CULTURE SHOCK:AN ANTHROPOLOGIST from a distant culture might conclude that when they are not worshipping St Patrick the Irish worship St Phil. Key sites for the cult of Philip Lynott might include his grave, in St Fintan's cemetery in Sutton, with its headstone by Jim Fitzpatrick, which has taken on some of the aura of Jim Morrison's tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery, in Paris. His figure is one of the most popular exhibits at the Dublin waxwork museum. Paul Daly's life-sized bronze effigy stands just off Grafton Street, the most prominent memorial to a contemporary erected in an Irish city in recent decades. And now, just up the road in Stephen's Green Shopping Centre, Hot Pressmagazine has mounted an impressive and reverential exhibition subtitled A Unique Celebration of the Life and Work of an Irish Hero. It is almost as grand in its own way as the National Library of Ireland's exhibition on the life and work of WB Yeats.
It is worth remembering how unlikely all of this is. Lynott was born and died in ignominy. He entered the world as a child conceived not merely out of wedlock but also to a black Brazilian father: a double disgrace in the 1950s. He left it far too early as a result of long-term abuse of heroin, alcohol and other substances.
And he was not, to be honest, a major artist. He was a good singer, a fine bass player and a consummate rock star. But it would be hard to put him in the same league as a near contemporary who explored a similar mix of American beats and Irish romanticism, of transatlantic inspiration and intense engagement with an Irish city of his childhood: Van Morrison. If artistic achievement in the broad field of popular music is the criterion, Morrison’s shrines will have to be on a pharaonic scale.
Lynott’s standing as “an Irish hero” stands out in even higher relief when you consider that no one from the fields of religion, politics or sport in the past 50 years enjoys quite the same status. That, of course, may be part of the reason for the extraordinary devotion to Lynott’s memory. We need heroes, and we don’t have many candidates from the old sources. But the honour doesn’t just devolve on Lynott by default. It’s not negative or grudging. It is wrapped up in genuine affection and admiration.
What did he have that remains so resonant? It was, I think, the impossible combination of two concepts: Irish and cool. “Irish” in this context means local, homely, familiar. “Cool” means distant, detached, apparently careless of other people’s admiration or disdain. Some people of his vintage – George Best, Luke Kelly – overcame this contradiction. Lynott embodied it.
It wasn't that hard to be cool in Crumlin, the corporation estate where Lynott grew up. My own childhood there trailed in his wake. A guy on my road who played in the Miami Showband was ultracool, so a tall, dark-skinned fella in baroque clothes who appeared on Top of the Popswas always going to be stratospherically hip.
But Lynott was cool even among rock stars. Even the punks declined to gob on him. Thin Lizzy and Motörhead were the only heavy rock bands to be considered cool by the punk and postpunk generation. (Lynott collaborated with the Sex Pistols' Paul Cook and Steve Jones in The Greedy Bastards. The Happy Mondays covered, or more accurately demolished, The Boys Are Back in Town.The Smashing Pumpkins did their own take on Dancing in the Moonlight.) But Lynott's cool somehow never became distant. He didn't become cool by ignoring or denying the awkwardness around him: his own birth and skin, the rawness of Dublin, the messiness of the Irish culture in which he was situated. Instead he transformed those things into the materials for stardom.
This is not to say all of his transformations were successful. The personal mythologies he developed were pretty standard macho heroic archetypes: cowboy, biker, rocker, street fighter, warrior. The Irish mythologies he explored were at best half-digested. (Jim Fitzpatrick’s “Celtic” covers for Lizzy albums now seem a lot more interesting than some of the songs they illustrate.)
But there was enough that was real in both his personal stories and his attempts to create a distinctively Irish rock idiom. There’s a gorgeous tenderness in his ability to imagine his mother’s situation when she was pregnant with him. (“Little girl in bloom / Carries a secret / A child she carries in her womb.”) The macho strut is also the genuine defiance of a kid who has to learn to stand up for himself and be proud of who he is. (“I’m a little black boy and I don’t know my place.”)
There is a Morrisonesque evocation of the remembered geography of an Irish city in early songs like Shades of a Blue Orphanage. And when he drops the macho front a romantic vulnerability is exposed.
And Lynott captured, too, the exhilarating anarchy of the Irish culture that was emerging from the 1960s with The Dubliners in one ear and The Beatles in the other, dreaming of Hollywood and the 1916 Rising. The Wild West and Elvis, cowboys and Cúchalainn, banshees and The Playboy of the Western Worldjostle for attention inside Lynott's imagination.
Particularly on the early Lizzy records, there is a wonderfully anarchic jumble of styles, a magpie's nest of borrowings. There is, apparently, a "Hendrix-influenced interpretation of Danny Boy" on a Deep Purple tribute album that Lizzy recorded before they were famous. The opening of Emerald– "Down from the glen came the marching men / With their shields and their swords" – is lifted from Dominic Behan's McAlpine's Fusiliers: "Down the glen came McAlpine's men / With their shovels slung behind them." Even beyond Whiskey in the Jarbits of folk songs and dance tunes edge their way into Lynott's hard rock sound.
The Hot Pressexhibition doesn't deal with the sordid side of Lynott's life, the harm he did to himself and to others, the awful waste of his potential. Those are the things that are sloughed off in the process of making heroes. But if we have to have a hero Lynott is not a bad one. He made Irish awkwardness cool, turned our contradictions into an energy. Maybe we could use such a hero now.
