Thin Lizzy: Gangsters, Drugs, Punks and St. Patrick
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This is a story about a rock star's rock star and his band. A band that made Ireland proud. A band that makes me want to drive fast and break things. A band that some of you, for some reason, think I hate, but I don't. A band born belly up in a bar filled with bad, bad men. A band who never really broke in America the way they should have. A band named Thin Lizzy. A band that made great music.

Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called Roll Me Over and Do What Now? MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to December 1963, Oh What a Night, by the Four Seasons. And why would I play you that specific slice of Jersey Boy's cheese? Could I afford it?

Because that was the number one song in America on March 26, 1976. And that was the day that Thin Lizzy released their sixth studio album, Jailbreak, featuring the hit single, The Boys Are Back in Town, a song that changed everything for them, for better and for worse. On this special St. Patrick's Day episode, a rock star's rock star, bad, bad men, and the pride of Ireland, Thin Lizzy.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. You're St. Patrick, the primary patron saint of Ireland. You're the reason why bar of an accounting wears green to the office each year on March 17th. You're also the reason why, on that same day, the lads knock back pints of Guinness down at the pub at an ungodly hour typically frowned upon for drinking.

But although people around the world drunkenly celebrate you once a year, they don't really know you. They don't know that you're not even Irish or that your name isn't actually Patrick. Your real name is Maywin or something, but it doesn't matter. The point here is that you, St. Patrick, are not who everyone thinks you are.

They don't know that you were born in Britain, or that when you were a teenager around 400 AD or so, you were kidnapped by pirates who took you to Ireland and made you a slave. You toiled in the fields as a shepherd boy for six long years. And then the voices started. Voices inside your head. They told you to leave this place, flee your captors, make a break for it and go back to the motherland. And so you did.

For 200 miles straight, you ran. Your chest was pounding. Your knees were weak. You made it to the Irish coast where you convinced a group of sailors to let you board their boat headed to Britain. But the seas were too rough. The vessel shipwrecked near the coast of France. You were starving. The food was all gone. So the sailors began to pray.

And this is when you found out that the sailors were pagans because they were praying to their pagan gods, which got you all buckets. So they turned to you and they said, hey, why don't you try praying to your Christian god?

So you did. And do you know what happened? Suddenly, a herd of pigs appeared out of nowhere. Which you, for one, were thankful for because it meant you no longer had to worry about becoming a meal for a boat full of starving heathens. Hold up. Did this really happen? Did St. Patrick prey pigs into existence? Probably not. But this is where the larger-than-life myth of St. Patrick begins. A myth which includes the story of how he later returned to Ireland.

This time, not as a slave, but as an apostle, to preach the good word, fight for the end of human bondage, and drive all the snakes out of the country. And since it's likely that Ireland never actually had snakes in the first place, that part of the story, just like the pigs thing, it probably isn't true either.

But if St. Patrick didn't drive out actual snakes, he did drive out demons from Ireland. Real demons. Namely, through his work as an anti-slavery activist. Thus, St. Patrick's spirit and legend loom large. Just like a 47-foot statue of him now looms large on the western coast of Ireland. These days, it takes about three and a half hours to drive from that huge statue of St. Patrick all the way across to the opposite side of the island.

specifically to Dublin, where a different statue celebrates a different patron saint of Ireland. Philip Lynott, lead singer, bassist, and the primary songwriter for the band Thin Lizzy, which formed right there in Ireland's capital back in 1969. Like St. Patrick, Phil Lynott was born in Britain and later came to Ireland, in this case at seven years old. But unlike St. Patrick, Phil was Irish on his mother's side.

Phil's father, who left when Phil was born, was from British Guiana. So, as Phil said in his own words, he was Irish and he was black and he was a bastard. Which meant from the jump, growing up, he had cultural, social, and even psychological barriers that made his personal struggle unique. He once said that if he couldn't make it as a singer, as a rock star, well, then he couldn't make it, period.

Phil was motivated by these insecurities, just as St. Patrick was motivated by those voices in his head. And I believe it's those insecurities that inform Phil's code as a professional musician. A code which insisted that, one, you always be professional. Two, you never lose your cool. And three, you always remain in control.

