After founding members Phil Lynott and Brian Downey recruited twin lead guitarists Scott Gorham and 18-year-old Brian Robertson, Skinny Lizzy’s traditional line-up fell into place throughout 1974. At this juncture, the much-loved Dublin’s band preliminary incarnation – involving Lynott, Downey and guitarist Eric Bell – had beforehand recorded three cult-level albums for Decca. But whereas the new-look band rapidly inked a contemporary cope with Vertigo and continued to gig ferociously, mainstream success remained elusive. However all that will quickly change in 1976 with the discharge of the Jailbreak and Johnny The Fox albums.
The groundwork had been laid by 1974’s laid-back, bluesy Nightlife and the next yr’s harder-edged Preventing, nevertheless it was with March 1976’s masterful Jailbreak that they lastly hit pay dust. Buoyed by the band’s first main worldwide hit, the swaggering “The Boys Are Back In Town,” this numerous, assured LP cracked the Prime 20 on each side of the Atlantic and quickly yielded a brace of gold discs.
Eager to press dwelling the benefit, Lizzy launched into high-profile US assist slots with heavy-hitting arduous rockers Aerosmith and Rush, however the momentum was curtailed when Lynott was struck down with hepatitis, and a scheduled US jaunt with Rainbow was promptly canceled.
The upside of Lynott’s enforced layoff was that he wrote a brand new batch of songs whereas recovering from his sickness, and he rapidly reconvened along with his compadres to report them with Jailbreak producer John Alcock. Accomplished throughout August ’76 and within the retailers on October 16, his band’s seventh LP Johnny The Fox continued on from the place Jailbreak left off, peaking at No. 11 within the UK (the place it gained the band one other gold disc) and rising to No. 52 on North America’s Billboard 200.
Lynott’s gifted new crew had already left most of their arduous rock contemporaries standing with the magnificent Jailbreak, and so they displayed comparable ranges of verve and virtuosity on its follow-up. Gorham and Robertson’s Wishbone Ash-esque dueling lead guitars once more got here thrillingly to the fore on the powerful, anthemic likes of “Rocky” and the frenetic, religious-prejudice-dissing “Massacre”; the charismatic Lynott indulged his romantic facet on “Old Flame” and the mellow, string-enhanced ballad “Sweet Marie”; and his costs even summoned up sufficient chutzpah to detour into imperious Sly Stone-style funk on the enigmatic “Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed.”
Johnny The Fox admittedly featured one subpar monitor within the anticlimactic “Boogie Woogie Dance,” however that mattered little within the total scheme of issues. The report additionally had the punchy UK Prime 20 hit “Don’t Believe A Word” in reserve, and Lynott gained over any remaining doubters with the formidable “Fool’s Gold,” a poetic, heartstring-tugging commentary on the devastation attributable to Eire’s infamous potato famine in the course of the nineteenth century.
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