart from all this, my personal life was going to shit.

The whole thing started slowly crumbling to a halt.

Out on stage that night I was, like...

I shouldn't have been on stage.

I looked out in the audience

and people looking at me trying to play the guitar

which was impossible at that point in time.

And this voice just said, "You've gotta get out."

And before I knew it,

I got my guitar and I threw it up in the air

and it's weird 'cause you remember that moment.

Here it comes.

Smack into the stage.

That was it.

The end of me and Lizzy.

It was over.

You have a reset in the spring of 1974.

And it starts all over again.

Being in a band is just like being in life.

Things don't look like you're ever gonna be able to get out

of that black hole and all of a sudden

bang, you're out of the black hole

and you're off on a new golden run, if you will.

The management said it would be worth our while

fo keep the name and to try and find replacements.

We started from scratch,

we started playing all the small venues and building it up.

We get to this first show and there was literally

more bouncers than there were paying customers.

"One, two, three, four, vaaanngg," the kids say,

and Phil starts jumping all over the place.

Brian Robertson's going crazy on my right

and Downey's getting a lot more animated,

I'm going, "What the fuck, man?"

Phil kept looking over his shoulder at me.

"Get... Come on!" I'm going...

"Get... Get..."

He stopped playing the bass, walked over,

grabbed me by the collar, dragged me over the front

and goes, "Bang. Don't fuckin' move from there."

"OK."

Going from a three-piece to a four-piece,

things did change because they naturally do.

But it wasn't a change for the worse, it was just a change.

This is it. Year zero begins now.

Let's sweep away the old and let's see what we can do.

When we get into the studio, the producer kept going,

"Yeah, can you just turn that down a little bit? Yeah."

"Yeah, just turn it down a little more."

"Uh, OK."

You know, I call it our cocktail album.

"I say, would you like a highball?

Put on that Thin Lizzy album."

Anyway, we digress.

Thin Lizzy never had

a completely consistent recording sound.

It started with that first album

and it was the same attitude to the last album.

We wrote what we wrote

and it's gonna come out as it's gonna come out.

There was the possibility here

of doing something unique

by combining the talents of two complementary

but distinctive guitar players.

The harmony guitar thing.

It was like a mistake that happened in the studio.

Brian had gone out just to record a single line.

And the engineer had left this echo on.

So, when it fed back on itself,

it fed back in harmony.

And, we came back into the studio,

"Yeah, it sounds pretty cool."

After a while, it just became this natural thing.

Twin harmony Thin Lizzy sound.

So, for the first number,

can the people in the front row stay a bit back?

And we'll let the show commence. Here we go.

Two, three, four!

By that stage,

Philip had developed the confidence as a frontman

to step out and establish himself

as the focal point while also being part of

that rock and roll gang.

His image was everything at that point.

Everything.

I could be in and out of the bathroom

and all the rest of it in record time,

and he'd still be deciding what scarf went with the ouffit.

You'll never see a bad photo of Phil Lynott. Damn!

That guy could put on anything and look great,

then he'd go, "Here, you try it on."

You try it on, look in the mirror, and you look like a clown.

Over the years, Lizzy did daft things

like the cover of the "Fighting" album.

And there was all sorts of cartoon posing.

We are anything but hard-looking men in this photograph.

Come on!

We brought in a make-up artist to make it look like

we'd just been in a really ass-kicking gang war.

And Phil got a little bit of blood down here.

Robertson was, like, bit of a shiner there.

I said, "Oh, man, I want...

Make it look like my nose has just been ripped off

and a huge hunk of flesh here

and I want blood everywhere coming down."

Phil's going, "No, no, no."

This has gotta be cool.

We don't wanna look like we got our arses kicked.

We've gotta make sure it looks like we won the fight.

We win! We're the winners, man. We kicked their arse.

The problem about going on about Philo

is that sometimes you miss just how good he was.

How good a bass player he was.

How good with words he was.

And how good a singer he was, you know.

I mean, he delivered those songs with...

in a way that you believed him.

Two, three, four!

At this point, we had our own little flat and it was lovely.

That was probably the happiest time.

