Thin Lizzy
The band Phil Lynott built out of two failed ones, and then led for fourteen years and twelve studio albums as the first Black Irishman to become a rock star. Thin Lizzy formed in Dublin in December 1969 — Lynott and drummer Brian Downey, who had met as schoolboys, joined by guitarist Eric Bell and organist Eric Wrixon from the last lineup of Them. Their breakthrough was a seventeenth-century folk song nobody in the band wanted released. What followed was something harder to categorise: blues, soul, psychedelia and Irish traditional music pushed through twin lead guitars, with Lynott writing working-class stories and Celtic myth into songs about people who were usually losing.
Jailbreak gave them The Boys Are Back in Town in 1976 and made them an international act; Bad Reputation, Black Rose: A Rock Legend and the live album Live and Dangerous followed. The guitar chair turned over constantly — Bell, then Gary Moore, then Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, then Snowy White, then John Sykes — while Lynott and Downey held the centre throughout. The band broke up in September 1983. Lynott died on January 4, 1986, at thirty-six, and a statue of him has stood off Grafton Street in Dublin since 2005. Thin Lizzy reformed as a touring act in 1996 and played on and off until 2019.
Articles on Thin Lizzy
Thin Lizzy – The Boys Are Back in Town
Thin Lizzy nearly left "The Boys Are Back in Town" off the album — it became the biggest hit of their career and broke America before Britain
Thin Lizzy – Jailbreak (Sight And Sound In Concert, January 26, 1983)
The Night a 23-Year-Old Guitarist Made His Thin Lizzy Debut — Onstage With a Band That Already Knew, Privately, It Was Finished
Thin Lizzy – The Boys Are Back In Town (Live At Rockpalast)
Fifty Years On — The Song The Band Voted To Leave Off The Album That Saved Their Career
Thin Lizzy – Whiskey In The Jar
Eric Bell wrote that riff imitating uilleann pipes off a borrowed cassette.
Thin Lizzy – Are You Ready
The Rhetorical Question That Became Their Battle Cry
Thin Lizzy – Cold Sweat (Live, 1983)
It's the only song John Sykes ever wrote for Thin Lizzy — a last jolt of electricity on the band's final album — and now both the men who wrote it are gone.