THIN LIZZY
It was on Thin Lizzy’s third album, Vagabonds Of The Western World, that “you really get to hear Phil the poet”, says drummer Brian Downey. After that record, the boys really were in town.
Long after they had gone their separate ways, original Thin Lizzy guitarist Eric Bell encountered Phil Lynott shopping. “I was walking past a 7-Eleven in London”, Bell says today.
“I could see this slim, tall guy with an Afro – but surely not, you know? I walk in and there’s Phillip holding a wire basket with some Domestos in it.
I’m thinking: ‘Fuck, if your fans could see you now…’ He’s like: ‘Ah, Jesus! How are ya, Eric?’ We have the big hug, and Phil looks at me and says:‘You know something? We created a monster.
Every gig I play, somebody still shouts for Whiskey In The fucking Jar!’”
Lizzy’s fine reinvention of an ancient Irish folk song proved to be a double-edged sword for them. Astand-alone single in November 1972, Whiskey was the group’s breakthrough UK No.6 hit, but it also prompted a directional quandary. Lizzy’s management wanted another folk remake as the follow-up – “It was: ‘You’re in the door, don’t blow it’”, Bell recalls– but Lizzy weren’t keen.
Their upcoming third album, Vagabonds Of The Western World was a transitional, forward-looking record which showcased their versatility and vocalist, bassist and main writer Lynott’s burgeoning gift for sometimes poetic, sometimes macho songwriting. More folk covers would be a bad move. It would typecast them.
Vagabonds was released in September 1973. Lynott insisted on Randolph’s Tango as Whiskey’s follow-up single, but it sank without trace. “It was great, but it was a bossa-nova,” says Bell. “We were skint and travelling up and down the country playing gigs, and every time we stopped at services Phil would buy all the music magazines and scan them for a mention of our new single. Weeks passed, and Phil kept looking. Still nothing on Randolph’s Tango. He eventually realised that we’d blown it, and that affected him pretty deeply.”
The original Lizzy trio of Lynott, Bell and drummer Brian Downey would implode before the year was out. But that was no reflection on Vagabonds Of The Western World, the recent 50th-Anniversary reissue of which has prompted Classic Rock’s chats with Bell, Downey and the painter of the LP’s ace sleeve-art, Jim Fitzpatrick. Although Vagabonds has perplexed some fans of ‘classic’-era Lizzy LPs such as Jailbreak and Live And Dangerous, it presents an equally captivating, if very different, Thin Lizzy. Vagabonds is ripe for critical rehabilitation, then, but to tell its story we must journey back to Ireland…
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