![]() ![]() And if, by the grace of God, you are Irish, we owe you another drink.Īh, but sly Phil frowns and reminds us that “starvation, it’s running wild,” which is a potato famine callback, because life is hard, none of Best, Behan, Synge nor Wilde, let alone the singer, reached old age and it’s a long way from Tipperary. Watch Smashing Pumpkins Cover Joy Division's 'No Love Lost' With Peter HookĪnd it was a joy that Joyce brought to me.Īnd if you don’t want to be Irish by this point in the song, you need another drink. Heading home, the rhythm section still jigging, Lynott begins a roll call and, in classic Phil fashion, delivers the names in puns he probably found when they fall off a limerick somewhere: ![]() Gorham and Moore swirl and drone around their singer, sneaking in snippets from “Whiskey in the Jar,” the whole band pulsing with a collective yipping yarragh. Lynott’s voice is echoing now, as if he were singing from the top of the mountains of Mourne, his voice carrying down across the valleys of green heather into the hearts of the children who would cover his songs: U2 and Metallica and Mastodon and the Smashing Pumpkins and Cass McCombs and Def Leppard and Ted Leo and the Replacements and so many others who heard the romance in hard guitars and tender feelings. Then that music stops, and misty keyboard chords waft in. They play the majestic, eternal, sentimental melodies of “Danny Boy,” “Shenandoah,” “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “The Mason’s Apron,” the last played so fast and hard that you can just about see the sweaty stepdancers slamming their ghillies into the floor, sending up splinters, absolutely lost in this outlandish heavy metal reeling and rolling. That’s exactly, beautifully, what Moore and Gorham do next. “Play me the melodies, so I might know,” he sings. Once Lynott’s in there, he tells everyone to shut up and listen. (Because no one does fatalism like the Irish.) The guitars meanwhile are just ripping through dueling licks in Celtic modes, rapiers slicing through the air, and Lynott, a fatalistic street punk with a head gloriously full of cowboy movies, Hendrixian comic book hoo-ha, roving vagabonds and that perfectly sentimental Irish poetry, he taps his temple and turns the key that lets him into the fantasy pub where all those doomed hooligans drink and dance together, which is exactly where “Black Rose” takes place. Then Lynott, who always sounded like he was either bashful or boastful and who here is a bit of both, nods to the folk hero Cuchulain, dark and sullen, who always won, and who promptly dies in the next line of the lyrics. Lynott tells a tale of kings and queens as guitarists Scott Gorham and Gary Moore riff on a modified Irish slip jig, only with hard rock distortion and road dog bite, backed by drummer Brian Downey bouncing around the compound meter. That’s what Lynott did, and he wrote Thin Lizzy’s “Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend” - found on 1979’s similarly-titled album - and it’s the best Irish rock song of all time.Īnd “the legends of long ago” is where “Black Rose,” a song about songs, a myth about myths, a messily epic, brilliantly exaggerated and melodramatic ode to Ireland by the ur-Irish rock band begins. So even if you can’t put the Irish on the couch, you can safely surmise that when people are born beneath the underdog, one way to deal is by learning to spin some yarns, and by developing some swag. As far as anyone can tell, the good doktor never actually uttered those words the line is just a charming bit of cultural mythmaking malarkey, which makes it very Irish, very rock and roll and totally Phil Lynott. Er, Matt Damon playing Irish-American in The Departed said that Freud said that. You know, Sigmund Freud said the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis. Born winners play the worst blues.Ģ0 Insanely Great U2 Songs Only Superfans Know As an outsider among outsiders, he found a way to deal by starting an outrageous, sad-boy weepy, myth-steeped, bad-boy bragging, bulldozing rock band, and fair play to him. ![]() So if we pretend there’s an iota of depressing truth being bandied about when, in Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments, the irrepressible yet wee bit naïve protagonist Jimmy says that the Irish are the blacks of Europe, then it’s fair to say that Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, a black Irishman, and that’s black as in race, not dark-haired Gaelic phenotype, well, he probably put up with more bullshit than most. And black people, those living in mostly white countries anyway, they’ve put up with a whole bunch of bullshit, too. The Irish have put up with a lot of bullshit over the years. ![]()
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