Which is why in the early 1970s, when Thin Lizzy were starting to make their mark, Phil Lynott kept his transgressions out of the public eye at a tucked away joint that only those in the know knew about. Up a set of back stairs, past some tough geezer standing lookout, and finally passing through the door into a place called the showbiz.

The showbiz, or the biz if you're into that whole brevity thing, was an after-hours bar attached to a hotel in Manchester, owned and operated by Phil Lynott's mother, Philomena. Inside, you get to rub elbows with the so-called Quality Street Gang, a loose collection of scrappers and safecrackers, used car salesmen and other con artists, guys with pickled faces and long rap sheets, the kind who may or may not have a concealed weapon smuggled into their fancy tailored suit.

On any given night at the biz, you'd run into guys like Jimmy the Weed, named so because, well, he grew on you. Jimmy the Weed was an underworld zealot, busted for fraud, for drugs, even for murder, but somehow eluding conviction every time. And then there were the local heroes, like George Best, the legendary Irish footballer, a winger for Man United.

It was this crowd of famous and infamous faces that Phil Lynott and his Thin Lizzy bandmates, guitarist Eric Bell and drummer Brian Downey, were hanging out with on one particular evening in 1972. Just hours earlier, they'd performed as the opening act for the popular glam rock band Slade. While Phil thought that Thin Lizzy's set had been pretty good, he was shocked when, just minutes after they finished, Slade's manager, Chaz Chandler, was all up in his face.

Normally, Phil would welcome such an interaction, seeing as Chaz had previously served as Jimi Hendrix's manager, and to Phil, Jimi was a god, but Chaz Chandler was not in a compliment-giving mood. In fact, Chaz was pissed. "'The fuck was that?' he asked Phil. "'That, of course,' referring to Thin Lizzy's set. "'You're here to wake the crowd up, not put them to sleep. Any more of that ho-hum bullshit on stage and you're off the tour.'"

Phil then carefully watched Slade's headlining set, focusing specifically on the group's frontman, Noddy Holder. His flashy manner of dress, his wild charisma, every move calculated to put the audience in a fist-pumping trance. And he understood exactly what Chaz was saying. Getting up there and simply playing the songs wasn't enough. Bowie knew this. Rod the Bod knew this. And now Phil Lynott did too.

Just like he knew that to truly succeed, he and Thin Lizzy would have to do better than Whiskey in the Jar, their version of an old folk song that was currently sitting at number one on the charts in Ireland. It was the band's first bonafide hit, but Phil thought it was a joke. It was kind of a novelty song. It wasn't even his song. Phil's own songs reflected his life, and Whiskey in the Jar was not his life. Not like his mother's Hush Hush Bar, The Biz, and the men who haunted him, the Quality Street Gang.

Sitting there in Manchester's best-kept secret, he looked around the room. This little speakeasy of sorts overrun with footballers, gangsters, actors from hip British television soaps. Jimmy the Weed in the corner making Man United's George Best nearly snort lager out of his nose with a joke. And it was at this moment that the Thin Lizzy we know now truly began to take shape.

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I have no idea how this rumor started online that I personally am not into Thin Lizzy, but nice work to all you wise guys who have been keeping the joke alive. It is ludicrous. I love Thin Lizzy, and I pretty much have from the first moment I heard them.

But don't take my word for it. Everyone from Huey Lewis to Sid Vicious loved Thin Lizzy. Phil Lynott even called both of those dudes his friends. And to paraphrase Henry Rollins, there's a Thin Lizzy song for everything. Whether you're head over heels in love or crushed halfway to death by a bad breakup,

Plus, just look at them. Or actually, just look at Phil, the platonic ideal of a rocker. High-heeled boots, black leather pants, big hair, sharp mustache, Mr. Johnny Cool himself. Those long legs spread in a power stance, his fender pee-base shooting straight up in the air like a crotch rocket.

It's a move that says, this base is a giant weapon. And also, this base is a giant penis. Which is about as rock and roll as it gets. But again, it didn't begin that way. It began when Jimi Hendrix's former manager, Chaz Chandler, read Phil Lynott the Riot Act.

