The very worst of Thin Lizzy

The band’s first iteration was as a serious threesome consisting of Lynott, the drummer Brian Downey and the manic Belfast guitarist Eric Bell. A folk-infused, progressive blues-rock outfit singular in their vision, the members seemed almost embarrassed by their blarney-tinged hit single Whiskey in the Jar in February 1973. “We don’t want people to get the impression that we do nothing but update old Irish songs,” Lynott said at the time. However, according to Bell, the frontman was “over the moon [as] he recognised the opportunity it ­presented”. By the end of the year, Bell was gone. According to observers, he was fired by Lizzy’s leader after a drunken performance at a Belfast gig. From then on, Lynott seemed as interested in making it big as he was in making good music.

Of course, there were myriad sides to Lynott, and Thomson is unafraid to show the singer’s unappealing ones. He is variously portrayed as a serial ­womaniser who kept tabs on girlfriends with a J Edgar Hoover-like vigilance; a talented lyricist who proved “amenable to compromise”; and a star who mentored young Irish bands but was jealous of bigger artists. The shy, poetic Phil of yore is a constant background presence —Eamon Carr, Robert Ballagh, Bob ­Geldof and others pitch in with ­anecdotes — but particularly shines through in the early chapters. “He didn’t have the confidence to walk tall,” says Carole Stephen, who started going out with the self-conscious, stooped musician in 1965.

After graduating from the relative anonymity of the Black Eagles to Brush Shiels’ Skid Row, Stephen’s boyfriend soon became a local hotshot, and a Jimi Hendrix-like swagger emerged. It appears to have been manufactured to conceal layers of insecurity — as a result, he is frequently forgiven for roguish indiscretions. When Lynott got Stephen pregnant, contact with his girlfriend ended, but he somehow emerged from the emotional wreckage as a victim. “If he didn’t tell anyone [about the baby Carole gave birth to in a mother-and-child home],” says his long-time friend Jim Fitzpatrick, “it was [because] of pain.”

Born in the English midlands in August 1949 to a single Irish mother and a Guyanese father, Lynott was raised largely by his grandparents in “grey” Crumlin. Nobody was ever there to ­collect him from school, he recalled years later. To compensate, he painted an idealised picture of his exotically named absent father, Cecil Parris. When he finally met him in London in the mid-1970s, however, the duke of his imagination looked like a pimp, and Lynott “almost” laughed.

Preternaturally creative — “I think his life began in his head when he was seven or eight,” says Fitzpatrick — Lynott also invented an exaggeratedly Irish version of himself and his adopted homeland, which drip-fed into his writing, at which he initially excelled. Songs such as The Friendly Ranger at Clontarf Castle and Eire, which feature on Lizzy’s self-titled first studio album, are awash with misty-eyed images of Ireland, which the group left in January 1971 after signing a contract with Decca.

Thomson excels at tragicomic descriptions of the band’s zigzagging journeys between seedy British venues, “when home was a red Avis transit van”. He also interweaves critiques into the narrative, but they frequently have a hackneyed, Hot Press feel. ���If the album has a defining characteristic, it’s of an early 1970s jam band expressing their musicianship through a thick smog of reefer vapour,” he opines of Lizzy’s debut collection. Indeed.

By the summer of 1976, when the band were riding high on the success of Jailbreak and The Boys are Back in Town, Lynott was still sucking on ­reefers. He was also injecting hard drugs, however, so it was no surprise when he contracted hepatitis after sharing a dirty needle. The wake-up call that prompted him to “curb almost all of his more destructive habits for 12 months”, was not loud enough, however. When Lizzy toured America in September 1977, Lynott exhibited all the signs of a dope-addled prima donna. “Stupid things became important, like the size of the hotel bed,” says the band’s former road manager Frank Murray. When they visited Manhattan again the following summer, the frontman had become a limo-riding parody.

Inevitably, there is a doomed quality about the book’s closing chapters, as Thomson chronicles the increasingly bloated and paranoid Lynott. His heart, liver and kidneys finally packed in on January 4, 1986.

In the years leading up to his death, both his band and marriage to Caroline Crowther had broken up — and, ­without his two families, so did he.

Tap to buy for £18, including p&p, from the ST Bookshop