69

Phil Lynott

1949–1986

 

Whatever may be his final reputation as a musician, rock star Phil Lynott will gain a place in history as the first pre-eminent black Irishman.

      His mother was a Dublin girl who had gone to England to work as a nurse in the Midlands.  Black men, either American or West Indian, were then a novelty rather than a distinct class in Britain.  The father of her child was in fact a Brazilian, but as much a descendant of a freed slave as any other black in the Americas.

      Philip Lynott was born on 20th August 1951.  At the home where his mother gave birth to him, efforts were made by the nuns to have him given up for adoption: a young girl like her would not want to be saddled with a baby, especially a black baby.  However, his mother was stubborn and strong willed, and kept him.  But it was a difficult choice, and eventually little Phil was sent home to his grandmother and was raised as an Irish Catholic on a Dublin council estate along with his nephews.

      One of the earliest photographs of the rock musician is one taken of him in a demure suit on the day he made his first communion, the essential rite of passage in Irish culture.  Though a black child naturally stood out in the Dublin crowd, Phil Lynott grew up happily enough, well supported by his family, and encountered very little in Dublin by way of racial prejudice.

      From very early on, his mother noticed that he had a stage presence, and as he grew up in the developing era of rock and roll, he fell into playing music almost inevitably.  Music was as important to Phil and his friends as the air they breathed.

      In 1969, along with Eric Bell from Belfast, and Brian Downey from Dublin, he formed a band called Thin Lizzy.  Initially they made a name for themselves as something new at music venues in Dublin, before they were signed by Decca.  They made two albums, which went almost nowhere commercially, never getting into the charts.

      But everything changed for the band when they made a rocked-up version of an Irish traditional song called 'Whiskey in the Jar'.  It was a case of Irish folk meets rock and roll, and was a wondrous and instant success.  It reached the Top Ten chart in Britain, and popularized the band's curious combination of folk and hard-rock guitar.

      But as is the way with rock bands, changes caught up with Thin Lizzy.  Gary Moore replaced Eric Bell on guitar, and two other session men were hired.  Two other guitarists were then recruited, a Scot, Brian Robertson, and Scott Gorham, an American.

      The band was now fixed, and began the main phase of its musical development.  In 1976 they released an album called Jailbreak, which mounted the charts.  A single called 'The Boys Are Back in Town' went into the Top Ten in Britain and the Top Twenty in America, and was voted single of the year by the New Musical Express in London.  There were a series of concerts during 1979 which developed their reputation.

      In 1980 Phil Lynott married Caroline Crowther, the daughter of popular British television personality Leslie Crowther.  This was not a marriage made in heaven so far as Crowther was concerned.  Lynott reunited with the band after some solo work.  The hectic details of the changes of the band did not prevent its further progress.

      Since he moved out of his family home Lynott had been living the customary life of the modern rock musician, which meant sex, alcohol, and especially drugs.  Eventually it all caught up with him.  He had split up Thin Lizzy in the summer of 1984, and at the end of that year an album called Life-Live was issued.  But Lynott was on borrowed time.  After a drug overdose towards the end of 1985, his body systems finally collapsed.  His mother finally realized it was the end when a priest was called.  On 4th January 1986, Phil Lynott died in an English medical centre from pneumonia and heart failure, compounded with almost total liver dysfunction.  His death at thirty-four was a great shock to his fans.  His remains were brought back to Ireland for burial near his mother's home on the north side of Dublin.

      In May 1986 Thin Lizzy was reformed, with BOB GELDOF [63] replacing Lynott for the charity concert in Ireland called Self-Aid, an offshoot of Band Aid, aimed at raising funds for young people.

      Along with BOB GELDOF [63] and U2 [36], Phil Lynott had been among the best known of Irish musicians and most influential in modern Ireland.  His extraordinary presence and power made a deep impression on a generation.  Only in England and elsewhere did he feel any resentment or prejudice against him because he was black.  At home in Ireland the Irish-Brazilian was treated as part of the scene.

      His memory has been kept alive by a series of books, one by his mother, and by reissues of his and Thin Lizzy's material.  'Whiskey in the Jar', with its mixture of Irish folk and imported rock, was truly representative of Irish culture as it had evolved since 1945.  But in time Phil Lynott may well come to have a greater significance for cultural historians as the first window into the coming multiracial Ireland of the future.