Cowboy Song Read online

  For all those who put fifty pence in the jukebox of the Richmond Springs, Brison, between 1988 and 1992.

  Cowboy Song: The Authorized Biography of Thin Lizzy’s Philip Lynott published in the United States of America in 2017 by Chicago Review Press Incorporated.

  First published as Cowboy Song: The Authorised Biography of Philip Lynott in the United Kingdom by Constable.

  Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61373-919-8

  Copyright © 2016 by Graeme Thomson

  Cover design: Debbie Berne Design

  Cover image: Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy backstage, circa 1979. Photo by Denis O’Regan/Getty Images

  Interior design: SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

  All lyrics written by Philip Lynott reproduced with permission of the Lynott estate.

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE: Dublin

  PART TWO: Are You Out There?

  PART THREE: Sun Goes Down

  Epilogue: The Ageing Orphan

  Afterword

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Introduction

  ‘The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads,’ Jimmy Rabbitte tells his band of white would-be soul singers in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. ‘An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland … Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud.’1

  If Dubliners were the blacks of Ireland, then being an actual black Dub was a veritable double whammy of otherness. In 1957 on his first day at the Christian Brothers’ School in Crumlin, the eight-year-old Philip Lynott stood in the playground while his classmates lined up to touch his hair.

  ‘Automatically, he was like a peacock,’ says Paul Scully, a fellow Southside Dubliner. ‘He was exotic. He stood out. I remember Philip coming to my mother’s house and she whispered to me, “Does he drink tea?”’

  The long, lean, coffee-skinned boy with no father and an absent mother became a celebrity simply by existing. By the 1970s he would be the Republic of Ireland’s first ever bona fide rock star.

  By 1986, he was gone.

  For Philip Lynott, fame was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its outline was always there; he simply needed to fill in the detail. It did not take long. He was a local band leader at the age of fourteen, the singer in Ireland’s best rock group at eighteen, and had formed Thin Lizzy by the time he was twenty. When the full force of his talent finally caught up with his looks, drive and charisma in his mid-twenties, Lynott seemed unstoppable.

  Thin Lizzy’s gold-standard records – Jailbreak, Johnny the Fox, Bad Reputation, Live and Dangerous – are both powerful and strangely beautiful. They are often described as a hard-rock band, even heavy metal, which undersells the soulful mix of machismo, melody, poetry, mischief, rhythm and attack Thin Lizzy conveyed at their peak. Amid the swagger, there was always a lightness of touch; beyond the smoke-bombs and sirens lay a determination for things to be better and smarter than they needed to be.

  On stage, Thin Lizzy became masters of the live ritual. For five years in the second half of the 1970s, Lynott was the quintessential rock-and-roll frontman. He controlled and coaxed and electrified crowds to the extent that he became synonymous with the image on the front of their classic concert album, Live and Dangerous, a Dionysian study in leather trousers, studded wristband, clenched fist and gypsy earring.

  He was so ridiculously good at being a rock star, he inhabited the role with such obvious relish, it’s easy to overlook all the other attributes Lynott had going for him. ‘He could speak freely in the language of music,’ says drummer Mark Nauseef. ‘Not many rock guys can do that. He had so much going on. People didn’t see a lot of it.’

  Had he never written a single song, his voice alone would have marked him out. It’s not really a rock voice at all. The wood-smoke timbre, the high-wire sense of timing and off-beat phrasing position Lynott closer to folk and jazz. He was a crooner seduced by high voltage and heavy wattage; the mournful grain was always an essential part of his appeal.

  If his voice brought out the soul of Thin Lizzy, his words delivered the substance. Lynott’s early lyrics have a poetic flourish. They are a young man’s words, anxious to impress, but often very beautiful. The tenor of peak-period Thin Lizzy, on the other hand, was all cinematic street-smarts, every adjective and noun armed with a flick knife and a sharply turned-up collar. Few lyricists have proved so adept at placing the listener right in the centre of the action.