And then when Phil recognized that the true inspiration for his biggest hits and thus the image of Thin Lizzy, those below the table badasses at the heart of incredible songs like "The Boys Are Back in Town" and "Jailbreak" were all sitting around him at his mother's tiny pub in Manchester. And then when Thin Lizzy's original guitarist, Eric Bell, exhausted from touring,

From the non-stop partying at the communal house where the band lived, from the hamster wheel of promotion to make the suits at Decca Records happy, distraught over his girlfriend running off to Canada with their young son, taking one too many bad trips himself , getting paranoid, Eric finally melted down halfway through his show in 1973, threw his guitar on the stage, and quit the band.

Eric Bell clearly was unable to adhere to Phil Lynott's strict code. He was not in control, and he most definitely lost his cool. Phil, on the other hand, was very much in control, which meant that he was the one who was left to pick up the pieces. And he did, because he was built for this. He was born against all odds, and he didn't ask for help to do it, just as he didn't ask for help back when he was the only black kid in his school.

This time, he got not one, but two guitarists, and not for artistic reasons, but for insurance. When asked why he hired Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham, a Scotsman and a Californian, respectively, to replace Eric Bell, Phil said, and I quote, "The next time one of those cunts walks out, there'll be another one there. I'm not gonna be caught out again." Failure for Phil Lynott was not an option. Remember, if he couldn't make it as a singer, as a rock star, then he couldn't make it, period.

The thing is, Phil Lyon had no idea that the choice he'd just made would lay the groundwork for Thin Lizzy's breakthrough innovation and push them higher than he ever could have imagined. If you know Thin Lizzy, you know what I'm talking about. That harmonized twin guitar attack. An integral part of Thin Lizzy's sound which began on their fifth studio album, Fighting, released in 1975. But the twin guitar thing wasn't planned. In fact, it was a mistake.

It happened like this. Brian Robertson, Robbo, was laying down his guitar part in the studio. Some real nice melodic stuff, unaware that the engineer had absentmindedly left an echo or delay effect on what he was playing on guitar. So the guitar begins to feed back on itself and thus harmonizing with itself. Scott's guitar was harmonizing with Scott's guitar. And then when they start hearing it in the playback, they're all freaking out. The engineer's like,

Fuck! And he leaps from his seat to fix the issue, worried that he's gonna get his ass fired. But he's shocked when he hears the guys in the band say, "No, man, don't touch anything. That's awesome. This is great."

And thus was born the process by which Robbo and Scott wrote out harmonized lead guitar parts. Which, yeah, I know, weren't new at the time. The Allman Brothers for one had been doing it for a minute. But the way Thin Lizzy did it was fresh. Because it truly was an attack. Written and performed like dual switchblades that snapped open in the middle of a song.

The sound perfectly complemented Phil's songs about tough guys, about cowboys and escaped inmates, powering the big hits on their beloved 1976 album, Jailbreak. Both the aforementioned title track and The Boys Are Back in Town, the band's biggest hit in America. And man, oh man, what a song.

When that song was climbing the charts in the summer of '76, Thin Lizzy were forced to cancel the second half of their American tour, which was supposed to finally break them in the States after seven long years of making music. Instead, Phil Lynott, who had quickly fallen under the spell of a sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle, looked in the mirror and saw that his eyes had turned orange.

Hepatitis. He told a friend he probably got her from shooting up with a dirty needle. And though it should be noted at this point, Phil was merely dabbling in heroin with cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol being more central to his drug diet.

Regardless, instead of conquering America, Phil watched from a hospital bed in Manchester as a pre-taped performance of "The Boys Are Back in Town" played on top of the pops from a tiny television set on the wall, while back in the US, the single slowly slipped back down the charts after peaking at number 12.

Just months later, it happened again. Thin Lizzy were set to conquer America a second time, only to once again be forced to cancel when Robbo got in a fight at a London nightclub, severing tendons and an artery in his hand when he tried to deflect a broken bottle. It seemed that Americans were destined to never truly know Thin Lizzy. Breaking America, of course, was the dream of any band from across the pond. And for Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott, wrong place, wrong time quickly became an unfortunate reality.