The honeymoon love story bit, you know.

And then from there, it was probably a car crash waiting to happen.

Towards the end, I realised

that this is just the most ludicrous situation.

I was very naive.

But I had this notion that all he needed was somebody to be true.

To prove that you could trust people.

Take me out and shoot me, honestly.

The periods of being away got longer and longer

and then I get the phone calls.

And his jealousy started.

He was feeling bad about his behaviour

and he had to dump it on somebody else.

It was attack as a form of defence.

Brian.

I had never once betrayed him in any shape or fashion

in six years.

I did love him and I believe he did love me.

I always believe that it was his insecurities.

He was continually waiting for life to be torn apart

or to be betrayed.

It is the ultimate form of connection.

He's speaking like he knows this, this isn't just a story.

He'd bring you to a place and you would stop judgement right then.

The part that I identified with Phil was his darkness.

You find a place to get what you need out.

I always like the anti-hero, I always thought that was very important.

The clean-cut always gave me a chill.

I much prefer my heroes fo be a little human.

Jailbreak! Jailbreak! Jailbreak!

The "Nightlife" album didn't sell anything!

The "Fighting" album didn't sell anything!

It has to hit on the third album

or you're warming up the car and you're leaving the building.

"What?"

So, the pressure's on.

And we gave it one hell of a shot

on the writing side of it.

Backstage, Louisville, Kentucky.

Chris O'Donnell, our manager, walks in and says, "Well, boys,

looks like we got a hit record on our hands."

We all went, "What song?"

He goes, "It's "The Boys are Back in Town'."

We're like, "Really?"

Even after we finished the song,

we still didn't think of this as single material.

Of course, I do now.

It's the most fabulous song ever.

That was like a bolt of lightning.

What is that?

It's like the ultimate lads anthem.

It is timeless.

Every generation relates to that song.

One of the great rock songs of all time.

It was cinematic.

And that was Philip.

He saw things as a movie,

complete with settings and lights, wardrobe and everything.

He could paint that picture.

And finally, we had a bona fide hit record in America,

which made life so much easier.

I really doubt if Phil just went...

"I'm gonna write "The Boys are Back in Town' today.

It's gonna be a belter, it's gonna make us massive."

He didn't do that.

I wrote by hook or by crook,

like, there can come many a good song

in the toilet in the bath, or, you know.

At one stage, it was called "GI Joe is Back”

[t took me ages just to think of the boys' though.

I was thinking the kids the lads'

Somebody said ‘the boys' and I went, "That's it, 'The boys are back"."

You just change a word. It made the song.

All these other bands, you know, big bands,

they wanted us on their tour 'cause now we could sell tickets.

That's what a big hit record will do for you.

You can actually feel and see the climb.

It just takes one, and you're off and running.

You're out of the blocks.

Philip was definitely tailoring the band towards an American audience.

It's all Americanisms in the songs.

Phil grew up on American television.

It always looked really sunny all the time

and palm trees and girls walking around in bikinis

and all the flash cars.

It looks like paradise.

And Phil was a romantic anyway.

I think America was everything

he was expecting it to be.

He fell in love with the whole idea of America.

He could not get enough of touring in America.

"I want to experience this, I want to taste it, I want to feel it."

And, boy, did he!

This was our time to break America.

What could go wrong, right?

He had real bad luck here in America ‘cause he got hepatitis.

And they had to cancel that first tour, The Boys are Back in Town Tour.

That was it, the tour was over with. Just in a blink of an eye.

In August, he was in the studio recording a new album.

And, if you take into account "Jailbreak",

then "Johnny the Fox" and "Bad Reputation”,

you've three albums out

within a period, roughly, of fourteen months.

The confidence that would've given Phil would've been immense.

They now knew they were really good.

And every time they stepped up on stage,

they were confident that the audience was theirs for the taking.

I could see these flashy lights.

And a big orange light going...

And then there was...

And then the big spotlight, and he came out,

"Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak".

And, oh, Jesus, the hair on my neck stood up!

Gol

Are you out there?

What always struck me about "Jailbreak" was,

"Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak somewhere in the town".

