The best frontman that Bono has ever seen: “He was amazing”
The art of being a great rock and roll frontman wasn’t lost on Bono.
He might abuse his power more than a few times by getting a bit too long-winded at every single U2 show, but you can tell that the frontman is always coming from a place of love whenever he starts talking about making the world a better place. You genuinely believe that the man wants to use all of his music for good, but there are many singers who have been able to push rock and roll music a lot further than he ever could.
But if you look at all that U2 has done over the years, it’s not like Bono hasn’t put in the effort to make them one of the biggest names in music. He wanted the opportunity to reach the top of the charts if he could, but it was also about making music that you could be proud of when listening back to it decades after the fact, whenever they made their pivots. Achtung Baby wasn’t what everyone was expecting, but it was absolutely necessary for them to sleep at night and still have their musical integrity.
After all, some of Bono’s favourite singers were normally the ones who painted pictures about their own state of mind whenever they performed. Joe Strummer and John Lennon weren’t the kind of artists to care about chart success whenever they made their records, but no one could deny that they sounded intense as all hell whenever they started crafting their classic tunes like ‘London Calling’ and ‘Revolution’.
Then again, growing up in Ireland also meant internalising the kind of poetry that was coming out of his home. Bob Dylan was opening people’s minds ever since the early 1960s, but Van Morrison was doing the same thing from the other side of the Atlantic. Astral Weeks had some of the most gripping lyrics that anyone had ever come up with, but in a world that was still interested in singer-songwriters, Phil Lynott brought a little more grit to everything that he played with Thin Lizzy.
As opposed to the traditional hard rock band that would write about fighting mythic warlords or rip off JRR Tolkien, Lynott was infusing pieces of his heritage and his own poetry into the mix. A lot of his greatest works could be read as brilliant pieces of prose if they didn’t have Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson performing alongside him, but Bono felt that Lynott could be just as entertaining with only his voice and his bass onstage.
Success seemed to evade Lizzy once they reached the US, but Bono still felt that Lynott belongs to be amongst the greatest frontmen that ever lived, saying, “He was an amazing frontman. If lyrical and musical ability has to be matched with showmanship, attitude, style, if that’s your version of rock’n’roll, there’s no way past Phil Lynott. He’s at the top of the tree.” And that’s before even getting to his showmanship onstage.
No one was thinking of trying to put those reflective covers on their guitars like he did, but when Lynott shined them throughout the set, no one could have taken their eyes off of him. And considering the amount of riffs that they came up with, it’s not hard to see why so many consider the band one of their biggest influences, whether it’s Metallica talking about their music or Noel Gallagher “borrowing” one of the riffs from ‘Rosalie’ for the bridge of Oasis’s ‘Step Out’.
Not everything that Lynott did had to be larger than life by any means, but it was about having that perfect combination of rock and roll swagger and lyrical mastery that put him into legend status. He wasn’t trying to become one of the biggest names in music by any stretch, but by quoting his heart and making the kind of passages he did on Black Rose, he solidified himself as one of the most interesting voices in hard rock.
