The Thin Lizzy song that tragically foreshadowed Phil Lynott’s death
Effortlessly walking the 1970s’ winding musical thread through hard rock, punk and even new wave, Irish proto-metal’s Thin Lizzy‘s melodic strut fused with an unrefined edge saw frontman and principal songwriter Phil Lynott win fans and reverence from artists as diverse as Aerosmith, Sex Pistols, and Midge Ure. Serving many a young rocker’s gateway to musical discovery, classic cuts like ‘Jailbreak’ and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ are often the first songs a budding bassist learns, inspired by the band’s charismatic singer.
As the band found success, heroin too eventually found them, as it did many a rock band in the 1970s’ excess. While touring their Black Rose album and staying in a Paris hotel, allegedly Lynott gave guitarist Scott Gorham a phone call and beckoned him to his room. Pulling out a package and revealing some brown powder, Lynott suggested they both give it a blast.
While there’s some dispute as to heroin’s presence earlier on, including suggestions that Lynott’s ’76 bout of hepatitis was caused by a dirty needle, smack would plague Lynott for the rest of his life from then on.
Eerily, Thin Lizzy unwittingly foreshadowed the drug’s later hold on the band. Dropped during punk’s peak, Bad Reputation contained the dramatic ‘Opium Trail’, a romantic picture of heroin’s exotic westward traversal from far-flung lands, anticipating The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown‘ with its lyrical allure on the topic and throwing in some Triad references he was obsessed with at the time of writing.
Bad Reputation was another success, reaching number four in the UK Albums Chart, but as good fortune was showered on Thin Lizzy, so too was the opportunity for hedonism.
“I used to note specifically these shady characters … who used to turn up backstage,” latter tour manager Adrian Hopkins revealed. “I knew they were drug pushers, and I made an effort to stop them getting passes. He [Lynott] said, ‘They’re my mates!’ But I said, ‘No, Phil, they’re not your mates.'” For a band that had released one of the most acclaimed live albums of all time, their shows were swiftly becoming affected as they entered the ’80s.
Their final show at ’83’s Monsters of Rock festival in Germany starkly documented a band struggling to play with the magic the crowd were used to, the spark lost in heroin’s pernicious fug. “I didn’t feel well, I didn’t look good, nothing was right,” Gorham confessed. “Everyone that was playing that show was on the side of our stage. There were people crying and applauding and crying again. All I could think was: ‘I’ve got to get off this stage.’ How terrible is that? It was a real shit way to end the whole thing.”
Tragically, heroin’s Russian roulette finally flashed Lynott his number, dying of pneumonia and heart failure due to septicaemia derived from addiction complications in 1986. He was buried in Dublin’s St Fintan’s Cemetery, and his mother, Philomena, visited his grave routinely. “I still listen to his music every single day…,” she told BBC News. “I go over, and I pour water onto his gravestone. I call it washing his face. Then, when I leave, I give him a kick… for breaking my heart.”