Like the jail, perhaps?

I mean, that's...

And, for years, I never noticed that.

It didn't matter.

That's a high energy song just for a certain point in the gig.

It's gonna lift everything up.

I gotta tell you one story:

we were playing the Santa Monica Civic in Los Angeles

and walked out, hit the first chord.

The audience up and there's like a sea of hands

and I'm shaking a few hands and I look down.

And who do I see? My mum.

I'm going, "Mum, what are you doing?"

Philip was always the consummate performer.

He was brilliant to watch.

Scott and Brian could've been running up and down the stage,

jumping on monitors and doing pointing,

doing all of this stuff,

but Philip was the one who grabbed your attention

‘cause he demanded your attention.

Everything moved on its axis a little bit when you discovered Philip.

It was life-changing in a good way.

I'd gone in there in a brown cardigan and I'd come out in a leather jacket.

How could this guy be Irish? How could he be from Crumlin?

There are new possibilities here now.

Things aren't as dull as they seem.

That was their prime, they rocked so hard.

Thin Lizzy in their prime were probably the best hard rock band

I've ever seen in my life, bar none.

Thank you!

It seemed that everything we put out was a hit.

Phil just could... There's another hit.

There's another hit. Bastard.

Sorry.

I got a phone call from Philip.

He goes, "I'm in a recording studio in London.

I'm really busy.

If ever I needed your help, I need it now."

And I said, "Well, fine, yeah, what's up?"

And he said, "l have a new girlfriend called Caroline.

And things are really taking off over here.

I can't think of anyone else who I'd ask, only you."

So, I was more or less on the next plane, as they say.

I was eighteen.

I met Philip because I was working for Tony Brainsby PR

and Thin Lizzy were a part of the roster of clients.

The first encounter I had with him was over the phone.

And he had an absolutely beautiful,

deep, soft-spoken voice.

He always sounded like he was in bed when he was talking to you,

which I later discovered he generally was.

He had a great sense of humour.

He liked to tease you with a mixture of innuendo

and misunderstanding.

And then, when you were all confused,

he would laugh,

and it was just delightful.

So, I was already partly in love with him

before I even met him.

I went to see them perform at Hammersmith Odeon

and, wow, oh my God, he was just mind-blowing.

I was just... Yeah.

Hooked.

I was quite wild and we just became a pair.

There were no conversations about it,

I just kind of got absorbed into his life.

The life of a working musician.

Once you plug into an amplifier,

it definitely gives you power.

There's no point in having a fast car and not driving it fast,

and there's no point in having a loud amplifier and not turning it up.

All of a sudden, "Live and Dangerous",

one of the great live albums of all time,

they were on fire.

The world-renowned Tony Visconti, record producer,

made the record sound like you were sitting

in the best seat in the house.

One of the things we did was enhance the audience.

And we'd made basically a huge tape loop of audience.

But it was several audiences layered on top of each other.

And this tape literally going around mic stands

right the way round the room.

We took the Lizzy audiences, and,

to be honest, some of David Bowie's "Philadelphia" audience,

and put it all together to make the biggest audience in the world.

And when you wanted some audience,

you could at any time just push these two faders up and it's like: Whoa!

And that sounds like an audience.

He was actually a shy man.

But when he was performing,

all of that shyness was gone.

He really did walk down the road with swagger.

A lot of my job was getting them out of trouble

and it was also pretty normal

because if you worked with rock stars in that era,

everybody was out there drinking, partying,

and Thin Lizzy had that reputation.

Guys in a posse together, getting up to no good,

and celebrating it.

And that's what Philip and the guys,

particularly Philip, thought his job was.

He was a man of many facets and many moods.

There was the friend,

the businessman,

the performer,

that muscle was always operating.

He kept people on their toes as well as himself.

Prolific and creative,

and that was brilliant when it was all working.

Yeah, just take it from the bridge, man.

Everything from top to bottom was scrutinised.

It wasn't just Phil the rock star, "Yeah, party!"

People had that impression of him.

But no, he was a very hard grafter.

The most amazing thing about Phil Lynott is

I've never met anyone

who could party that hard,

and at the same time never ever gave an inch

as far as quality and work.

You weren't around him if you weren't working.

He was very canny.

And he had a business head on him.

He was clever, he could suss things out,

he would keep quiet on stuff but it would be read and noted.

He knew what he wanted.

Philip controlled every aspect of Lizzy,

from the music to their look,

to the way they were perceived as a band.

It's a dumb phrase

but I guess he was the emotional cheerleader.

And then all the guitarist changing went on.

It was like one big long soap opera

with guys falling in and out and Gary Moore coming in

to replace Brian Robertson.

Gary was in, Gary was out. Gary was in, Gary was out.

But, for the most part, we were living the life.

One of the big guns, no doubt about that.

We were on top of the world.

There's nothing like it.

Every album we brought out was instantly gold

and then it would go platinum.

Life was good.

How could you not have fun with that, right?

Thank you!

If I don't get back fo Dublin within three months,

I really suffer from homesickness.

Ireland was very significant to him.

He was a proud Irishman, he was a proud Dubliner,

and that really comes through, that came through in every show he did,

it came through in all of his works.

Phil was an Irishman. Period.

Phil's almost more Irish than any other Irishman I ever met.

We would go into a radio station,

we're publicising this new album

and some disc jockey

inevitably would say something very dumb about Ireland

or he was just naive, ignorant, right?

He would say something and Phil would go, "Whoa! Hold on a second here."

From that point on, the whole interview turned into an Irish lesson

for this guy on air.

Coming from England. The Stones...

-Ireland. Ireland. -Or Ireland.

Irish.

Ah, yes, you sound like a British person.

No, I'm just teasing.

Irish. I'm Irish, you've got to get that right.

Well, Great Britain, British.

No. Irish, Republic of Ireland.

- My goodness. - There you go.

Very important.

Within a year,

it was all change.

And I was a mum.

He wanted his children born in Ireland.

That's how Irish he was.

Caroline had to come home

and have the children in Holles Street.

He'd decided that Sarah was going to be born in Dublin

without telling me.

Seemed like rather a nice adventure.

When Philip and Caroline got married

and the kids came along,

there were lovely times.

There were happy times.

I remember being so nervous

the priest literally shook me

and said, "Pull yourself together, woman!"

Philip laughed quite a lot of the way through the ceremony,

which I hope was joy.

There is a photograph that you see of me, like,

giving him the evil eye.

He was literally like the shoulders were starting to heave.

I was like, "Behave yourself!"

I carried Sarah during the ceremony.

She was a sweetheart.

Very well behaved.

It was very good fun, and the beginning of a new era.

I just remember this room full of family and friends

and he looked incredibly handsome.

And I was very happy.

It was absolute heaven.

Heaven to raise children.

It was just blissful.

He was not a hands-on, nappy-changing sort of father.

But he doted on his girls.

The memories aren't necessarily tangible.

The feeling is very much still the same

of him being part of our lives.

The best, because you could just go out the back gate

and you're on the beach and you just were lost.

And we'd be there for days.

It's hard to describe, it felt happy.

It's this blur of a warm childhood.

He loved to play games with the girls.

And he'd just get lost in the moment.

It was brilliant.

He had a very naughty sense of humour.

That naughty little boy was definitely in there.

Philip was somebody who was very enchanted

with the magical side of life.

Becoming a father has brought out emotions in me

that I honestly aian't think I had.

[t's amazing when you do get married and have children,

how much passion it can bring out.

What do poets write about? They write about love and death

and everything in between.

And there was lots of love in his life.

I don't remember a lot of Philip sitting with me

and talking about the music that he was creating.

But I do remember that he brought the song "Sarah" to me

and it really was the first time that he almost wanted approval.

It was like, um...

a present.

A thank you present.

It's an amazing thing to have a song written about you.

To not have him around

to say the things that you want him to say to you,

to have that reassurance, that love, that support there.

He wrote everything in that song.

If I ever need to feel his love, it's in that song.

Obviously, there's many a time that I've listened to it

and it's broken me,

but there's many a time that I listen to it

and it just fills you with absolute love, basically.

