The song established Phil Lynott’s growth as a singer and frontman and the singer’s future success.
Support: Courtesy of Decca Records
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Phil Lynott, a vocalist for Thin Lizzy, entered Decca Studio 4 in London in July 1973 as a man who had a point to verify. He was there to report Lizzy’s third studio album, Vagabonds Of The Western World, which was their first full-length release since their adaptation of the Irish classic” Whiskey In The Jar” had received a surprise reception earlier that month.
That discovery individual, which the band had initially been reluctant to release, helped the group a lot more confident and was supported by a fantastic Irish homecoming tour in spring 1973. A UK visit supporting Slade in late 1972 – and a wake-up contact from the headline act’s manager Chas Chandler, who’d also represented Lynott’s hero, Jimi Hendrix – had inspired the earlier introverted frontman to operate at his stagecraft, adding filthy fresh moves to his onstage repertoire and brilliant audiences. It appeared that issues were improving.
See the standard film for Thin Lizzy’s” Whiskey in the Jar”.
But when happened but often with Thin Lizzy, with victory came losses. The success of” Whiskey In The Jar” led to record label pressure to follow it up with another rocked-up take on an Irish traditional –” Danny Boy” and” It’s A Long Way To Tipperary” were apparently mooted. Lynott was eager to showcase his personal songwriting and fought to have an original feature on the next one, not only because he was keenly aware of the potential adverse reaction of some elements of the British rock community to quite a move. He got his way, but the loving bossa-nova of” Randolph’s Tango” was a dud. Lynott was devastated, as guitar Eric Bell told Classic Rock in 2024,” He gradually realised that we’d blown it, and that affected him very seriously”.
After licking his wounds, Lynott retreated and wrote his most compelling work for Vagrants to time. The movie’s first one,” The Rocker”, was a strutting declaration of intent that denoted a fresh sense of purpose and intensity. It’s the noise of a posturing and prancing, leather-clad moth emerging from its studded chrysalis. Lynott boasts of his road smarts and gender appeal with growling and credible insouciance, but his melodies are too abrasive and his drums are careening. His lyrics were always full of noble criminals, so here he was casting himself in the position. With a childless, traveling childhood and a curiosity for European mythology, westerns, and Marvel cartoons, it’s not hard to see where this concern came from. One of the few things Lynott was aware of about his father as a child was that his given name was” The Duke.” It’s a little hop to” The Rocker”. This was writing as a form of self-actualisation, a means of creating a demeanor that Lynott, by all accounts a delicate heart, would follow absolutely in his public career. And Bell’s fireworks display adds to the overall impression that whatever scrape this rocker gets into, his band has got his back.
Elsewhere, the heads-down boogie of eco-conscious opener” Mama Nature Said” and the hard funk of” Gonna Creep Up On You” are further pointers towards heavier things to come for Lizzy. The same goes for the near-title track,” Vagabond Of The Western World”, a blistering psych-rock workout which tells the story of a rootless philanderer, another thinly-veiled example of Lynott taking inspiration from his absent father. ” Slow Blues”, meanwhile, lives up to its name, a wronged and woeful Lynott pouring his heart out over a smouldering, late-night blues.
Not everything on Vagabonds spoke of Lynott’s transformation into a swashbuckling, streetfighting rock god. The slow-burning” Little Girl In Bloom” sounds like nothing else here, or indeed elsewhere in rock music. While never quite blending with Brian Downey’s swinging drums and the off-kilter melody, Lynott’s austere bass improbably foreshadows Joy Division, giving off a melancholy tug intensified by a tender vocal. Meanwhile, Eric Bell’s guitar is an exercise in cool restraint, all spare, heavily treated single notes, till the midpoint of the song where, as if echoing a sense of liberation, he embarks upon a joyfully untethered solo.
Once again, Lynott’s lyrics draw upon his past, this time alluding to his former girlfriend, Carole Stephens, and his estranged child. In December 1967, Stephens became pregnant, and Lynott suggested the pair leave England and go with his mother. Instead, Stephens told her family and she was whisked away to a convent 60 miles from Dublin, unbeknown to Lynott. Stephen was forced to hand her son to the Catholic Protection and Rescue Society of Ireland five days after giving birth, and he was not seen until 2000. Only months later, when Lynott bumped into Stephens in Dublin, was she able to tell him. ” The two of us went to the cartoon cinema, and I told him everything”, Stephens told Graeme Thomson in his definitive 2016 Lynott biography Cowboy Song. We sat at the back and sobbed,” We had to wait until it was dark before we left.” There was no turning back in terms of our relationship. Lynott did n’t tell a soul about his child until the mid-70s, when he explained the lyric to artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who was illustrating a book of his poetry.
Lynott’s poetic side also surfaced on the tender” A Song While I’m Away”, on the surface the kind of burnt-out, on-the-road dispatch that rock stars tend to write around their third album. In Lynott’s hands though, it became something genuinely moving, as convincing a love letter to his cherished Ireland (” And far away hills look greener still, but soon they’ll all slip away” ) as to anything else.
Vagabonds did n’t make Thin Lizzy stars, but it laid the foundations for the band’s future success and Lynott’s development as a songwriter and frontman. Additionally, it led to the band’s first era to come to an end. While Life on the road and its accompanying decadence suited Lynott’s cast iron constitution, Lizzy relentlessly traveled to support the album. The guitarist’s hardships came to an end at a Belfast gig when he had an onstage breakdown, leaving Lynott and Downey to play the majority of the show as a two-piece. Bell would n’t play with Lizzy again, he’d be replaced by the twin guitar attack of Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. With the rock ‘n’roll glory that Lynott had envisioned drawing ever closer to the horizon, a new era for the band was about to start.
Listen to Vagabonds of the Western World by Thin Lizzy right away.