In his father-of-the-bride speech at the Kensington Hilton Hotel in London, on February 14, 1980, TV star Leslie Crowther said that when Phil Lynott had asked for his daughter Caroline’s hand in marriage, he replied: “You’ve had everything else — you might as well have that as well.”

On January 11, 1986, Leslie would read a passage from the New Testament, Romans 14, at his son-in-law’s funeral service in the Church of the Assumption in Howth.

Everyone in the church that day, from Charlie Haughey to Bob Geldof to Father Brian D’Arcy (who gave the sermon) to Barney McKenna (who performed), to Ali Hewson and Bono, was heartbroken.

But possibly not shocked.

Bono, whose band U2 had supported The Greedy Bastards – Lynott’s supergroup with Scott Gorham and Brian Downey of Thin Lizzy and Steve and Paul Cook of The Sex Pistols – at The Stardust in 1978, was later to say about Lynott at that gig: “He was at the end of Thin Lizzy and about to slide down the hill into the abyss. We really didn’t know how dark it could get for guys in a rock band.”

How dark it would get was that Lynott’s heroin use saw him taken to an early grave at the age of 36.  

But this side of Ireland’s greatest rock star isn’t covered in the documentary Phil Lynott: Songs for While I’m Away, which finally gets a proper cinema release this week.

Director Emer Reynolds, whose previous credits include the award-winning doc The Farthest, as well as I Went Down, and One Million Dubliners, both of which she edited, was more concerned with Lynott’s emotional legacy.

“I was not interested in the tabloid version of his life and his downfall, which of course is so tragic and awful and sad,” she says.

She wanted to make Songs For While I’m Away like the man — “a shy film but with a swagger. It also has this soulful thread, this sadness, this ache, of this shy boy trying to find his way through... the mixed-race child growing up in really a white Ireland, and what that would have meant, and his attempts, over time, to articulate and sing about his inner life.”

Songs for While I’m Away is, of course, a heart-rending watch. Especially when Lynott’s daughter Sarah — the subject of one of his most touching songs — says about her father: “What I always feel sad about is that there is so much focus on the death and I love to just know more about the man, the living man, the amazing creative, loveable man.”
That said, the documentary seems at times to be like a little white lie smoothing over the cold truth of the rock star’s inner war.

Lynott was born in Birmingham on August 20, 1949. His Irish mother, Philomena and his father Cecil Parris, from Guyana, met at a dance in the London Lyceum.

Cecil left Philomena not long after their son was born.

When Phil arrived, Philomena was carted off to a home for unmarried mothers in Birmingham, run by nuns.

“It was awful what they did to me in that place,” she once said.

“They put me out to work in the shed because I was the lowest of the lowest — because I had a black baby. Even today, I live with a bad back because it was freezing working in the shed.”

In 1951, Philomena gave birth to a daughter, Jeanette, who was given up for adoption, while her son James, born the following June, was also adopted.

In 1957, Lynott moved to Crumlin to live with his grandparents, Frank and Sarah, while his mother stayed in England. He went to Armagh Road CBS primary school and then Clogher Road Tech. He would sing on ‘Black Boys on the Corner’: “I’m a little black boy and I don’t know my place.

“The path he forged out of his childhood, which was tough enough and under-privileged, was a path made from his dreams,” Emer says.

“His humanity, his vulnerability, is a big part of the story of Phil Lynott. He is teaching us what it means to be human and that we are all the same. The film is trying to look at the boy in the man.”

Music promoter Pat Egan, then a DJ in The Five club on Harcourt Street in the mid-1960s, knew the boy before he became the man.

“At 17, he was soft spoken, shy and always courteous,” Pat tells the Sunday Independent now. “He had a very gentle way about him. He rarely spoke about Philomena, his mother. It was always: ‘My Gran this, my Gran that.’ She seemed to be the big influence on his early years.

“A mutual friend, Jon Hodges, the DJ in The Scene in Parnell Square, died in 1969 suddenly [from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma] at the age of 20,” says Egan.

“It had an especially big effect on Philip. He would always say to me: ‘It’s shit, man. Only the good die young.’” Sadly, the words proved all too prophetic for him.

Musician and broadcaster BP Fallon first met Lynott in 1966. It was late one night at the Wimpy Bar in Phibsborough, where all the young men in beat groups would congregate after their gigs in Dublin’s cellars and tennis club hops.

“Phil did most of the talking in a quiet, whispery voice. He enthused about their group The Black Eagles,” Fallon tells me, referring to Lynott’s first band and – according to Fintan O’Toole in a piece for Magill magazine – Crumlin’s first rock band.

In 1968 he joined Skid Row with Brush Shiels before leaving to form Thin Lizzy in late 1969 with Brian Downey on drums, guitarist Eric Bell and keyboard player Eric Wrixon.