We had a hit at the same time, on Top of the Pops.

And I noticed that Phil was a little bit uncomfortable

singing this song about his daughter.

He was a little bit exposed.

And I was watching him sing it, he must've seen me watching,

and he went like this, right in the middle of one of the lyrics.

And I went, "Oh, that's..." "I'm still Phil."

Don't look too deep.

Sweet.

He wrote the song "Cathleen" because I said,

"You're not gonna write a song for Sarah

and not write a song for Cathleen.

You're just not. That's not gonna happen."

Hold on, I thought he wrote that song because he loved me.

Thanks, Mum.

It feels very much about our family life,

not just about me, which is,

for somebody who doesn't have loads of memories

and was very young,

I feel it kind of provides me with a little snippet

of our family's life together that's just for me.

You remember something and it's like a tiny little moment.

If I try and think about it too much, it tends to fade out.

He always had the blue fade down on the car.

We could've been anywhere, we could've been in town,

we could've been in London.

It was more just I know that I felt small in the seat.

And him just looking round.

Just that 'now are you doing back there?"

And just going, "Yeah."

I wish I could remember more than that.

It's a snapshot almost, with a feeling.

It's just a glimmer.

They were finally primed to crack America.

But he had terrible problems on American tours.

Something always seemed to get in his way.

Three times, and fell down.

The impact of Gary Moore leaving

was so far-reaching it's mind-blowing because they were on tour

and the people that were promoting the gigs, man,

you do that, that's the end.

That was the end of Lizzy in the States.

It was another blow to his American dreams.

They never really got it right in America.

He never enjoyed the popular success he should have.

Luck is a big thing

and that hasn't been on our side in America.

But in so far as Thin Lizzy's career Is concerned,

we've been a very successful and a very lucky band.

When Gary quit mid-tour of America,

Philip didn't go, "Ah, here, I'm giving up."

He was a great spirit in that way, he never gave up.

We had some great players over on the right-hand side.

Brian Robertson, Gary Moore, Snowy White, John Sykes,

and then there's Midge.

It's a very odd chapter.

Why he asked me to be in the band, I will never know.

I'm not a killer whiz guitar player.

Which is what Lizzy were always known for.

I get the phone call from Philip who's in Arkansas,

who said, "We're on tour, Gary's out.

The band didn't turn up for a few of the shows.

Can you come out tomorrow?"

I had just enough time to pack my bag,

and I thought I'd learn the set on the plane.

And they flew me out on Concorde.

I'd never been to America, but I knew what America looked like

'cause I'd watched Starsky and Hutch.

I got dressed to go on stage.

Big shoulder pads, very '80s,

smart, you know, neckerchief.

And Scott said, "Oh, God."

That guy's got some brass balls, man.

All of a sudden, I'm on stage

with Phil Lynott leaning over and going,

"Hey, here we go." You think...

It was glamourous,

it was everything you'd expect a rock tour to be.

Girls a go-go, bottles of champagne in the dressing room.

It was the package.

Rolling across America with your band playing great music.

And all the trimmings.

Depression started to hit us.

Knowing all the work that we had done

and how hard we'd actually tried to really break America

and we just couldn't do it.

You can do things during that age

that you will never ever be able to do in your life again.

And you only know that when you get to 35.

You kind of know you can't get back

and channel that same energy again.

So, itis, to an extent, it is a Faustian pact.

But the wise man knows that it's a short contract.

Phil always liked to experiment

and saw the potential of using keyboards

as a part of the texture of Thin Lizzy.

We just hit it off straight away.

He asked me what team I supported,

I said United.

Then it just went from there.

Dream come true, I was just 18 as well.

Really, my life became centred in Dublin,

whilst Philip was mostly in London.

We swapped countries.

If we were in London, I was living in the house with Phil,

and there was a lot of tomfoolery going on.

I remember once, we was all at the house

and we'd been recording stuff and hanging out.

Philip comes down in the morning, looking for his cheddar.

The only thing in the fridge was a big lump of fucking cheddar.

Somebody had the munchies.

In the middle of the night came down, took a chunk out of it.

