Skinny Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott stepped into Decca Studio 4, London, in July 1973 as a person with one thing to show. He was there to report Lizzy’s third album, Vagabonds Of The Western World, their first full-length since their tackle the Irish conventional “Whiskey In The Jar” had been a shock hit earlier that yr.
Although they had been initially reluctant to launch it, that breakthrough single had given the band a brand new sense of confidence, bolstered by a triumphant homecoming tour of Eire in Spring 1973. A UK tour supporting Slade in late 1972 – and a wake-up name from the headline act’s supervisor Chas Chandler, who’d additionally represented Lynott’s hero, Jimi Hendrix – had impressed the beforehand introverted frontman to work at his stagecraft, including raunchy new strikes to his onstage repertoire and dazzling audiences. Issues had been seemingly on the up.
Watch the official video for Skinny Lizzy’s “Whiskey in the Jar.”
However as occurred so typically with Skinny Lizzy, with success got here setbacks. The success of “Whiskey In The Jar” led to report label strain to observe it up with one other rocked-up tackle an Irish conventional – “Danny Boy” and “It’s A Long Way To Tipperary” had been apparently mooted. Lynott was not solely conscious about the potential damaging response of some components of the Irish rock group to such a transfer, however he was eager to indicate off his personal songwriting and fought to launch an authentic as the following single. He obtained his manner, however the romantic bossa-nova of “Randolph’s Tango” was a flop. Lynott was devastated, as guitarist Eric Bell informed Basic Rock in 2024, “He eventually realised that we’d blown it, and that affected him pretty deeply.”
After licking his wounds, Lynott kicked again writing his strongest materials to this point for Vagabonds. The album’s first single, “The Rocker,” was a swaggering declaration of intent that denoted a brand new sense of function and urgency. It’s the sound of a preening and strutting, leather-clad butterfly rising from its studded chrysalis. Over brash guitar riffs and careening drums, Lynott boasts of his avenue smarts and intercourse enchantment with snarling and plausible insouciance. His lyrics at all times teemed with heroic outlaws; right here he was casting himself within the function. With a fatherless, itinerant childhood and a fascination for Irish mythology, westerns, and Marvel comics, it’s not exhausting to see the place this preoccupation got here from. One of many few issues Lynott knew about his father rising up was that his nickname was “The Duke.” It’s a brief bounce to “The Rocker.” This was songwriting as a type of self-actualisation; a method of making a persona that Lynott, by all accounts a delicate soul, would undertake wholly in his public life. And it’s topped off by a fireworks show of a guitar solo from Bell that means that no matter scrape this rocker will get into, his gang has obtained his again.
Elsewhere, the heads-down boogie of eco-conscious opener “Mama Nature Said” and the exhausting funk of “Gonna Creep Up On You” are additional pointers in the direction of heavier issues to come back for Lizzy. The identical goes for the near-title monitor, “Vagabond Of The Western World,” a blistering psych-rock exercise which tells the story of a rootless philanderer, one other thinly-veiled instance of Lynott taking inspiration from his absent father. “Slow Blues,” in the meantime, lives as much as its title, a wronged and woeful Lynott pouring his coronary heart out over a smouldering, late-night blues.
Not every thing on Vagabonds spoke of Lynott’s transformation right into a swashbuckling, streetfighting rock god. The slow-burning “Little Girl In Bloom” feels like nothing else right here, or certainly elsewhere in rock music. Lynott’s austere bass improbably foreshadows Pleasure Division whereas by no means fairly gelling with Brian Downey’s swinging drums and the off-kilter melody, making a melancholic tug intensified by a young vocal. In the meantime, Eric Bell’s guitar is an train in cool restraint, all spare, closely handled single notes, until the midpoint of the track the place, as if echoing a way of liberation, he embarks upon a joyfully untethered solo.
As soon as once more, Lynott’s lyrics draw upon his previous, this time alluding to his former girlfriend, Carole Stephens, and his estranged little one. Stephens grew to become pregnant in December 1967, and Lynott prompt the pair run away to hitch his mom in England. As a substitute, Stephens informed her household and she or he was whisked away to a convent 60 miles from Dublin, unbeknown to Lynott. 5 days after giving beginning, Stephen was pressured handy her son over to the Catholic Safety and Rescue Society of Eire and didn’t see him till 2000. It was solely months after, when Lynott ran into Stephens in Dublin that she was in a position to inform him. “The two of us went to the cartoon cinema, and I told him everything,” Stephens informed Graeme Thomson in his definitive 2016 Lynott biography Cowboy Track. “We sat at the back and we sobbed… We had to wait until it was dark until we came out. In terms of our relationship there was no going back.” Lynott didn’t inform a soul about his little one till the mid-70s, when he defined the lyric to artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who was illustrating a e-book of his poetry.
Lynott’s poetic facet additionally surfaced on the tender “A Song While I’m Away,” on the floor the form of burnt-out, on-the-road dispatch that rock stars have a tendency to jot down round their third album. In Lynott’s fingers although, it grew to become one thing genuinely transferring, as convincing a love letter to his cherished Eire (“And far away hills look greener still, but soon they’ll all slip away”) as to the rest.
Vagabonds didn’t make Skinny Lizzy stars, but it surely laid the foundations for the band’s future success and Lynott’s improvement as a songwriter and frontman. It additionally introduced concerning the finish of the primary period of the band. Lizzy toured relentlessly to assist the album and whereas life on the highway and its accompanying decadence suited Lynott’s forged iron structure, Eric Bell suffered. The tour took its toll on the guitarist and months of exhausting dwelling got here to a head at a Belfast gig wherein he had an onstage breakdown, leaving Lynott and Downey to play the vast majority of the present as a two-piece. Bell wouldn’t play with Lizzy once more, he’d get replaced by the dual guitar assault of Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. A brand new period of the band was about to start, with the rock’n’roll glory that Lynott dreamt of drawing ever nearer on the horizon.
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