Dublin, August 20th, 1977. Hometown heroes Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy were back to headline the capital of Ireland's first open-air rock festival, but that was tomorrow. Today, or tonight, was Phil's 28th birthday, and he was celebrating in style at Castletown House, a lavish mansion owned by the Guinness family, specifically Desmond Guinness, second son of Brian, the famous brewer and heir to the Guinness Beer Empire, but I digress.

The doctors had told Phil to avoid these sorts of environments where the booze and the coke flowed like, well, you can imagine the deluge of booze and coke at a party happening at a Guinness mansion in 1977. It was simply too dangerous given the complications from his hepatitis. Phil, however, didn't look to doctors as role models. These days, he looked up to the great Freddie Mercury, whom Phil had witnessed during a recent tour when Thin Lizzy opened for Freddie's band, Queen.

Freddie was decadence incarnate. The hotel suites, the entourages, the willing and able groupies, the piles of illicit substances served on silver platters. Everything was bigger for Freddie Mercury, and Phil Lynott wanted to reach that hallowed ground where Freddie and Queen now found themselves followed suit. In Freddie, Phil even saw a reflection of himself. Someone who had his own set of insecurities to overcome simply based on who he was. Freddie's bravado gave Phil confidence and hope.

But any feelings of hope or of birthday joy were suddenly dashed when the front door of the Castletown mansion flew open.

Into the party barged the Garda, the state police force of the Republic of Ireland. They were here on a tip that they'd find musicians and thus drugs. And they did. A ton of blow in weed was seized. But one of the many things Phil Lynott had learned from a guy like Freddie Mercury was how to keep your vices a secret. Which is how Phil had managed to get someone else to hold onto his stash at the party when he was stopped and searched by the Garda. He was clean.

Two days later, however, the headline on the front of the Irish Independent newspaper read, "Six Held in Drugs Raid on Pop Party." And none other than Phil Lynott's name was right there in the mix. Phil was furious. Was he using that night? Sure. But was he holding? He wasn't that stupid. At least not on that particular night. The police hadn't found anything, and now here he was being branded public offender number one by the press.

He walked over to the paper's office and paid a personal visit to the editor, whom he berated in front of the entire staff. "My grandmother saw that!" he shouted. "It's not fucking true what you printed! I didn't have any fucking drugs!" It was just as Freddy said. It was all about what you showed them. What they saw. The controlled narrative. Phil lined it for one, locked down his private life, even as it began to spin out of control behind locked doors.

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Behind them, they left their own blood splattered on the bathroom wall. The junk was coursing through their veins now, slowly animating them like stop-motion skeletons down the hall to the living room where they collapsed on a couch next to Phil who was watching an old Elvis Presley movie on a giant TV. "Hey, Sid," Phil said, himself high on one substance or another at the moment, "when are you gonna let me show you a few things on the base, mate?"

Sid scrunched his face in disgust. "I'm not interested in that crap. I'm in the fucking Sex Pistols." It was the summer of 1978, so actually Sid's math, or more likely his mind, was off. The Pistols had broken up earlier that year after releasing one studio record which sent shockwaves through the rock and roll world. Things were changing and changing fast, all because of bands like the Sex Pistols taking the piss out of the status quo.

Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy were not exactly status quo when it came to rock and roll, but they were close enough. Phil knew that adaptation was essential for survival. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and all. Which is how Phil found himself moonlighting in the Greedy Bastards, a supergroup of sorts that featured Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, plus Brian and Scott from Thin Lizzy, Bob Geldof from Dublin's own Boomtown Rats, and more.

They played sets at places like the Electric Ballroom in Camden, and a version of the group even appeared as the Greedys on Top of the Pops. And it wasn't just the punks in England who were taking the film. Over in America, in New York City, Johnny Thunders was sitting in his room at the Chelsea, balancing some heroin on his guitar pick to kill time, waiting for his fix, and waiting on a friend. That friend being Phil Leinen, who wound up playing bass on a bunch of the tracks on Johnny's classic 1978 solo record, So Alone.

