Chinatown

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable warmed up and the needle dropped on Thin Lizzy's "Chinatown," the title cut from the 1980 album of the same name, and if you Zoo Freaks are riding along with us over at THE ZOO, settle in. This one comes in swinging. Snowy White and Scott Gorham trade those stinging lead breaks while Phil Lynott spins a dark little tale full of Eastern color and back-alley smoke. A lot of folks figured the band had gone soft once the laid-back White stepped in for the fiery Gary Moore. Phil was having none of that talk. On the Chinatown tour of Australia he told an interviewer he was really pleased with the record, that it had already gone silver before it was even properly out, and that the single was sitting in the top ten. He said people thought the solo album and the kids and all that had turned him gentle, and Chinatown dismissed that idea straight away because you could hear the aggression right between the eyes.

The song itself grew out of a couple of scraps. New man Snowy White brought in some guitar ideas, and the bass line started as an exercise Brush Shiels had shown Phil years earlier. The whole band finished it, with Brian Downey laying down those double bass drum fills that give the thing its push. Jerome Rimson, who had worked on Phil's solo records, watched a lot of the Chinatown sessions and said Phil would stand at the microphone making up the words while a full-blown party rolled on in the control room. That fits the man. He was writing on his feet, chasing a mood more than a tidy lyric sheet. In a German interview around the same time Phil explained that almost every song on the album had something to do with Chinatown, and for him Chinatown meant London Soho. Not the tourist lanterns. A bad patch of ground, like the Reeperbahn, unholy and dark. He said the record had gotten dirtier on purpose, a long way from the almost romantic Black Rose theme. The prostitutes, he told them, were the prototype of the social outsider, and he saw a parallel with the musician's life. Bands still got looked at sideways, same as the people working those streets. He had done his own kind of neighborhood study before he wrote it.

White later called the album pretty strong, though he wished they had spent the studio time a little cleaner. Some guitar ideas he laid down while he was waiting around got wiped at Phil's instruction before anybody even listened. Downey, looking back, said there were great tracks on Chinatown and the follow-up Renegade, but Phil's writing was starting to slip under the pressure, and the drugs were beginning to take hold. Gorham put it plainer: they realized they were not actually getting any bigger. None of that keeps the title track from landing. It still feels like a night ride through a district that does not care whether you make it home. The cover, with those glittering dragons, fooled a few people into expecting pure exotic romance. Phil wanted the opposite. He wanted the record to prove Thin Lizzy could still play rock and roll after the softer single "Sarah" and the solo album had everybody guessing.

To get how a song like that could come out of this band, you have to go back to Crumlin and a kid who was never supposed to be the frontman. Philip Parris Lynott was born on 20 August 1949 in West Bromwich, near Birmingham, son of Philomena Lynott, a young Irish nurse, and Cecil Parris from Brazil. His parents had already parted. He was raised in Dublin by his grandparents, a mixed-race boy in a neighborhood that did not always make room, and he grew into a lively, popular figure anyway. He idolized Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix. At school he met Brian Downey, two years younger, and the two of them started in a short-lived outfit called the Black Eagles, Phil on vocals, Brian on drums. After that came Brush Shiels' Skid Row, one of the hotter Irish rock bands of the late sixties. Phil was tall and thin, Afro out, built to be a stylish frontman, but the others were not sold on his singing and he got sacked in 1969. Convinced he had no future out front, he let Shiels teach him bass. That lesson stuck. A lot of the low-end muscle you hear under "Chinatown" traces back to those early exercises.

He and Downey then formed Orphanage, with Pat Quigley on bass and Joe Staunton on guitar, and they started working original tunes. Downey later said quite a few of the melodies that landed on the first Lizzy album were already being thrown around in that band. Near the end of 1969, Belfast guitarist Eric Bell, who had passed through Van Morrison's Them, came down to the Countdown Club on Mary Street with keyboard player Eric Wrixon. They had a short meeting in the dressing room. Downey was not keen. Phil spelled it out that Eric was going to play with them whether Brian liked it or not. They split Orphanage and started Thin Lizzy, Phil now on bass and vocals, Downey on drums. The name, as the band still likes to tell it, came out of three things at once: a robot, a Ford Model T Tin Lizzie, and a Dublin accent bending the words. Their first release, on Parlophone in July 1970, was Phil's own "The Farmer." Five hundred copies pressed, 283 sold. Roadie Peter Eustace remembered those early nights as mostly Eric running through his Jeff Beck and Hendrix routines, with Phil barely getting a look-in. They signed to Decca, cut the debut album in 1971, and Bell later admitted they were totally bombed for the duration of that record. Kid Jensen on Radio Luxembourg kept playing them, and an underground following started to build.

From there the line-ups turned over, the twin-guitar sound locked in with Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, "The Boys Are Back in Town" broke them wide open, and by the time Snowy White walked in for Chinatown the band had already lived a whole career. Phil stayed the writer and the voice through all of it. If you want the long version from the people who still keep the name alive, the official home is Thin Lizzy Official, where the rock and roll history page walks the Dublin days straight through the Chinatown era and Snowy White's debut on that album. The official Facebook page is Thin Lizzy on Facebook, the official Instagram is @thinlizzy, and the official account on X is @ThinLizzy_. Fans still gather and trade stories in the Thin Lizzy Fans Club group. Spin it again, Freaks. The riff has not worn out yet.