Philip Mohammed Ali" Lynott talks to Damian Corless about life since Grand Slam, and his new single, Nineteen.
Last summer may have been the worst in living memory but for Philip Lynott a little sun shone through when, for the second time in an erratic but highly successful career, he burst back into the Top 10. This time it was courtesy of Gary Moore s Out In The Fields, nine years previously The Boys Are Back In Town had proven a prophetic title.
Now, by way of capitalising on his recent success, Philip Lynott brings you . . nu, nu, nu. Nineteen, a single produced by one Paul Hardcastle. Sounds familiar?
It's not unless you were one of the few to catch the ill fated Grand Slam who premiered the song, a Lynott original.
So how did this coincidental pairing come about? Well, for a start we share the same management, he reveals. I met him on a tv show when we were doing Out In The Fields and he was doing 19 . He was saying he'd been a big Lizzy fan. He really liked the Johnny The Fox album. I told him I wanted to experiment with putting a dance production to a rock song ZZ Top have done that successfully. Eddie Van Halen worked well with Michael Jackson. I had this idea of trying a scratch mix with a heavy song and I already had Nineteen written from last year.
That appealed to him (Hardcastle) cos he wanted to show that he's up to doing more than disco mixes, so we just decided to go into the studio. Gary (Moore) was busy so I looked around and got Robin George in I'd played a few basslines on his album about a year ago. We did the single in three days.
For a hardened rock-biz veteran Lynott exhibits remarkable enthusiasm for the project, explaining I did the single to show (affects an Ali banter) I'm alive! I've landed on my feet after all the troubles of the past two years and I m still hard 'n' heavy. If I d come out with a ballad, people would be saying Phil s changing.
He's softening up! Lynott modestly hopes that the single will scrape the Top 20, but even if it doesn't it's still X amount of Publicity to let people know that I m still around.
Throughout punk's heyday Thin Lizzy were the world's only credible metal band and the one with the best songs to boot. But ill luck dogged the group relentlessly, preventing them from breaking the States key to the cash-box and thus to longevity. By the turn of the eighties Philip's muse, it seemed, had deserted him.
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