He was one of Ireland's first rock icons. Now Phil Lynott's native Dublin is finally paying official tribute to his legacy.
On August 19, the day before the late Phil Lynott's birthday and memorial concert at The Point, a bronze statue of the musician will be unveiled outside Bruxelles bar on Dublin's Harry Street, the result of a joint venture between the Roisín Dubh Trust, set up to promote his legacy over 10 years ago, and the City Council. One can only wonder what Lynott, equal parts rabble-rouser and proud patriot, would have made of it all.
"I'd say he would've fallen about laughing," reckons Jim Fitzpatrick, a friend of Lynott's since the early '70s, and a renowned artist whose elaborate Celtic mythological images adorned many of Lizzy's iconic 1970s album sleeves.
"He probably would've felt it should've been on O'Connell Street beside Jim Larkin!"
If any Irish musician embodied the rock 'n' roll animal, it was Lynott. Van and Rory were purists in the best sense, but the Crumlin native was the first Irish musician to harness style as well as substance, a flash romantic and unashamed musical dilettante, whose cavalier attitude to pilfering the prevailing trends of any given age – from the hard rock of Lizzy to the reggae of 'Solo In Soho', from the elegiac folk of 'Tribute To Dandy Denny' to the synth pop of 'Yellow Pearl' – placed him with cherry pickers such as Bowie or Prince as much as craftsmen like Springsteen and Neil Young.
For a generation of young Irish males, whose avatars of cool had hitherto been writers, drinkers and actors like Behan, Harris or O'Toole, he was close to a folk hero.
Catholic but guilt-free, Dublin-born but black, hard-man and dandy, Lynott was a complex artist who understood the possibilities of myth, tapping into his audience's residual post-adolescent fascination with cowboy yarns and horse operas, science fiction glamorama, Marvel comic strips and Celtic epics.
In common with Keith Richards, he graduated to rock 'n' roll via Saturday afternoon Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy matinees.
To Lynott, performance was merely an extension of child's play.
"Sometimes I go out there and go completely berserk - I'm often completely off me head," he said in 1977. "And it's got sweet fuck all to do with drugs. It's just that I get as heavily into what I'm doing as when I used to be a kid playing cowboys. Anybody can be anybody in rock and roll. It allows for all these people to exist within it and live out their fantasies."
Lynott, like so many musicians and actors, filled the hole in his own family history (he didn't meet his father until his early 20s), with an invented persona.
"I think when you come from the background he came from, you have to invent your own character, because your character is informed by parents, your social environment," proffers Jim Fitzpatrick. "And Philip was totally adept at that. Of course, he was a great reader in his early days. He sort of got lazy later, but he was very absorbed by Celtic mythology and Irish history. And when he met me, we were kindred spirits. He loved to hear the explanations of various myths and legends."
Too straight to play with the bi-boys, Bowie and Iggy and Lou, yet too silver-tongued to conform to Neanderthal metal stereotypes, Lynott cultivated an exotic image somewhere between Spanish Romeo, gypsy rogue and Southside Hendrix, replete with dangling earring, pencil-thin pimp 'tache and extravagant Afro.
If anything, his sartorial instincts had as much to do with Adam Ant and the New Romantics of the 1980s as with '60s figureheads such as Jimi and Keef.
"He was incredibly dressed," enthuses Fitzpatrick. "I remember the two of us in the Dandelion Market trying on jeans, lying on the floor pulling them on. They were that tight. In those days if you had a big ass you were dead! But he was so snappy. Philip had the in-between bit between stylish and hippy that I couldn't quite get."
It is no exaggeration to say he was our Elvis Presley, Bill Graham observed in 1991. Certainly, Phil was both the snake-hipped pre-army Elvis and the drug-bloated Vegas self-parody.
Yet, according to Audrey O'Neill, director and secretary of the Rosín Dubh Trust, if there were murmurs of disquiet about erecting a monument to a man with a reputation as a hard drinker, drug-user and womaniser, she never heard them.
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