Rock star extraordinaire, Philip was not granted an abrupt rock’n’roll cessation. Philip’s last great song was 1977’s tolling, elegaic “Southbound”: Driftin’ like a drover/ Chasin’ my career … Straight from the flaw in his heart. His band, certainly, were about to enter a decline: After Thin Lizzy’s annus mirabilis of 1976 ( Jailbreak and then Johnny The Fox) the full-tilt lifestyle would begin to do them all in.
Half-hidden by the languorous precision of Philip’s delivery, throbbing under it, is an extraordinary, an unsustainable excitement. “Angel From the Coast” is daredevil-euphoric ( Lady Luck has got me covered …) and with “My Sarah” Philip tenderly celebrated the birth of his first daughter, but there’s just something about those boys, bippin’ and boppin’ and kicking the shit out of everybody down at Dino’s. Is “The Boys Are Back in Town” the happiest song in the Lizzy canon? Possibly. “The Boys Are Back in Town” shares a three-in-a-row rhyme scheme with “ Madame George”-you could put Van’s lines, actually, right into Philip’s song without disturbing the meter or even (much) the meaning: And outside they’re making all the stops/ The kids out in the street collecting bottle-tops/ Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops … For Philip, as for Bruce Springsteen (from whose “Kitty’s Back” the guitar riff of “The Boys Are Back in Town” was apparently nicked or adapted), Van’s Astral Weeks was a wellspring, and his street-bardic gabble a pure energy. The metrical elasticity of these lines, and their easy sensation of transport, poetic lift-off, has a lot to do with Van Morrison. That jukebox in the corner blasting out my favorite song/ The nights are getting warmer, it won’t be long/ Won’t be long ’til summer comes/ Now that the boys are here again. In a Shakespearean touch, they’re even improving the weather. The boys have been away (prison? a war? a “job”?), they’re back now, and Philip exults in their sharpness and vitality-their presence. But “The Boys Are Back in Town” is a glorious reunion with reality, a homecoming. Last rides were his particular thing, and tricky situations: Five to four they blast him away/ Three to one he’s gonna live. Half-cartoon himself, he populated the Lizzyscape with a spray-can cast of lonesome cowboys, gangland Casanovas, junkie pistoleros, sci-fi ass-kickers, and doomed Celtic swordsmen. They will return again, of course, in triumph, in 1976’s “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Listen to 1973’s “ The Rocker,” to Philip scatting ecstatically through the verses while Downey explodes in beatnik syncopations: Down at the juke joint me and the boys are stompin’/ Bippin’ and boppin’ and tellin’ a dirty joke or two … And here we see the amazing and sanguinary “boys”- finger-poppin’ daddies, masters of the spoken word-making their entrance into Philip’s fantasia. Mister, fill me another/ ’Til I go crazy and it turns my mind around/ Just pass that bottle one more time/ I’m slowly slippin’ down … (“ Borderline”) Seven syllables and three stresses in the first line, 12 syllables and four stresses in the second-aren’t these the very rhythms of boozed-out soliloquy, the depressive ponderousness and the lunges in thought? The heart of Thin Lizzy was a duet between Philip and drummer Brian Downey, his childhood friend and miraculous musical partner. And it was led by one of the greatest prosodists in rock’n’roll. For all Philip’s machismo, and the guitar-thunder, etc., Thin Lizzy the musical unit was more Steely Dan than Iron Maiden-nifty, mobile, slenderly groovy. I must say however that the thing as a whole is too heavy. Somewhere behind singer Ricky Warwick, too, you can hear the sorrowful push of Philip’s voice. The title track rocks like metallicized Bob Seger, and “Bound for Glory” could almost be Thin Lizzy, with the guitars charging in tandem and the rhythmic punch. Which are not-astonishingly-absolutely goddamn terrible.
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