And Phil's screaming, "Get down here, get down here now!"

So, we all trundled downstairs and Phil's there in his nightgown.

And he went, "Who the fuck ate the cheese?"

And there's this perfect bite mark out of the cheese.

And he lined us all up.

He had the cheese, going, "I wanna match your teeth marks."

I'm looking, going, "God, that looks like the shape of my teeth on that."

So, we all have to bite the cheese.

He was taking samples.

"No, it wasn't him, it wasn't you.

Gus, you're looking a bit suspicious there."

Anyway, it turns out to be Gus. Gus was the culprit.

Uh oh, he said it was Gus. Maybe it was Gus.

I blame Darren, now, on that.

He was living in the house at the time.

I'm sure it was Darren.

Phil just stormed off.

He didn't speak to us all for about an hour,

going to the Hammersmith Odeon.

Someone must've been very hungry.

I can prick around a bit with the solo stuff.

Like, I could use strings and I could sing love songs.

[t's more interesting as an individual.

But my first love is the band.

So, the drugs now.

I know we're going there.

They were there. They were always there.

But really just recreational stuff.

Almost everybody in the industry was like that.

The beginning of the problem with those class A drugs

started in Paris with the "Black Rose" album.

This was where the problems were beginning to start,

not that any of us really knew that.

When you actually look at the lyrics of the songs,

it's quite clear the idea of hiding in plain sight,

and he was perhaps reaching out,

hoping that some solution might be found.

All right, come on.

There's no question that was a note to self.

We did seem to be on the road all the time.

Tokyo, Australia, America, all over the world.

Private plane there, jet there, just a massive big rollercoaster.

But that has its down sides because you can burn people out.

This is the beginning of cracks in the relationship

because we literally just weren't together so much.

He was in a studio in London or on tour

and actually became a bit more of a visitor.

But there were other factors

that were influencing his thinking

and his behaviour and the way our lives were going.

We were starting to shift away from one another.

There was a marked change

in the guy that had a trajectory upwards

and had a vision, knew where he was going,

knew what he wanted,

and the guy that was falling apart.

You can hear it in the lyrics and you could feel it in the music.

It became more formulaic,

striving to get that "The Boys are Back in Town" part two.

The energy was going now,

the writing seemed to go down.

Even through the haze of all this crap that I had in my system,

I actually could see and feel the difference.

I just went to Phil and I said, "Buddy, I...

I gotta get out of this thing."

He says, "OK, this is what we're gonna do."

We do one last album and one last world tour

so we can say goodbye to all the fans."

So, that's what we did.

We're gonna do the only slow number on the new album.

It's a deep meaningful song, this one.

"Whiskey"!

No, it's not "Whiskey in the fucking Jar".

When the management first told us

that we're gonna take a break that was all it was,

we're gonna take six months to a year off

and give the guys time to rejuvenate.

It was never meant to be the end of the band.

All I can say about the last years of Lynott,

just listen to the last album, he's telling you everything.

It's all there.

The last gig in Dublin, the spark was missing.

It was sad that this kind of Irish...

institution' is the wrong word, I guess,

but this Irish thing called Thin Lizzy was to be no more.

Now, we know in retrospect

they were probably quite relieved it was almost over.

I've been to enough concerts to know that

it was right at the feet that I would get the plectrum.

I just was in the right place at the right time.

Yeah.

We all just said goodbye at the airport

as if "I'll see you next week, then.' It was like that.

Totally opposite from the way I thought the band was ever gonna end.

I thought it would be a mutual thing and we'd have a party,

shaking hands with big hugs.

It was me grabbing my bag and saying,

"Good luck everybody."

It was a really crappy ending to the whole thing.

So, what can you do?

Thin Lizzy is like a girlfriend

that you were madly in love with at one stage.

I'm in love with the idea of being with her again

but actually knowing it's impossible,

you can't really go back.

So much had gone, the brotherhood had gone.

And that's what Philip needed.

You cannot walk away from a successful band

and expect to be equally successful.

It's kind of like starting all over again.

There's always a transitional moment with fame

where the spotlight moves away from you.