  He wrote melodies that have endured. Although numerous hard rock and heavy metal bands – from Megadeth to Metallica, Foo Fighters to Def Leppard – cite Thin Lizzy as a key influence, perhaps more telling is the diversity of artists who have performed Lynott’s songs, among them Pulp, Sade, the Hold Steady and the Corrs.

  He was a fine bass player. He was a phenomenal band leader. He was a wired-up perfectionist who affected the lassitude of Johnny Cool. He knocked around with poets and snooker players, fishermen and gangsters, Johnny Thunders and Georgie Best. He read comics and Camus and had a deceptively sprawling hinterland.

  This is a story about Lynott’s life in Thin Lizzy, but it is also a story about all the other things he was and could have been, inside and outside of music.

  It is a story with an unhappy ending. Lynott did not always behave well, nor did he always make the smartest choices. In later life his addictions and insecurities made him a difficult man to be around, and ultimately they overpowered him.

  But there is also much to celebrate. As the first full-blooded rock star to break out of his homeland, Lynott signalled the possibility for a new kind of Ireland: confident, swaggering, unbowed. His image, aspects of which can seem faintly ridiculous in retrospect, was potency writ large. As the late Irish writer Bill Graham said of Lynott. ‘He was the most masculinely sexual of any Irish star before or since, at a time when we were struggling to escape the prison of our repressions.’ The ‘jailbreak’ Lynott sang about was real. The Boomtown Rats and U2 tunnelled out after him. In time it became an exodus.

  That it took a black, illegitimate, English-born, Irish-Guyanese man to roll back the frontier is rather wonderful, even if Lynott regarded himself as an Irishman first, last and always. ‘He entirely viewed himself as Irish,’ says fellow Dubliner Bob Geldof, returning to Jimmy Rabbitte’s theme. ‘The old Black Irish thing – you’re an outsider anyway. He was totally Irish, in every sense. He couldn’t be more Irish.’

  And yet no matter how Irish he felt or sounded, Lynott appeared to be the precise opposite. This distance between the seeming and the being is part of his story. It was an existence filled with tensions and contradictions, playing out over thirty-six years. They resulted in some wonderful times and music, and some soul-scouring lows. ‘He lived many different lives,’ says Noel Bridgeman, a friend since their days together in Skid Row. ‘There were different levels. His personality was paradoxical.’

  The Irish poet and publisher Peter Fallon told me: ‘Philip rose and he fell, and somehow that rise and fall was simultaneous.’ At times in this tale Lynott looks like someone who threw it all away. At other times he looks like a man who spun gold from a fistful of thin air. Of course, he was both, and more, and all at once.

  PART ONE

  Dublin

  1

  There are several recurring archetypes in the songs of Philip Lynott, each one a form of self-portrait. The streetwise hustler (let’s call him Johnny; Lynott usually did) of ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and ‘Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed’; the flinty Celtic warrior of ‘Eire’ and ‘Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock
Legend’, chiselled from Irish mythos; the amped-up main man of ‘The Rocker’ and ‘Black Boys on the Corner’; the sad-eyed lothario of ‘Romeo and the Lonely Girl’ and ‘Randolph’s Tango’.

  And there is the orphan, a supporting character throughout much of his work. Lynott named his pre-Thin Lizzy band Orphanage, and his earliest songs in particular wrestle again and again with family and identity. ‘Shades of a Blue Orphanage’, ‘Saga of the Ageing Orphan’, ‘Mama and Papa’, ‘Diddy Levine’, ‘Philomena’ and several others are complex triangulations involving mothers, fathers and sons. They are sometimes characterized by a wild, questing romance; more often, by an aching awareness of absence.

  Lynott was seven years old when he was sent from Moss Side in Manchester to live with his grandmother in Crumlin, in the Southside of Dublin. Those first years of his life are ill-defined, but absence is a recurring theme. The absence of his biological father and a number of potential surrogates; of two younger siblings given up for adoption; of a settled and stable home, until finally he is faced with the absence of his mother.

