The Lynott I Knew

A veteran among Irish music business veterans, Frank Murray knew Phil Lynott from the Black Eagles and Skid Row days, and as a longtime friend was obvious choice for the post of Thin Lizzy tour manager. In his capacity as boot camp sergeant and nursemaid, Murray oversaw Lizzy’s rise from promising one-hit wonders to one of the premier touring bands of the day. He was also the man charged with the sad task of stewarding Phil Lynott’s casket home in January 1986.

Following Thin Lizzy’s demise, Murray went on to handle on-the-road duties for Elton John and also took on the not inconsiderable task of managing The Pogues throughout their glory days, before heralding The Frames through their lean years (he proclaimed that band’s debut single ‘The Dancer’ as the finest Irish single since The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’). After four decades, Murray remains at the industry’s coalface, managing gruff-voiced rabble rouser and balladeer The Mighty Stef. He sat down with Hot Press in the last days of 2010 to reflect upon Phil Lynott’s legacy, and all points beyond.

When was the first time you saw Phil Lynott perform?
The first time I saw him he was singing with the Black Eagles. They used to wear really flashy dark blue jackets, kind of like bolero, almost like a Mexican mariachi jacket, like a lounge singer. And because it came to his waist his legs seemed to go on forever, and I just thought ‘Fuck me!’ But there was something about him that kept your eyes trained on him all night. He was kind of a magnetic figure. You’d be looking at him, like. All the guys had band uniforms but he still stood out, even ignoring the fact that he was a black guy. His body size, he was six foot odd and he was slim.
Clothes were obviously a big thing at the time.
Big time. You had to develop your own style in those days clothes-wise, whereas in London they had the outbreak of boutiques with all kinds of nice clothes on all levels from high level tailoring. Like John Lennon could go to Saville Row and get all his suits made, to ordinary boutiques on King’s Road or Edgeware Road. We didn’t really have that choice here in Ireland. Eventually one shop did come in on Capel Street, Even Steven, but the problem was half the town shopped there as well, so you were gonna be looking like half the town. Phil’s mother would always send him clothes over from Manchester. But he was one of those guys – you know when people describe a model and say she can throw anything on and she looks beautiful? Well Philip was the male equivalent of that. He could throw on anything and it always fell on him properly. He’s the kind of guy who could take a white shirt out of a briefcase that had been there for two days and in ten minutes it would look like it was pressed.
He was tall as well, which helped.
I think it’s probably his mother’s genes that gave him that. She was kind of tall for a woman, and his Uncle Timmy was a tall guy.
Tell us how Lizzy evolved from what could have been a one hit wonder into a proficient touring machine and album band?
‘Whiskey In The Jar’ saved the band in a way. We had a hit in England, we were on Top Of The Pops, we could tour, we could come back home to Ireland and make a lot of money. So we’d come home each holiday to Ireland at Christmas, Easter, three times a year probably, and we’d tour the ballrooms, so we actually made money to keep ourselves alive, pay ourselves wages, pay for transport, road crew. The same thing happened in Germany: because we had ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ as a hit, we went over to the pop shows over there. Their television was great, the live TV shows – if you look at them they were incredible. I guess what was happening for the first three Decca albums, Phil had very catholic taste. Everything was very diverse. If you go from the first album to the third album, you can see him developing as a writer. He was also starting to do things like ‘The Rocker’.
Who was the main chart competition at the time?
Your main competition in those days was people like T.Rex, David Bowie, Slade and Sweet, and they were monsters. These were hit machines. And Philip wasn’t like that at the time, he wasn’t a hit songwriter. They had their formulas, but we never fitted into any of those categories. We had one-off hits. I think ‘The Rocker’ should have been a hit and then there was ‘Little Darling’, which I thought would have been a hit as well. There was no way we could go up against those guys though. And eventually when the (original) band (line-up) broke up, Phil started to audition and he went for the twin-guitar thing. That harked back to a time about three years earlier when Skid Row had come back from America and we had seen the original Allman Brothers. Funnily enough on the same bill that night was Iggy and the Stooges.
That’s some bill!
