The Ace with the Bass: Phil Lynott’s Life of Swagger, Soul and Sadness
- U I Team
- Aug 20, 2019
- 8 min read
It’s the mid-1980s, and Phil Lynott is deep in a Soho recording studio, working on his second solo album. The room, as usual, is full to bursting with hangers-on, friends, freeloaders, fans, all waiting for the moment when the rock star opens up the party supplies.
With a wry smile, Lynott counts them: twelve people. Methodically, he lays out twelve lines of cocaine. The group lean in. Then, without breaking eye contact, Lynott bends over and inhales every single line himself.
“He sat next to me and clenched the edge of the desk,” recalled producer Kit Woolven. “His hands went pure white, he was holding the desk so tightly.”
It was a moment of theatre. A rebuke to the opportunists, and a declaration of unchallenged bravado. That scene, charged with attitude and tragedy, encapsulates Phil Lynott: a man driven to live up to the rock star image he’d spent his life crafting, and who, ultimately, couldn’t escape it.
The First Black Irish Rock Star
Phil Lynott wasn’t just a frontman. He was a phenomenon. In 1970s Ireland, still clinging tightly to Catholic orthodoxy, social conservatism and an often insular cultural identity, he appeared like a bolt of lightning across grey skies. Tall, mixed-race, stylish, poetic and unrepentantly confident, Lynott embodied something that Ireland had simply never produced before: a Black rock star with swagger, vision and global ambition.
Born in West Bromwich, Birmingham in 1949, Lynott entered the world at a time when Britain and Ireland were just beginning to experience the demographic shifts that would slowly redefine them. His mother, Philomena Lynott, was a Catholic teenager from Dublin who had travelled to England to find work. His father, Cecil Parris, was an Afro-Guyanese merchant seaman and self-styled adventurer who disappeared from the picture not long after Lynott was born.
At the age of seven, Phil was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Crumlin, a working-class suburb of Dublin. His grandmother Sarah and grandfather Frank were loving but firm — not wealthy, but consistent and protective. They gave Phil stability, and the values of hard work and resilience. He adored them. It was in this environment, deeply Irish, modestly rooted, that Lynott began to shape his identity.
lin in the late 1950s and early ’60s was not a racially diverse place. Phil was one of just a handful of Black children in a city of more than half a million. But far from being cowed by that visibility, he embraced it. He didn’t try to disappear into the crowd; he stood out, and deliberately so. He grew his Afro high, leaned into his unique style, and developed a taste for American soul, British rock, and literary drama.
By his early teens he’d formed his first band, and by 20, he’d co-founded Thin Lizzy. From the beginning, it was clear that this wasn’t someone merely dabbling in music — he was on a mission to lead, to perform, and to define what Irish rock could be.
What Lynott represented mattered deeply in a country still wrestling with its post-colonial self-image. He was the embodiment of a modern, confident, multicultural Ireland before most people even realised such a version existed. He was both insider and outsider — shaped by Irish values, but unafraid to challenge them. In doing so, he inspired a generation of musicians and creatives, from Bono to Imelda May, and opened the door for a more open and expressive Irish cultural identity.
Thin Lizzy and the Birth of the Irish Rock Juggernaut
Thin Lizzy, with Lynott on bass and vocals and Brian Downey on drums, was Ireland’s first rock supergroup. While the guitarists came and went — Eric Bell, Scott Gorham, Gary Moore among them — Lynott was always the core: the band’s songwriter, image-maker, and anchor.
Their music was a fusion of street poetry and heavy riffs. Songs like The Boys Are Back in Town, Cowboy Song, Dancing in the Moonlight, and Don’t Believe a Word blended lyrical romance with hard-hitting guitar lines. Their version of Whiskey in the Jar, a reimagined Irish folk ballad, became an international hit and was later covered by Metallica, Pulp, and others.
Bob Geldof once called The Boys Are Back in Town “one of the top five songs about rock ‘n’ roll itself ever – spectacular.”
But behind the confidence was complexity. Lynott was a self-confessed romantic who read Camus, idolised Frank Sinatra, and wrote poetry. Yet he also believed rock stardom required myth-making — and he threw himself into that with total abandon.
Machismo, Mayhem, and Melancholy
Lynott’s public persona — all leather trousers, limousine arrivals and impish grins — was part performance, part coping mechanism. In the pages of Cowboy Song, his authorised biography by Graeme Thomson, we see a man balancing contradiction: a church-going, literature-loving son who grew into a man playing the role of untameable icon.
“I wanted to explore the dichotomy of someone who, at heart, is quite quiet and thoughtful but who gets a lot of his self-esteem and his identity from being a rock star and playing up to that image,” Thomson explained.
Phil certainly played the part. When a Dublin newspaper falsely reported he’d been arrested in a drugs raid, he stormed into the office and started swinging punches: “My f***ing granny saw that!” he shouted. It wasn’t the first time the rock image collided with reality — and it wouldn’t be the last.
The early substance use was limited to cannabis and alcohol, but even then, fights and confrontations followed. Guitarist Scott Gorham said he’d had just two fights in his life before joining Lizzy — and two more within his first month on the road with them.
