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

On March 26, 1976 – fifty years ago – Thin Lizzy released Jailbreak, the album that should have ended them but instead saved them. The band was broke, the label was losing patience, and the record they considered their best shot at breaking America was about to arrive with almost no one listening. What followed is one of the most unlikely comeback stories in rock history — built almost entirely on a song the band had already voted to leave off the album, a song they’d written about a comic strip, rewritten about Vietnam, then rewritten again about a Saturday night. “The Boys Are Back in Town” wasn’t supposed to exist. The live version captured at Rockpalast in 1981 — one of the last great performances of Phil Lynott’s life — shows exactly what the world nearly missed.

The single reached No.8 in Britain and No.12 in the US, Thin Lizzy’s first charting record in that country. The album reached No.10 in the UK and No.18 in the US, certified gold — their only RIAA recognition in America. The single also reached No.1 in Ireland, No.8 in Canada. On the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time it first appeared in 2004, dropped from the 2010 update, then returned in the 2021 revision at a significantly higher position — number 272. The song had grown in stature over forty-five years. That rarely happens to rock singles.

The song’s creation began with a rejection. “We had demoed about fifteen tracks for what became the Jailbreak album, and we’d selected those we felt were the ten best ones,” explains Scott Gorham. “Then our co-manager Chris O’Donnell came down to listen to the songs, and we played him all fifteen. He picked up on something we’d titled GI Joe, but we had already rejected it as not good enough for the album. He liked it, and told us that we should include it. We accepted his judgement, but there was still work to be done, because the lyrics were anti-war, which wasn’t really right for us, and musically it wasn’t there. However, we sorted it all out, and GI Joe turned into The Boys Are Back In Town.” The original title came from the GI Joe comic strip, and Lynott’s initial draft drew on the anti-war feeling stirred up by Vietnam. Phil eventually set that draft aside. “He looked at all of us: what do we do on a Saturday night? We go out, we have a lot of drinks, try to pull the chicks and have a great time. And that is what that song is: it’s Saturday night with all your buddies. Nothing more,” Gorham recalled. There may also be darker geography in the lyric. According to Lynott, the lyrics were partially inspired by a group of people in Manchester called the Q.S.G. — the Quality Street Gang — described as “a far from sweet bunch of characters.” Saturday night with your boys. A Manchester criminal gang. Vietnam veterans returning home. The lyric contains all three, and none of them exclusively.

The recording at Ramport Studios in Battersea, London was built from an unusual foundation. “Although the guitar part in the middle of the song that helped to make it work so well came from Phil. He played it on the bass, and then Brian and I adapted it to the guitar,” Gorham told Classic Rock. Gorham and Brian Robertson then put the trademark guitar harmonies together, while drummer Brian Downey added his own distinctive shuffle. Some have pointed towards Bruce Springsteen’s “Kitty’s Back” from 1973 as musical inspiration — while there’s a lyrical similarity in the chorus, this is rock ‘n’ roll in action, with one great artist feeding off another. Producer John Alcock — most known for his work with The Who’s John Entwistle — kept the production lean and propulsive. The twin-guitar interplay between Gorham and Robertson would define Thin Lizzy’s sound on every album that followed. “To us, this was a decent album track, no more. We certainly did not think it could be a single!” Gorham later admitted. The band were wrong, but they had no way of knowing it yet.

America, where it mattered most, came to the song entirely by accident. “It was 1976 and we were touring America,” recalled Scott Gorham. “Jailbreak wasn’t shifting and we weren’t selling any tickets.” The band were surprised to learn from their manager that “The Boys Are Back in Town” was becoming a hit record, especially as the track had not been among the ten songs originally chosen by the band for the album. Gorham attributed the song’s unexpected success to two DJs in Louisville, Kentucky who “played it incessantly until other stations in the surrounding area picked up on it. Had that song not kickstarted the sales of the album, then the band was over.” Its American breakout started on KSAN in San Francisco, after which airplay spread coast to coast. But Lizzy’s opportunity to maximise their impact there was scuppered when Phil Lynott contracted hepatitis, forcing the cancellation of a crucial tour supporting Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. An illness in 1976 cost them the American momentum they’d spent seven years trying to build. The song still climbed. The band still survived. But the full American conquest remained perpetually just out of reach — the great unrealised ambition of Thin Lizzy’s career.

The Rockpalast performance captured on August 21, 1981, at the Loreley Open Air Festival in Germany, is a document of a different band — and a different moment. The lineup that night was Phil Lynott on bass and vocals, Scott Gorham on guitar, Snowy White on guitar, Darren Wharton on keyboards, and Brian Downey on drums. Brian Robertson, whose playing had been so central to the original recording, had departed three years earlier. Snowy White — a gentler, bluesier player, brilliant in his own right — brought a different texture to the twin-guitar attack. The Rockpalast concert runs to nearly two hours and covers almost every phase of the band’s career. “The Boys Are Back in Town” arrives as track twelve of nineteen, after “Cowboy Song” and before “Suicide” — embedded in the middle of a set that demonstrates why Thin Lizzy were, by near-universal agreement of their peers, one of the great live rock bands on earth.

By 1981, the song had become something larger than even Lynott’s Saturday night anecdote could contain. It played at Irish rugby internationals. It was about to appear in A Knight’s Tale, The Expendables, The Simpsons, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Happy Mondays, Bon Jovi, Everclear, The Cardigans, and Celtic Thunder would all cover it. Van Morrison’s “Gloria” is the only other rock song with a comparable status as a live staple adopted by bands from garage level to superstardom. In 2012, the song was played without permission at the Republican National Convention to introduce Paul Ryan — prompting both Philomena Lynott and Scott Gorham to publicly object, stating that Phil would never have permitted his music to be used for political purposes. The song had outlived its creator’s ability to control it, which is what happens when a song stops belonging to the person who wrote it and starts belonging to everyone who has ever felt it.

Phil Lynott died on January 4, 1986, from pneumonia and liver failure, at 36 years old. He was the first Black Irish rock star, the son of a Brazilian-born father and an Irish mother, who had been told for most of his career that his face didn’t fit the image of a rock frontman — and who responded by becoming one of the most charismatic live performers in the history of the form. “The Boys Are Back in Town” was a No.1 hit in Ireland, one of many they’d score there — but the song that Lynott wrote in a Battersea studio from the remains of a comic strip lyric has since become something close to a national property. On the fiftieth anniversary of its album’s release, the Rockpalast performance is the best place to hear what it sounded like when the boys were really back in town — Phil at the microphone, the crowd already singing before the first verse ends, and the twin guitars doing exactly what they were built to do. The band were right that it was a decent album track. Their manager was right that it was more than that. The two DJs in Louisville, Kentucky — whose names history has not bothered to record — were right about everything.