This was 1970 in Detroit, and Skid Row were on the bill as well. So we got the head blown off us twice, first by the Allman Brothers, they were magical, and afterwards Iggy came on and blew us away again. It was like he landed from Mars. The Allmans were sublime. We came back talking about the twin guitars. Phil decided upon a sound that he was gonna go for. It became, then, essentially like a hard rock band. That’s what people like Bowie had done, perfected a sound. Marc Bolan had perfected a sound with T.Rex. I think Philip decided, ‘We’re gonna go concentrate on this, and stop trying to be a bit folky, a bit psychedelic, a bit of this, a bit of that. We’re gonna be great at one thing’. Jailbreak became the hit, they had established their sound, but what was important was that there were enough great songs on the previous two albums to put into a live set. We just had this genius collection of songs. The same thing happened with The Pogues when it came to If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Without the three albums they wouldn’t have had the classic live sound. And that’s so important, the core of any great set.
What was it like when the band returned home to do Irish tours?
It was a really odd time. Horslips had happened here, so they kind of opened up the ballrooms. The showbands were going down, they were going nowhere. The ballroom managers realised that they were going to make a killing out of Horslips. Back in the ‘60s those guys would bar you from the ballrooms, they didn’t want anything to do with beat groups. We were bad news. Our hair was long. They seemed to assume we were on drugs. But Horslips as a homegrown act had high production values. Some places were used to giving you electricity for your lights or for the guitars – but a lot of them, you were just talking to farmers who owned ballrooms and they never knew what you were talking about when you talked about power requirements, or if you wanted a few drinks in the dressing room. The dressing rooms were usually just freezing places. There might be a pot of tea in the middle of it. It was quite primitive. In fact it was really primitive. We used to pack them, even when we were peaking over here with the Eric Bell line-up. At Christmas we’d play up North, we’d have guys who’d call themselves the Provos coming in trying to make us play the national anthem. Or, in the ballrooms, some guy would be telling us about how many thousand people were in and we’re going, ‘Is this the record for this place?’ and they’d always say, ‘Nah. we had Big Tom here about three weeks ago and he had about 150 more than you’. If they put 150 more in, the place would collapse! But they never would give you the satisfaction of saying that you had the record, so it became a joke among us, we’d go into ballrooms and we’d ask ‘Did Big Tom play here recently?’ and ask how many he had in.
Did you ever cross paths?
No, we never ran into him at all. I have a genius photograph of Big Tom receiving a golden whiskey from Christy Brown with his left foot. It’s a great photograph. But it was tough, particularly in the ‘70s when there was petrol rationing. It was tough to get around Ireland and hope that you’d run into a gas station. We started travelling around in little Fiats that you could probably get 70 miles to the gallon in.
How hard was it to get people to the show on time?
They were good. Some people mistake partying with unprofessionalism, but when it actually came to being at a gig at a certain time, soundchecking at a certain time, going on stage at the right time, all that was fine. I mean, Lizzy was a professional act. Robbo could get a bit lippy if he’d had too much to drink. A couple of times he fell over when he was on stage and I often had a pop at him over that, ‘cause he’d wear clogs and they’re not the greatest of footwear, unless you’re a Danish sailor or something. An odd time rows would break out about people turning up late to rehearsal but nothing really serious.
Of all the years of touring, can you recall any real highlights?
Funnily enough on the Jailbreak tour they did a gig in Leek Town Hall outside of Edinburgh, and I remember that feeling quite genius for some reason. I remember all the guys from Graham Parker and the Rumour, who were opening for us, running down the front of the stage during the middle of the show and almost doing that, ‘We’re not worthy’ gesture to the band on the stage. There was something really great about that gig. The standards were pretty high. You rarely got a bad show off Thin Lizzy. If the show didn’t go the way they wanted, afterwards in the dressing room, you’d want to keep people out for at least a half an hour while they settled amongst themselves who did what wrong, you know? They never took anything for granted. The first question when Philip came off the stage, he’d always say, ‘What was that like?’ First question all the time.
Even during the three-piece band with Eric Bell, we used to tape gigs off the mixing desk most nights and we’d be driving home in the car and we’d put it on the cassette player and listen. Phil was always listening back, listening back, listening back, trying to improve things. The same in the studio. If we finished in the studio at three or four in the morning, when we’d be going home in the car together he’d be playing this stuff back to me over and over again. We’d wake up the next morning and the first thing on the tape player would be the stuff we’d done the day before. He was constantly, constantly listening. It was his work, you know? He felt his work was important. He had standards. He was a bit of a perfectionist.
When did you notice those standards start to slip?
You’d play a gig and you’d stay overnight, so you’re not in a car to listen to it and you might go partying in a club instead. Next morning you wouldn’t listen to it because you’d have to go to a radio station and do an interview. Other duties took over. But he never gave up on it, he could still go to his hotel room and listen. He was still like that with the recorded stuff until the ‘80s. It was important to him. In those days if he didn’t like a solo that was being done, the guitar player had to stay and learn some other solo. In my experience, people doing documentaries about Thin Lizzy don’t really want to know about that, unfortunately. They want to know about Philip and sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. They talk to an awful lot of the wrong people and they seem to ask an awful lot of the wrong questions. You have to understand Phil was a very complex man, again because of his generation. We used to go watch Elvis in his early movies and the characters he played were kind of tough no-nonsense people. Phil often used to quote that thing from Kid Creole, ‘I ain’t no grease monkey. I ain’t gonna slide for you’. Skid Row toured America twice and Gary Moore was this great guitar player and Brush was a great bass player and Noel Bridgman was an incredible drummer, but the one thing that Philip had over any of those people was that he was a star. He liked that. And Philip liked his buddies around him. He liked the comfort zone. Scott was always there, Gary would always be in and out, BD was always there. He didn’t like strangers. I think he was afraid of starting again.
A lot of musicians get institutionalised on the road.
There was a bit of that, all right. If you like sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, the best place to get it is on tour. He loved that. The attitude to drugs in the early days was far more lax than it is now. Back then it was regarded as a bit of a weird thing to do, but you were less likely to be hassled about it by the cops or customs staff. For example, I remember a bunch of us smoking joints on a plane and the stewardess just laughed at us. Then the big stuff came in and Ireland was flooded with cocaine and heroin and gradually it became harder and harder to be seen to use any kind of drugs at all. When the criminal gangs got involved something had to be done about it. When Phil came back to Dublin, the doors had just opened on the heroin rush. Heroin was available to every single body.
And when Lizzy finished and he tried to put together Grand Slam he was too far gone to create it. I think his creative muse was hibernating somewhere. Put it this way, had he given up Thin Lizzy earlier, and had he been confident about recording a solo album, staying at home, kicking back for a year, playing around in the home studio, doing the things that you’re supposed to do, that are kind of normal, I think his songwriting would have developed in a different way. He would have really delivered. He still had so much to give when he died. He went through this great patch, and around the Bad Reputation or Chinatown period things started to slack off. A lot of Lizzy fans would disagree with me, but some of the songs were hit-and-miss on some of those records. I think if he had finished around then, he’d enough status to relax for two or three years. If he’d stayed healthy and some time in the early ‘90s said, ‘By the way I’m getting Thin Lizzy back together’, they could have been one of the biggest bands in the world, you know? A lot of that generation, whether it was Dinosaur Jr., whether it was Metallica, whether it was Slash, there was another cycle there. Of course we all know what happened in between, but I would have loved if it had happened like that.
Your last duty as Lizzy’s road manager was flying Phil’s casket back to Ireland.
That was one of the saddest moments of my life. Making his last journey, I remember realising that his coffin was in the hold and I kind of froze in the plane. It was very sad, bringing your buddy home, and normally it would be your guitars and your cases in there. We’d flown around the world together and we’d come back to Ireland lots of times together from tours. Normally there was a sense of joy and celebration and mischief on the plane, we were gonna go to Neary’s for a pint. All of a sudden to have the tables turned this way, it was such a sad occasion.
When was the last time you saw him?
August (1985), I think that was the last time. He was in good form. He seemed to see some light at the end of the tunnel. What he did afterwards between then and Christmas, I do not know. It seems like he got an infection and I imagine this would all have been as a result of physical abuse over the years. His immune system was shot to pieces. He couldn’t fight what was going on in his body. It’s a terribly, terribly sad story for me because it was my friend. The whole nation loved him. Up and down O’Connell Street or Grafton Street and everybody’d be shouting ‘Hey Philo’. He had this thing, he had this very strong walk. You’d be walking beside him and he took these long strides. Even when I go out with my girlfriend and she’s like ‘Slow down!’ I still have his strides! You just keep heading for where you’re going. You don’t stop.