The thing is, 1978 was supposed to be huge for Thin Lizzy. Punks or no punks. This is the year that they released their double live album, Live and Dangerous, a record which not only featured Phil's very un-punk buddy Huey Lewis on harmonica, but is widely considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. It was a huge hit for the band also. Number two on the UK charts.

This is the kind of record you pull out when the aliens land and they want to know what a killer rock show sounded like in the 1970s. Huck Brampton comes alive. Live and Dangerous has got the goods. As amazing as it is, however, Live and Dangerous by Thin Lizzy has a dirty little secret. And I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but your favorite live album probably shares the same secret. And it's this. Live and Dangerous is not live. At least not entirely.

Here's what I mean. Thin Lizzy's producer, Tony Visconti, was tasked with assembling a cohesive listening experience from a ton of concert tapes taken from shows the band played throughout Europe and North America. A lot of live albums are made this way. You cherry-pick the best versions of the songs you want to include from an entire tour. But Tony Visconti had a problem. The tapes were all different speeds, different formats, and in various shades of quality. He couldn't edit together a consistent, balanced sound based solely on what he had in his hands.

So the solution was to have Thin Lizzy come into the studio and re-record some of their parts. But once they started the overdubbing process, they thought, well, instead of just re-recording the bass part or that vocal part, why not re-record the whole thing?

By producer Tony Visconti's estimation, about 50% of Live and Dangerous is not live and is therefore not dangerous. But instead, it's a studio recreation. Some of the audience noise isn't even from Thin Lizzy shows, but instead from the tapes for David Bowie's so-called live album, Stage, which Tony Visconti was also working on at the time. The true backstory of Live and Dangerous was just as much of a secret as was Phil Lynott's life these days.

No one on the outside knew it, and many on the inside didn't either, but in addition to cocaine and marijuana, Phil was continuing to do more heroin. Or whatever he could get. On tour in New York, he checked in on Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel while his limo driver drove up to Harlem to score some Daladid, which he melted down and shot up. Two weeks later, Nancy bled out from a stab wound to her abdomen, and the cops fingered Sid for the job, but just a few months later, he was dead too.

And the reason Phil's own transgressions were never salacious front page news like his friends, and when they were, like the bust at the Guinness Mansion, the reason he was so adamant to shut them down, was because of the strict code he lived by. He was always professional. He never lost his cool, and he was always in control. And now, he was a family man with a wife and two daughters. If someone wanted to get at the real truth, the whole truth, they'd have to come and get him. November, 1980.

The doorbell rang at one of Phil Lynott's houses. Not the one in his beloved Ireland, but the one at 184 Q Road in Twickenham, England, where he lived with his young family. He answered it and was greeted by employees from the gas company, there to carry out a routine inspection. Phil was confused. No one had told him anything about an inspection, but it was possible he'd missed the letter in the mail.

These days, Phil had a lot more than usual on his mind. Two small girls and a wife to provide for. His band, Thin Lizzy, constantly touring all over Europe, Australia, and Japan despite their latest album, Chinatown, getting some of the most lackluster reviews of their career. And last but not least was the constant turnover in the band, with Gary Moore replacing Scott Robertson on guitar and then Gary replaced in short order by Snowy White.

Phil struggled to keep it all together. He chalked up this gas thing as something he'd overlooked and welcomed the men inside his home. They began to look around, but not where the furnace or the piping was. Phil watched as one of the men walked into the master bedroom, which was odd. Suddenly, Phil began to panic. Paranoia set in. The kind of paranoia that his old friend Eric Bell, Thin Lizzy's original guitarist, once experienced just before he threw his guitar to the stage and walked away for good.

But there was no walking away from this for Phil. He was surrounded, and not by gasmen, but by... Philip Lynott? Phil spun around to see the so-called gasman who'd entered the master bedroom standing there. He was holding two wrapped packages of cocaine in one hand. In the other, he was holding a badge. Not a gasman badge. These guys were the drug squad. Philip Lynott, the phony gasman said again. You're under arrest.