Their first manager Terry O’Neill tells me about the early days of Thin Lizzy.

“When the band started in 1970, Phil and I would usually go to The Copper Kettle folk club off Molesworth Street and Universal Folk Club on Parnell Square on Tuesday and Thursday nights if we didn’t have a gig.

“Phil was beginning to write songs and, like all really good songwriters, he sought inspiration everywhere. If we were doing a gig and there was a showband playing before us, we’d watch. Phil didn’t have any snobbery.”

Thin Lizzy’s first single was ‘The Farmer’ in July 1970. Three months later, they signed with Decca Records in London and the next spring, released their self-titled first album.

By February 1973, ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ had reached No 6 in the UK charts; three years later, ‘The Boys Are Back in Town‘ made the top 10 in Britain and America. His friend Bob Geldof says he was “the only true rock star ever to come out of Ireland”.

Emer Reynolds believes Lynott crafted that rock star image in an attempt to have a vehicle he could hide behind.

“So, he didn’t have to reveal himself fully when he went onstage,” she says of the performer who gave the world songs like ‘The Rocker’ (from 1973’s Vagabonds of the Western World album), ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ (No 12 in America in 1976), ‘Don’t Believe a Word (from the 1976 album Johnny the Fox), and ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ (a top 20 hit in England, from 1977’s Bad Reputation).

Over the three decades since his death, Lynott has influenced everyone in Irish rock from U2 to Therapy and a thousand bands in between, as well as the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Metallica, and The Ramones.

“I was freaked out when Lynott died from Thin Lizzy. I cried. It was too crazy,” Dee Dee Ramone said.

It is a tragedy that such a talented man didn’t live longer to record more music of such timeless, primal potency.

While being brilliantly produced and emotionally powerful, Songs for While I’m Away would hit more of a chord if it had looked into the reason why Lynott died so tragically young.

This, I feel, could have been gently explored without becoming the tabloid-cliché of cautionary tale, without being salacious. Simply by telling the whole story.

DId he use drugs as a way of dealing with the pain of his early childhood, growing up without a father, his lost family in England, or was his drug use merely what he felt was part and parcel of being a rock star?

“Why did Phil take heroin? Was it because of some unstableness due to having no father in the picture? Only Phil knows the answer to that. At first, heroin numbs emotion, it kills pain. And then it kills,” BP Fallon tells me.

Huey Lewis (whose band Clover opened in the UK for Thin Lizzy the mid-1970s, with Lynott subsequently becoming Lewis’s friend and mentor) says in the film that Lynott had ”real bad luck” to catch hepatitis on tour in America with Lizzy in 1976.

But it is never explained that Lynott contracted Hepatitis C on tour from sharing a dirty needle in Los Angeles, according to a 1976 account in New Musical Express. “Phil flew back to London, where he spent two weeks in an isolation hospital: he had been diagnosed with hepatitis.”

Nor does U2’s Adam Clayton — who had his own experience with addiction, in his case, alcohol — share his insights in the documentary into Lynott’s addiction.

Instead, he offers up his wisdom on fellow bassist Lynott and the Freudian role of that instrument in rock: “It’s about that huge thing dangling between your legs. You are definitely the man of the band.”

Scott Gorham adds a few lines about narcotics in the band: “They were kind of always there, but just recreational stuff. The beginning of the problem with those Class A drugs started in Paris” – a reference to when Lizzy were recording the Black Rose album in 1979.

Bob Geldof would later recount in Graeme Thomson’s book Cowboy Song – The Authorised Biography of Philip Lynott – how his pal had him high on heroin when they wrote a song together; with surreal results: “I fell off the stool, crawled up to the loos and threw up. Then Phil tried to get into bed with Paula (Yates). She told him to f**k off.”

In the same book there is also the story of how Lynott once brought a drug dealer into a recording studio that Lizzy were sharing with Cliff Richard, to wind up the Christian singer: “Lynott said, ‘come on, let’s drag over Cliff and see what he thinks’,” Scott Gorham remembered.

“So, we sat Cliff in front of the desk and right behind him there’s this f**king dealer chopping out a line of smack. I’m looking at Cliff and, God bless him, he didn’t look. I thought, ‘this has got to be uncomfortable for him’.”

There is another story that, in July, 1979, Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore abruptly left an American tour because of heroin use in the band in the States. 

On August 20, 1981, Lynott was fined £200 at Kingston Crown Court in London for possession of cocaine.

The words to his 1982 solo hit ‘Old Town’ seemed like a cry for help. When he sang “this boy is cracking up, this boy has broken down”, you can almost hear his psyche falling asunder.