  If there is any substance at all in the old Jesuit proverb – Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man – then Philip Lynott makes a particularly fascinating case study.

  Crumlin was built in the image of Holy Ireland. The names of its main streets – Leighlin, Clonmacnoise, Ferns, Kells, Bangor, Clogher, Lismore – are taken from the dioceses of the Irish Catholic Church, and were laid out to approximate the shape of the Celtic cross of the Eucharist.

  Named from the Gaelic Croimghlinn, ‘Crooked Glen’, the area had been settled since Anglo-Norman times. In the 1930s, when the Irish government began clearing out the cramped, crumbling tenements in the centre of Dublin and relocating their inhabitants to landscaped sites further out of town, the ancient lines of Crumlin Village were redrawn to accommodate a vast new social housing development of 3,000 homes.

  Lynott’s grandparents, Frank and Sarah, were part of the exodus. By the time the Lynotts were moved there from the Liberties, in the heart of old Dublin, in 1936, Sarah had given birth to six of her nine children. After the noisy, head-to-toe confines of the tenements, Crumlin promised space, order and civic pride. For a modest sum the family secured the tenancy of a modern Corporation House at 85 Leighlin Road, with running water, a kitchen, two upstairs bedrooms and a plumbed-in toilet.

  It offered a new kind of stability, but in a poor country shaped – literally, in the case of Crumlin – by the Catholic Church, and the drip-feed of religious, moral and social censure it meted out, ambition was strictly rationed. Growing up, Philomena Lynott felt keenly not only the lack of immediate opportunities, but the awareness that Ireland would not change quickly enough to alter the course of her own life.

  Born on 22 October 1930, the sixth of Frank and Sarah’s children, Philomena – known as Phyllis to those close to her – was in many respects a very different personality than her siblings. Irreverent, wilful and eccentric, her spirit would not be contained. As so many of her compatriots had before her, including two of her older sisters, she left Ireland. She could hardly wait.

  On the first occasion, she ran away to England, and an older brother was despatched to find and return her. At the age of fifty-one, Sarah Lynott was expecting her final child, Peter, and Philomena was needed at the house to help with her two younger siblings, Timothy and Irene.

  She came back, but she did not stay long. Philomena was seventeen when she arrived by boat in Liverpool. By eighteen she was pregnant.

  In a photograph taken when he was in his twenties, Philip Lynott’s father wears the same suavely minimalist pencil moustache later adopted by his son.

  Cecil Joseph Parris was born on 21 April 1925 in the port city of Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana. A colony on the northern coast of South America, wedged between Venezuela and Suriname, the country was renamed Guyana in 1966 after gaining independence.

  He was Afro-Guyanese, a descendant of the millions of African slaves shipped to the east coast of South America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Afro-Guyanese were regarded as socially superior to the Indo-Guyanese, the country’s large population of indentured workers from the Indian subcontinent which was granted minimal opportunities for education and social mobility. Parris’s father, Eustace, worked as a schoolteacher in Georgetown, part of the educated, urbanite middle-class who arrived in the city following the abolition of slavery. Eustace was married to Jeanetta, and Cecil was one of several children.

  The flow of migration from British Guiana to the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s was closer to a trickle than a flood, particularly in comparison to Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados. It was a promising colony, and in those days Georgetown was a fine garden city, with canals, tree-lined streets and elegant buildings. British Guiana was a remote outpost, however, and the cost of travelling to Britain was prohibitive. Migration was available primarily to members of the educated elite who had the means and the connections.

  Cecil Parris died in 2012. When he left Georgetown almost seventy years ago, it’s impossible to know whether he was running from the past or sailing towards the future. Later in life, he told his wife Irene that in 1947 he made a decision to emigrate to New York. His family have always believed that he stowed away on a steamer. Once the ship was seaborne and sufficiently far from Georgetown port, Parris revealed himself to the crew and worked his passage in the ship’s kitchen. The family were also told that he still mistakenly believed his boat was bound for America, and he arrived in Liverpool thinking it was New York.