In addition to the coke, which had been stuffed into one of Phil's jackets, the narcs found grass in Phil's Mercedes and a cannabis plant growing inside his house. And that next summer, on his 32nd birthday, August 20th, 1981, Phil Lynott stood before the judge, who sentenced him to a 200-pound fine. It was a lenient penalty, but only because Phil had convinced one of his roadies, a guy they called Big Charlie, to take the fall for the drugs and swear under oath that the jacket belonged to him and not to Phil.

It was a page taken right out of Freddie Mercury's book, Keep Your Secrets, Control Your Narrative. Or as Phil Lanet's own code instructed, always be professional, always be in control.

Sean O'Connor couldn't believe his luck. His Dublin-based band, The Lookalikes, had managed to score an opening slot on Thin Lizzy's tour. And though you didn't have to look into a crystal ball to know that their best days were now behind them, for any Dubliner, or Dub as the local parlance goes, Thin Lizzy were it. The rest of the world can have St. Patrick. Give us St. Phil.

Lizzie were a source of tremendous national pride. Sean O'Connor, in particular, was stoked to be able to support such legends night after night. And he knew what came with the territory. The parties, the women, the revolving door that was Phil Lynott's private room. So many women coming and going that, despite Phil's relationship status at the time, earned him the nickname, Phil Line Em Up.

And then there were the drugs. They were everywhere. Dealers, hangers-on, guys looking for a one-way ticket to the big show with a little baggie. One night backstage, one of these dudes approached Sean, flashing his ready supply of cocaine. Well, Sean thought, when in Rome. But before he could indulge, out of the shadows sprung Phil Leinen. He put his hands on the dealer's arms, pushing him away from Sean and violently slamming him up against a wall headfirst. The dealer felt like his brain was oozing from his ears.

With one hand, Phil held him in place and with the other, he stuck out his finger and pressed it against the dealer's chest. "If you ever offer Sean coke again, I'll fucking have you killed." This was just one side of Phil Lynott. The side that fancied himself a character down at the pub with the quality street gang. A badass, a jailbreaker, a no shit taker. One of the boys who is back in town and who's gonna fuck you up for turning this young grasshopper here onto dope.

And then there was the other side, the gentler side, the more vulnerable Phil Lyman, the self-described Black Irish bastard from Dublin who successfully drove out his own insecurities in order to realize his dream of rock stardom, just as his fellow saint, St. Patrick, once drove the snakes out of Ireland, allegedly.

But there was no one protecting Phil Lynott the way Phil Lynott was now protecting Sean O'Connor. No one to step in when he showed up again at Johnny Thunders' room at the Chelsea, this time with a bag of heroin in his hand. Or when he was stopped at the Dublin airport with more junk, grass, and methadone in his possession. Not just because he ignored his own advice and the advice of doctors, but because he did so while delving further into his addictions in secret.

Phil's longtime bandmate, guitarist Scott Gorham, also struggling with a heroin addiction, got himself under control using neuroelectric therapy to kick his habit. Unlike Scott, however, Phil wasn't so lucky. On January 4th, 1986, at just 36 years old, his heart, liver, and kidneys gave out.

It was just about seven years since Phil's old friend Sid Vicious died from a hot shot. And roughly five years after Phil's death, another one of his friends, Johnny Thunders, would also die from an overdose. Phil's buddy from the other side of the musical tracks, Huey Lewis, looked around at all the carnage. All this talent and promise wasted. A handful of his friends, gone or on their way out. Huey, for one, wanted a new drug. One that wouldn't make him sick.

One that made him feel the way he felt when he listened to the rich musical legacy of Thin Lizzy, which is to say something like grace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgraceland. All right, happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody. This week's question of the week is which Irish artist or band is your favorite and why?

Is it Thin Lizzy, U2, The Undertones, Cranberries? Who is it, which artists, and why? Let me know, 617-906-6638. Leave me a voicemail, send me a text. We'll get into it in the after party this week. You can also reach me at DisgracelandPod as well on Instagram, X, and Facebook. And do me a favor. If you're an Apple podcast listener, make sure you're following Disgraceland and have automatic downloads turned on so that you are guaranteed not to miss one of our episodes. It really helps the show.

You know the drill. Leave a review for Disgraceland on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and win some free merch. All right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership.

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He's a bad, bad man.