And it happens to everyone.

You get very vulnerable at that moment

and you try and chase the fairy dust in one way or another.

At that stage, his marriage had broke up

and Lizzy had broke up, so there was a lot happening there.

And he wasn't the same old Philip that he used to be.

It's always sad when a relationship

that you had thought was for life breaks up.

In the same way that we came together

in a kind of absorption of each other,

we came apart in...

in... I don't know how to describe it.

Ina... um...

Almost like the tide going out.

And there was, I don't think, any point

where I knew that the tide had turned.

I spent from 18 to 24 with him.

It's minute, really.

I kind of feel like I was only beginning to get to know him.

He had faded.

Faded a lot.

I was really concerned about him.

Everybody tried to help,

but nobody can help a drowning man.

You'd do anything to put a rope out there

and just haul him back in.

But life isn't like that.

I wanted to get him back, singing up in the range

with that power that he had, that only he had.

But for Philip, I would never be here.

He was instrumental for me.

The late '70s,

my band Clover was selected to open for Thin Lizzy.

Our first show, the curtain goes up to...

Lizzy! Here's this other band.

The place went, "Boo!"

Barely got through all eight tunes.

And just hustled off the stage to silence.

And just in the wings of the stage

watching the whole show was Philip.

And he said, "Come on, let's have a chat."

He had faith in me and he raised me up.

Literally.

He came to San Francisco

and we spent a week working in the studio.

And we got a few things cut.

None of them were finished,

but we were on our way and it was great,

and he was going to go to England

and come back and finish the songs.

He was over on a flying visit to Dublin

and we had a great chat.

But before he left,

he said, like, he goes, "I just want to say to you that

my love affair with Dublin is over.

So, I go, "What?"

And he says, "Yeah, my love affair with Dublin's over."

He says, "That's it."

So, that was...

pretty sad.

I never saw him again.

After that, he just walked out the door

and six months later he was dead.

What a way for it to end, you know what I mean?

It was just... It wasn't how it was meant to end, was it?

It's just one terrible day in my life.

I'll never forget it.

Man, it's just been on the news.

That's how I found out, it was on the news.

Yeah.

Yes, sorry.

Absolutely crushed me.

I was in my basement.

I just sat on the stairs, cried like a baby.

This was a guy that loomed large in your life.

And now he's not there and he's not gonna be there.

So...

Yeah.

Weird. It's even weird to talk about it, you know.

There's things that go way past shock.

And then there's always regrets.

There's always the melancholy.

It was absolutely heart-breaking.

Even great people are desperately vulnerable.

It was a horrible wet day.

It was bleak and black, rainy.

It was incredibly hard to accept.

At some point,

there is a recognition that that life, albeit shorter

and much, much shorter than it should've been,

left behind something far greater

than most of us will in our lifetimes.

We can still hear his voice

and still tap into those memories

of everything that he left.

When I was on a train with him once when he was a little boy,

he put his arms around me, he said,

"You smell lovely, Mummy.

When I grow up, I'll buy you lots and lots of perfume

and a big, big house."

And blow me, he did.

All the time, we think about him.

He was one of a kind, Philip Lynott.

One of a kind.

I've stolen a few... Or borrowed, excuse me.

Borrowed a few lines from him over the years.

"You still out there?"

Phil Lynott would give you his entire soul

just to get you to smile.

I picture him as the guy I met at the very start.

He worked his arse off.

You can sit and dream all you want.

But you've got to pick it up.

I reckon he'd be dancing with the young ones around him somewhere.

He'd tell 'em the boys are back in town, probably in a kind of calypso.

I still have dreams about him.

This working-class lad who took on the world

and gave it a damn good thrashing.

It's always him looking over his left-hand shoulder

and giving me this grin.

Like, "Wow, check this out. Isn't this cool, man?"

And I'm like, "Yeah!"

I have the memories, I have the music

and I have Sarah and Cathleen

who keep him with me in my life.

And I'm grateful for that.

Loved. We felt very loved by him.

To feel loved.

And to pass that on.

That's a beautiful thing.

Until the next time. Thank you!