But he kept the show on the road. Robbie Fox, who managed the famous haunt of rock and film stars, The Pink Elephant nightclub in Dublin, from 1980 to 1987, has vivid memories of Phil and Caroline coming into the club before Christmas in 1983.

“He was very down to earth,” he tells me. “He never lost his Crumlin accent. My
eldest brother was in the same class as his in Crumlin.

“He loved the limelight but not the celeb thing. When Stringfellow’s opened in London in 1980 and sent him a VIP card, he thought it was tacky and swapped it with me for a normal Pink card.”

 

The Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who drew many of Thin Lizzy’s covers, and whose portrait of Phil Lynott is published here for the first time, has many reminiscences (fond and not-so-fond) of his friend.

“I miss the man who stayed over in my house in the early Lizzy days,” he tells me.

“When I called him for breakfast one morning after a gig, I found my little son, Conánn, in the room with him and the bed covered in bank notes. The two of them were counting the proceeds of the gig from the night before.

“Conánn was falling around with pound notes hanging off him strutting around in Philip’s platform shoes while Philip and myself fell about laughing.”

He also remembers Lynott’s kindness to his daughter Suzanne.

“He took a beautiful watch off his wrist in the Bailey pub and put it on hers to keep and remember him by.

“I remember when I was near broke he commissioned other art from me to try to get me some survival money for myself and my family.

“He commissioned me to produce a painting of his own family in the garden of the big house on the Burrow, in Sutton, which I pass every day on my bike.”

The house that Lynott bought for and Caroline and the two kids – Sarah, born in 1978, and Cathleen, who arrived in 1980 – to live in Sutton was meant to be the home he and his wife would grow old in. It was not far from the house he bought for his mother in 1980.

It turned out to be the house Caroline, Sarah and Cathleen lived in while Lynott, due to touring commitments and recording, lived in their London home. “It was like I swapped countries,” Caroline says in the documentary.

“His behaviour became very erratic, unpredictable and often dangerous,” Jim Fitzpatrick tells me.

“His talent was buried under a haze of hard drugs.

“He got to the point where he found it almost impossible to even get out of bed until around four or five in the afternoon.”

And yet, “performing was Philip’s lifeblood”, he says.

As his addiction deepened, the fall of Thin Lizzy went hand in hand with Philip’s own fall, at first physically.

“But gradually spiritually and emotionally,” says Fitzpatrick.

Towards the end, Jim and his pal, the late Frank Murray (who went on to manage The Pogues), were no longer welcome in Lynott’s home in London or Sutton.

“We were both questioning his obvious use of heavy drugs and were really trying to reach out and help him.

“He was our friend, our fantastic buddy, our great companion for so many beautiful years and he needed real help, but it was a waste of time.”

Philip, sadly, was too far down that awful road.

“He was always in denial but when he was caught at Dublin Airport with traces of heroin in his pocket – if I remember correctly – that’s when the alarm bells went off in my head,” Jim says.

“Without going into detail, Philip managed to persuade me he was totally off any heroin use but Frank, who grew up with him, was never fooled.”

 He was aware throughout that later period that the pressures on Lynott were becoming “immense and unbearable”.

“He always assured me he ‘had it sorted’. If only that was true. No one has that stuff sorted without expert help and Philip was in denial.”

That denial affected everyone who loved him – his family, his friends, his band and everyone involved in his life and music.

Lizzy’s drawn-out and messy demise became official with their last concert on September 4, 1983, at the Monsters of Rock festival in Germany.

But the writing had been on the wall for years. On 1979’s ‘Got to Give It Up’, he sang, every inch the tortured genius: “I’ve been messing with the heavy stuff, for a time I couldn’t get enough/But I’m waking up and it’s wearing off, junk don’t take you far.”

It took him as far as the morgue in 1986.

With his marriage to Caroline over, he collapsed after an overdose at home in London. He died of pneumonia and heart failure due to septicaemia in Salisbury General Infirmary on January 4, 1986. 

Jim prefers to remember his old friend as he was: a one-off.

“We will never see his like again. He was the most charismatic person I have ever met,” he says.

“I absolutely adored him, a legend in his own lifetime before it went wrong. I remember best his wonderful giving, caring persona, a man wild at heart but kind and generous, a father who doted on his kids, a husband who deeply loved his wife, a neighbour who held open house for any caller, a wonderful presence, full of jokes.”

“I last saw Phil when I visited him at his house in Howth,” BP Fallon says.

“His post-Lizzy group Grand Slam had collapsed, and he was sad, but trying to make light of it, saying everything would work out.

“He was severely wounded by the poison of the poppy but I too thought everything would turn around, that Phil would get healthy again and back on track, away from the smack.

“‘It’ll work out’, I told him. I was wrong.”

 

Phil Lynott: Songs for While I’m Away is in cinemas nationwide now