Dedication

The Zoo Crew has got "Dedication" spinning for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, and this one is a story worth sitting down for. It is not a leftover from the twin-guitar years, and it is not a studio jam that got shelved in 1976. "Dedication" came out on January 14, 1991, as the lead single from the compilation Dedication: The Very Best of Thin Lizzy, which hit the shops a few weeks later, on February 4. It climbed to number 2 on the Irish singles chart and number 35 in Britain. For a band whose frontman had been gone five years, that was a real return to the radio.

The song did not start life as a Thin Lizzy number at all. Guitarist Laurence Archer wrote the bones of it around 1982, while he was still in Stampede. When he joined Phil Lynott's post-Lizzy outfit Grand Slam in 1984, Lynott tore into the lyric and rewrote most of it. The two of them cut a rough demo, with Lynott singing over tracks Archer had already laid down. Grand Slam never got the record deal they were chasing, and the band folded in 1985. The tape sat there. Lynott died in Salisbury on January 4, 1986, at 36, and that demo was the only known recording of him singing the song.

When Phonogram started work on a new Thin Lizzy collection for early 1991, Scott Gorham told them it would be nice to put something a little different on it. In October 1990 he and drummer Brian Downey went back to that old eight-track. They kept Lynott's vocal and the bass line, wiped Archer's guitar, and put their own guitar and drums on top. Gary Moore had agreed to take part and then did not. Modern studio tricks did the rest. The finished track runs about four minutes, and the B-side of the single was "Cold Sweat," with a twelve-inch and CD adding live takes of "Emerald" and "Still in Love with You." A picture disc turned up as well. The lyric is a plain dedication: to the woman he loves, to children going hungry, to people on a front line, and then back again to the woman. It is Lynott the poet, not Lynott the outlaw, and it landed as a farewell the band never got to record while he was alive.

The trouble started when the writing credit went to Lynott alone. Archer found out the way a lot of musicians find out bad news: somebody told him they had heard the song on the radio. He had registered the song. He was not amused. He later said he was furious when he saw what had been done with "Dedication," and that there was a lot of nasty feeling. In the end he signed away the rights to six other Grand Slam songs he had been involved with, just to get paid for this one. The credit was put right. Later pressings and reference books list it as Lynott and Laurence Archer. Discogs still notes that the original single sleeve left Archer off. It is a strange little chapter in a catalog that is otherwise full of leather, harmony guitars, and jailhouse rock.

The band that carried his voice on that record started in Dublin, and the start was not smooth. Philip Parris Lynott was born on August 20, 1949, in West Bromwich, near Birmingham, to Philomena Lynott and Cecil Parris. His mother brought him up in Manchester until he was about four, then sent him to live with his grandparents, Sarah and Frank Lynott, on Leighlin Road in Crumlin. He went to the Christian Brothers on Armagh Road, tried a fitter's apprenticeship at Tonge and Taggart's foundry in 1967, hated it, and quit with his mother's backing. He had been singing since his teens, first with the Black Eagles alongside a younger schoolmate named Brian Downey, idolizing Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix.

In 1968 Brush Shiels brought him into Skid Row, one of the sharp bands on the Dublin circuit, as the stylish frontman with the Afro. The rest of the band was not sold on his voice. In 1969, while he was hoarse with tonsillitis, they let him go. Shiels, figuring the kid had no future as a singer, taught him bass. Lynott and Downey then put together a short-lived group called Orphanage. Late in 1969, guitarist Eric Bell from Belfast came down to the Countdown Club on Mary Street with keyboard player Eric Wrixon. Downey has told the story more than once: they had a short meeting in the dressing room, and he rejected the idea of starting a band with Bell, something Bell has never let him forget. Lynott spelled it out. Eric was going to play with them whether Downey liked it or not. They split Orphanage and started Thin Lizzy around the turn of 1970, Lynott on bass and vocals and most of the songs, Downey on drums, Bell on guitar.

The name itself is a Dublin joke with three parents. Official word from the band is that it came from a robot, a Ford Model T, and a Dublin accent, the old "Tin Lizzie" nickname run through a local mouth until it landed as Thin Lizzy. They signed to Decca, moved toward London, and put out their first album, Thin Lizzy, in April 1971. It did not set the charts on fire. The turn came in 1973 with their reworking of the folk song "Whiskey in the Jar," the first real hit, the one that dragged a lot of Irish rooms away from the showband circuit and toward something louder. Bell left later that year. Gary Moore passed through. Then came the classic twin-guitar years with Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, Jailbreak in 1976, and "The Boys Are Back in Town," the song that still opens doors for the band.

Lynott kept writing like a man who had read the poets and also stood at the bar. He once said that once you are Irish and Catholic, you are always Irish and Catholic, that you can pick up another accent but it stays in your head. He also said he still enjoyed playing a guitar in front of a mirror and posing. That mix, the romantic and the rocker, is all over "Dedication." By the time Gorham and Downey finished the track in 1990, the compilation that carried it reached number 8 on the UK album chart. A follow-up reissue of "The Boys Are Back in Town" did less, but the point had been made. The voice was still on the radio.

If you want the band's own front door, the official site is Thin Lizzy Official, where the discography, the biographies, and the shop all live. They keep a verified page on Facebook, an official account on Instagram, and the long-running X account. For the fans who have been keeping the scrapbooks since the dial-up days, thin-lizzyfan.com has been online in one form or another since May 1995, with biographies, release lists, and tributes, and the Thin Lizzy Fans Club group is where the old tour stories still get told. That is the circle this song belongs to. A demo from a band that never got signed, a vocal left on a tape, two old bandmates finishing the job, and a dedication that finally got its name on the label. Turn it up.