Gary leaving the band halfway through a tour was the death knell for Thin Lizzy in America, it really was. Our career was cut short in a couple of weeks. “All these incidents did not impress our American record company, and our promoters,” Downey says. The following year, Gary Moore – who replaced Robertson in 1978, and was an on-off member of the band over many years – flew home partway through another US tour, The following year they had to cancel a US tour after Robertson broke his hand in a brawl at the Speakeasy in London, the night before they were due to leave. Left to right: Brian Downey, Phil Lynott (1949-1986) and Gary Moore (1952-2011). Thin Lizzy posed in New York in 1977: Scott Gorham, Brian Downey, Phil Lynott, Brian Robertson (Photo by Richard E. With The Boys Are Back in Town in the Billboard chart and Lizzy on the road in the US, they had to fly back home after Lynott contracted hepatitis. I went: ‘The Boys Are Back in Town doesn’t sound like a commercial single to me.’ How wrong could you be?”Īnd this, the moment of greatest triumph, is where everything started to go catastrophically wrong. Until one of the record company execs had the idea of The Boys Are Back in Town. “We were asked: ‘What do you think would make a single?’” Downey recalls. They had it perfect by 1976’s Jailbreak album, and its single The Boys Are Back in Town, which finally achieved Lynott’s aim of getting a US hit, albeit by accident. It was as simple as: you pick a melody, then you pick a harmony.” Scott didn’t have a grasp of scales at the time. It was something that developed instinctively, according to Gorham.
“I had only been playing guitar for three years.” But together – after one failure of an album, Nightlife – they gradually worked out a way to play gorgeous, harmonised guitar lines that managed to seem languid and elegant, even when the band was pressing hard on the accelerator. “At this point, Brian was way more accomplished than I was,” Gorham accepts. But Phil was thinking about world domination, about getting to America.” It was nothing to do with the guitar playing. “Scott – we didn’t really want him in the band. Robertson, though, has a different version of events. Gorham says Lynott decided he would never again be let down by a guitar player – which proved to be a vain hope – and decided to get two in, so there was always a spare. Until, that is, their guitarist Eric Bell drunkenly walked offstage in Belfast on the last night of 1973, in the middle of the set, never to return to the band – although the Bell years are represented on a new six-CD/one-DVD box set, Rock Legends, containing all the Lizzy UK singles, dozens of demos and a disc drawn from a couple of 1980 live shows.
The pair were in bands, then in bands together, one of them finally becoming Thin Lizzy. Singer Phil Lynott rehearsing in London, 1973. "He was the only black guy in the whole school," Downey says. Their roots stretched back to Downey and Lynott's time at the Christian Brothers school in Crumlin in the 1960s. Lizzy had already released three albums by the time Gorham and Robertson joined, with one UK hit single – a version of Whisky in the Jar that reached No 6 in 1972.
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