Phil Lynott's Influences: The Sounds Behind Thin Lizzy

This is a messy drawing of Phil Lynott, and a map I put together a long time ago trying to trace some of his influences. A good opportunity to take a look on what would have been his 77th birthday.

Phil Lynott was born on August 20, 1949, in West Bromwich, and raised in Crumlin, Dublin, and the tension between those two places never left his music. He once said Jimi Hendrix proved that a black man could front a rock band, and that single fact runs through everything that followed: the guitar-hero theatrics, the swagger, a refusal to be boxed into either the Motown records his uncle Timothy played him growing up or the Dublin rock scene he built Thin Lizzy out of, funk and soul and blues giving him a vocabulary before Irish myth gave him a subject.

I would put Van Morrison near the top of that list too. Morrison's band Them had already fused American R&B and soul with something unmistakably Irish on records like "Gloria" in the mid 1960s, around the same years Lynott was first picking up a bass. Morrison proved the hybrid worked. Lynott spent a career building his own version of it inside hard rock.

That Irish half ran deeper than atmosphere. "Róisín Dubh (Black Rose: A Rock Legend)" pulls directly from the Ulster Cycle: Cú Chulainn, the old warrior tales, the storytelling tradition of a city he never stopped calling home even as Thin Lizzy toured the world and absorbed the British rock scene around it. Folding Dublin folklore into hard rock is arguably the most Lynott thing about Lynott.

Then there is the outlaw mythology: Westerns, comics, street gangs. Thin Lizzy took its name from Tin Lizzie, a robot character in the British comic The Dandy, and Lynott's authorised biography is literally titled Cowboy Song. Heroes, outlaws, warriors: he was drawing on all three long before he picked up a bass.

What about a Phil Lynott/Thin Lizzy music history print? If I made one, would you want to know? Let me know in the comments or write me at alejandro@thesenseofdoubt.com

In the meantime, some of my other music history prints are in the community favourites collection.