FILTER REISSUES
The Boys Are Back
Marvel again at the swashbuckling heart, soul and guts of Phil Lynott and “the squadron” at their peak. New box set features all seven nights of the shows that made up their landmark live LP.
By James McNair.
Thin Lizzy
★★★★★
Live And Dangerous – Super Deluxe Edition
UMR. CD/DL/LP
“WEWOULD leave that stage smeared with blood if we had to,” Thin Lizzy’s Scott Gorham told this writer in 2018. “No matter what happened up there, nobody gave up on the squadron.” Such staunch commitment to the cause was obvious to those who witnessed Lizzy’s November 1976 shows at Hammersmith Odeon, and to punters who bought Live And Dangerous upon its release some 18 months later. Oft cited as the definitive document of hard rock performance, …Dangerous brought an impassioned, piratical air to Phil Lynott’s sometimes cock-sure, sometimes heartsore songs. In summer ’78, only the soundtrack to Grease stopped it topping the UK album charts.
Featuring the ‘Fab Four’ line-up of Lynott, Gorham, young Scots firebrand Brian Robertson and masterful, versatile drummer Brian Downey, L&D became an exemplar of on-stage heroics for U2 and other aspirants. Lynott had clocked the unprecedented, early-1976 success of Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and fancied his band might follow suit. Concurrently, Lizzy’s attempts to break America touring March 1976’s Jailbreak on the back of US Number 12 hit The Boys Are Back In Town had just come to nought when, sick and yellow-eyed with hepatitis, Lynott had been forced to quit the tour and fly home.
There was a lot at stake, then, when a regrouped Lizzy parked outside the ‘Hammy’ Odeon that November with producer Tony Visconti and the Maison Rouge mobile studio in tow. Now wrapping a sold-out UK Tour in support of Jailbreak’s rapid fire follow-up Johnny The Fox, they were hyped; a cocked pistol waiting to fire. For three nights, Visconti would attempt to capture the juggernaut live show that Lynott’s illness had derailed in the US. That way, if Lizzy’s extra-curricular activities compromised future US tours – and they would – the band would at least have proof of their prowess for anyone who cared to listen.
This 8-CD Super Deluxe Edition brings seven full-or-as-near-as-dammit sets recorded between November 1976 and March 1978. We get the three Hammersmith Odeon shows, two from The Tower Theatre, Philadelphia in October ’77, one from Seneca College Field House, Toronto that same month, plus Lizzy’s March ’78 show at the Rainbow theatre in London. The eighth disc remasters the pooled content of the original double-album. This in-the-round approach confirms what we already knew, namely that Lizzy were on-point every night. Perhaps it’s also time to junk disparaging theories about how much or how little parts of Live And Dangerous might have been shored-up in the studio (see Back Story). Are these essentially live recordings of a visceral, in the moment experience? Of course they are. You can’t fake that vital spark.
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“The ...Dangerous line-up had the firepower and stagecraft to move moun tains.”
Naturally, the box set invites us to compare the various different versions of these long-familiar songs. Still In Love With You, penned by Lynott about old flame Gail Barber, comes across like his nightly confessional and catharsis, a soulful, all-too-human meditation on regret. It’s also one of several tunes here whose arrangements evolve over time. You notice how its tricky intro and outro segments become subtler, more finessed.
For sheer sensory excitement, though, the opening power chords of Lizzy’s take on Bob Seger’s Rosalie take some beating, and the inherent spunk of Brian Robertson’s playing is manifest on four different instances of his extraordinary wah wah solo on Don’t Believe A Word. “You had to be able to step into the spotlight and hold your balls in your hand,” noted Gorham. Live And Dangerous-era Robbo is the archetype of that phenotype. In the studio, the group’s inherent magic had sometimes been harder to realise. Nightlife, the 1974 album which first saw Gorham’s destiny entwined with that of fellow new recruit Robertson, was so famously under-amped by its co-producer Ron Nevison that Lizzy came to call it their ‘cocktail’ album. Live, however, this line-up had the Marshall-stacked firepower and stagecraft to move mountains. Prop-less save for a jerry-built Thin Lizzy sign and ‘Derek The Dog’ (a stuffed toy mascot Robbo plonked on his amp-head each night) they threw skinny, angular shapes as Lynott strafed the crowd with a beam reflected from his bass guitar’s mirror scratch-plate.
It’s a delight, too, to flick through the photos in this set’s accompanying 48-page book. Here was a band so photogenic they could have helmed Paris Fashion Week, should its ’70s purview have alighted on hard rock couture. There was something in the symmetry of Gorham and Robertson’s Les Pauls; something in the album covershot of a clench-fisted Lynott on his knees, that made Lizzy obvious poster boys. Did we mention their great hair? A four-way miracle, really, given that Lynott’s mother Philomena would set about it with Fairy Liquid whenever Lizzy docked at her Manchester hotel, The Clifton Grange.
When Thin Lizzy made plans, God tended to laugh. On November 23, 1976, just a week after the three Hammersmith shows, Brian Robertson got involved in a skirmish while defending his Scots soul singer pal Frankie Miller at The Speakeasy Club in London’s West End. Sticking out his fretting-hand to prevent Miller being glassed, he suffered a severed nerve. Lizzy had been due to fly to the US on a support tour with Queen the next morning, but Robbo was incapacitated. Super-sub Gary Moore stepped in admirably while the Scotsman’s hand healed, but the moment had passed. Lizzy never did break America.