One of my ear­li­est music loves was the Irish hard rock band Thin Lizzy. Like many of my gen­er­a­tion, my intro­duc­tion came in the song that would become their all-time clas­sic, and the one you hear most on the radio (along with Whiskey In The Jar), name­ly The Boys Are Back In Town. This led me to go out and buy the album, Jail­break, which I found out was their sixth stu­dio album (released in March 1976) and thus I began my jour­ney of dis­cov­er­ing ear­li­er albums and then sub­se­quent albums as they came out. Phil Lynott was the cre­ative force that led the band through their four­teen-year career, with drum­mer Bri­an Downey also a con­stant fig­ure.

Formed in 1969, Thin Lizzy ini­tial­ly com­prised Lynott, Downey, and gui­tarist Eric Bell (and to be tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, organ­ist Eric Wrixon, though he left after a few months, leav­ing the band as a three-piece). The band’s music reflect­ed mul­ti­ple influ­ences from blues and psy­che­del­ic rock to tra­di­tion­al Irish music through a sol­id hard rock lens, and adorned by Phil’s evoca­tive lyrics that always have a sto­ry to tell; wit­ness these poet­ic lines from the lead song of their sec­ond album, Shades Of A Blue Orphan­age:

When we were kids we used to go over the back wall into old Dan’s scrap­yard
Into the snook­er hall where most us kids were barred
An’ into the Roxy and the Stel­la where film stars starred
That’s where me and Hopa­long an’ Roy Rogers got drunk and jarred
And we might have been the sav­iour of the men
The cap­tured cap­tain in the dev­il’s demon den
And we might have been the mag­ic politi­cian in some kind of tricky posi­tion
Like an old, old, old mas­ter musi­cian we kept on wish­in’
We was head­ed for the num­ber one hit coun­try again

Eric Bell left in 1973 and was briefly replaced by Gary Moore, but it was the deci­sion to replace Gary with two gui­tarists, Scott Gorham and Bri­an Robert­son, that the clas­sic line-up of my youth was formed. The twin gui­tar sound that Scott and Bri­an brought to the table would lead them to their great­est suc­cess­es and break them in the US, that holy grail of band ambi­tion. And it was Jail­break that did it. Packed with great songs like the epony­mous Jail­break, The Boys Are Back In Town, Cow­boy Song, and Emer­ald, the album was also the­mat­i­cal­ly coher­ent As demon­strat­ed so icon­i­cal­ly by Jim Fitz­patrick­’s great cov­er art­work, the album exudes themes of escape and rebel­lion, of the dis­en­fran­chised break­ing free from the shack­les of, well, you get the drift…

You can lis­ten to the song Jail­break here: