The metallic glint of the guitars gave the new Thin Lizzy a sparkling chrome finish. While the Allman Brothers had been knitting tight harmonies for years, the stripped-down simplicity of Lynott’s hard rock songs put Gorham and Robertson’s playing in the center of the frame. Gorham overheard and they began experimenting with playing in tandem. Robertson and an engineer had been playing around with super-short delays in the studio, allowing the guitarist to accompany himself. While recording Fighting in 1975, the two guitarists-one a laid- back Californian, the other a hard-drinking Scotsman-would figure out how to braid their disparate styles together. In addition to the added security, the twin-guitar attack brought a new sense of purpose to Thin Lizzy’s songwriting. Lynott was explicit about his reasons for bringing on the two guitarists: “The next time one of those cunts walks out there will be another one there,” he told the band’s former manager Brian Tuite, as related to Graeme Thomson in his biography of Lynott, Cowboy Song. Together they put out three strong but poorly selling records in the early 1970s and had a novelty hit with their version of the traditional Irish song “Whiskey in the Jar.” From the age of 7, Lynott had been raised by his grandmother in Dublin while his mother lived in Manchester, and when Bell and his successor Gary Moore left the band in rapid succession in 1974, he hired Gorham and Robertson partly to appease his fear of abandonment. Lynott and Downey began Thin Lizzy in 1969 as a power trio that also included guitarist Eric Bell, an alum of Van Morrison’s Them. They built a statue of him in the middle of Dublin. He is beloved in a way that perhaps no other Irish rock star has ever been. And in their home country of Ireland, Lynott is revered as a poet and cherished son. They’re probably the only band to have the same song covered by Titus Andronicus, Belle and Sebastian, the Cardigans, and Huey Lewis and the News. Henry Rollins claimed they were “streetwise as any punk could hope to be,” which made Lynott, Gorham, and drummer Brian Downey the most authentically punk members of their short-lived supergroup the Greedies with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols.
Nick Lowe not only aped Thin Lizzy in “ So It Goes,” he set the song’s first verse at one of their gigs. He and Lizzy left behind an uneven but greatly rewarding discography whose fingerprints can be seen in the needling harmonies of everyone from Prince to Iron Maiden to 311 to Ratatat. While they stayed on the UK charts longer, reaching their highest mark with 1979’s Black Rose: A Rock Legend, they flamed out in 1983 Lynott himself passed away three years later, his body severely ravaged by a heroin addiction. Who wouldn’t want to feel this free, even if the freedom dies the moment the record’s over?ĭespite the persistence of “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the reputation of Thin Lizzy in the U.S. On Jailbreak-their most focused, most confident album-Thin Lizzy’s unwavering belief in their power as a band and the simple joy they get from playing together is so strong, it nearly makes the legend feel like it’s worth believing in, no matter if you know how all of these stories pan out. Like many songs of its era, “The Boys Are Back in Town” evangelizes the poseur myth of rock’n’roll: It wants you to believe that the music can whisk you away from who you actually are. It’s pure romance, pure bullshit, exactly the kind of story you tell over a pint, knowing and not caring how stupid it sounds.
The boys want to fight each other for the girls, the girls aren’t all that impressed, and this is all happening where? A place called Dino’s Bar and Grill.
The danger is totally theatrical, mostly theoretical. Guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson crack open the song with a thunderous chord and they sign their names to the chorus in battery acid, twin-tagging it with a heroic pride and triumphant humor that makes them sound like John Williams scoring Woody Woodpecker. “The Boys Are Back in Town” is a romantic proclamation, Lynott the grinning town crier with a pack of cigs tucked into his shirt sleeve who sings with the pluck of someone who thinks this time, he might join them. He always believed he was a superstar, and on the song that finally proved it, he swells with the feeling of what’s coming. Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott seemed like he felt this way even when nobody was around.
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