  There is a chance he came to Britain via an alternative route. A passenger list for a Pan American Airways flight from Georgetown to New York on 13 August 1947 names Cecil Parris among those on board. His British passport had been issued three months earlier, and his New York address is listed as 24 Halsey Street, Brooklyn – a long, lively thoroughfare in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district full of theatres, dance halls and boxing arenas. This may be an entirely different Cecil Parris. The surname is not uncommon in Guyana and the passenger’s age is recorded as twenty-five rather than the twenty-two Cecil would have been at this time. The alternative conclusion is that Lynott’s father succeeded in his original aim to emigrate to New York and lived there for a spell before travelling to Britain.

  What is certain is that within a year of disembarking, Parris had met a fellow runaway. Irene Parris believes that her husband first knew Philomena Lynott in Liverpool, the great port city of north-west England where they had entered the country at almost exactly the same time. However, Philomena has recalled that their first encounter was in Birmingham, at one of the regular weekend dances held at a local displaced-persons hotel in the city. In post-war, post-Windrush England, such institutions were plentiful. They were often given a gloss of gentility they rarely merited by calling themselves hotels. Primarily, they were hostels providing accommodation for Eastern Europeans and newly arrived West Indian immigrants.

  Parris and Philomena Lynott hit it off. He was already in possession of a nickname, ‘The Duke’, bestowed in honour of a rather ostentatious sense of style and his reputation for charming the opposite sex; the pencil moustache was not the only trait he shared with his son. Regular dances led to regular dates, which led to more, and early in 1949 Philomena Lynott discovered she was going to have a child.

  Her son was born on 20 August 1949 at Hallam hospital in West Bromwich, weighing nine-and-a-half pounds. His first name was the male counterpart of his mother’s name. His middle name was Parris, after the father who, according to both Philomena and Irene Parris, proposed marriage before he was born, an offer that was not accepted.

  Philip Parris Lynott’s first home was Woodville House, 176 Raddlebarn Road in Selly Park, in south-west Birmingham. A large Victorian building formerly in use as a workhouse, since 1943 it had been a home for unmarried mothers run by the Birmingham Diocesan Rescue Society, now known as Father Hudson’s Society. W
oodville was overseen by the Sisters of Charity of St Paul the Apostle and could accommodate up to fifteen young women and their babies at one time. While his mother slept in a communal dormitory and worked for her bed and board, Lynott was put in the children’s dorm elsewhere in the building. He was baptized – there was no choice in the matter – on 4 September 1949, at St Edward’s, the Catholic church situated a short walk down the road, where the young women and their children attended Mass each Sunday.

  Since 1944, the Birmingham Diocesan Rescue Society had been a registered adoption agency, free to arrange for the children in its care to be taken on by more ‘suitable’ families. After three months at Woodville, mothers could either agree to give up their babies or leave and make their own way in the world. The choice was harder than it should have been. It was a time of postwar austerity. The Family Allowances Act had been introduced in August 1946, but the payment of five shillings per week in welfare was only applied from the birth of the second child onwards; first-time mothers such as Philomena Lynott were excluded. Socially as well as financially, there was an enormous amount of pressure and coercion applied to force women and their infants apart.

  In the event, she managed to keep her baby and find a place to live. It was the start of a transient and uncertain period lasting several years in which Philomena and her son were subject to close supervision and regular intervention from both the Catholic Church and local social services. When she moved, as she did often, she earned money as best she could. Philomena shuttled between a series of boarding houses, halfway hostels and attic rooms in the less salubrious parts of Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester. Her child was minded by babysitters – some familiar, some strangers – and on occasion was left alone while his mother worked at night. It was a rootless, unsettled life, pockmarked by prejudice and the looming threat of the next moonlit flit. New rooms, new streets, new cover stories. Lynott spent at least some time – and possibly quite a lot – in the care of welfare services.