But things escalated. Cocaine and heroin entered the picture. By the early 1980s, Lynott was touring with a 2lb bag of cocaine — casually dipping in and out of it as if it were a snack. He spent time with heavy-living rockers like Lemmy from Motörhead, and tried, on and off, to get clean.
A Poet Dressed in Leather
Phil Lynott was more than a rock icon with a bass guitar and a bottle of whiskey in hand. Beneath the surface of leather trousers and arena-shaking choruses was a man shaped by language as much as volume — a songwriter, a reader, and most of all, a romantic who saw himself as a writer first, musician second.
His lyrics were never just filler between solos. They were stories — often melancholic, laced with longing, heartbreak, or myth. In Cowboy Song, he’s the solitary wanderer. In Dancing in the Moonlight, he captures a fleeting, youthful joy tinged with nostalgia. In Sarah, written for his daughter, there’s tenderness stripped of bravado. He had the rare ability to write songs that were as poetic as they were pub-ready — verses that made you feel something even when the amps were turned to eleven.
Lynott didn’t just write lyrics either. He published two volumes of poetry: Songs for While I’m Away (1974) and Philip (1977). These weren’t vanity projects to pad his image — they were genuine attempts to explore themes that rock ’n’ roll couldn’t always contain: mortality, religion, exile, love. The titles alone suggest distance and intimacy, as though he were already aware he might always remain slightly apart from the world around him. The boy from Crumlin who dreamed big never quite lost that sense of watching from the edges.
He read widely, too. Albert Camus, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald. There was a literary seriousness to him that surprised people expecting only rock clichés. He loved language, and he was thoughtful — at odds with the caricature of a hard-drinking frontman, but not necessarily incompatible with it. Lynott understood the need to play the part. The leather and the limelight were as much costume as calling.
And yet, that duality — the bookish romantic and the swaggering rocker — wasn’t just personal. It was national. Lynott’s identity straddled multiple tensions: Black and Irish, working class and intellectual, tough and tender. He became Ireland’s first major rock export not simply because he had the talent, but because he captured something of a country in transition. He made Irishness cool — not the twee folk stereotype, but a swaggering, modern, streetwise Irishness that carried electric guitars and quoted Yeats.
As Graeme Thomson writes in Cowboy Song, Lynott’s overt masculinity was revolutionary in a landscape where male emotion was usually muted or repressed. He was brash, yes, but also emotionally open — a combination rarely permitted in Irish public life, let alone from a man with an Afro and a leather jacket.
“He transmitted a growing sense of cultural confidence to those who came in his slipstream,” Thomson notes, “inspiring the likes of Bono.” Indeed, U2’s frontman has often acknowledged Lynott as a path-breaker — someone who gave permission for Irish musicians to see themselves as global contenders, not local curiosities.
Lynott embodied contradiction, but never shied away from it. He was the romantic rogue, the soulful rebel, the sensitive showman. In many ways, he was his own greatest creation — a persona shaped from the fragments of literature, rock mythology, and personal struggle.
As much as Ireland shaped him, he also helped reshape Ireland. His music didn’t just soundtrack a generation; it hinted at the emergence of a more confident, outward-looking culture. A culture that, like Phil, could mix beauty with grit, poetry with punch, and truth with theatre.
The Final Chord
By 1983, Thin Lizzy had disbanded. Years of relentless touring, infighting, and hard living had worn the band down. Lynott tried to go solo, but the momentum was fading. The hits were fewer, and the problems were multiplying. His substance use — once part of the rock ’n’ roll theatre — was no longer manageable. Heroin and cocaine were taking a toll not only on his career, but on his health and family.
He became isolated. Friends worried. The press turned less forgiving. And yet, he remained proud, often defiant. He still wrote. He still hoped for another shot. But the body, by then, could no longer keep up with the spirit.
On Christmas Day 1985, Lynott collapsed at his home in Kew, West London. His estranged wife, Caroline Crowther — daughter of television presenter Leslie Crowther — rushed to his side. He was taken to Salisbury Infirmary, unconscious and gravely ill.
On 4 January 1986, he died. He was 36 years old. The official causes were pneumonia and multiple organ failure, but the years of physical punishment had brought him to that point. The boy who had once run headlong into the spotlight, determined to be bigger, bolder, and louder than anyone else, had burnt out.
In the afterword to Cowboy Song, Caroline writes with heartbreaking clarity:
“Drugs have a way of spoiling everything, even while they’re telling you they’re going to make it all better… For Philip that was not possible.”
It’s a sobering coda to a story fuelled by ambition, poetry, and self-destruction. But it’s not the end of Lynott’s tale — not really.
He lives on — in statues, in street names, in the lyrics that still drift out of pub jukeboxes and late-night radios. And in Dublin, where statues are known for their irreverent nicknames, James Joyce is “the prick with the stick,” and Oscar Wilde is “the queer with the leer.” But Phil?
He’s simply “the ace with the bass.” And no one says it with a smirk.
