Don’t Believe a Word

The Zoo Crew has got "Don't Believe a Word" rolling out of the speakers right now, Thin Lizzy off the album Johnny The Fox, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks tuned in to THE ZOO, you already know this little two-minute-and-seventeen-second number hits harder than records twice its size. Phil Lynott wrote it, the band cut it while he was still climbing out of a bad bout of hepatitis, and the single went to number 12 in Britain and number 2 over in Ireland. Johnny The Fox landed in October 1976, seven months after Jailbreak, and a lot of folks at the time said it felt milder. Phil did not buy that. He told an interviewer he wrote most of the record while he was still sick, and looking back he could hear how the illness took some of the usual Lizzy fire out of it. He still thought the words were more grown-up than anything the band had put down before.

The song almost never sounded the way you know it. Phil first brought it in as a slow, mournful twelve-bar blues, the kind of thing you might hear late at night in a Dublin room with the lights low. Guitarist Brian Robertson hated it. He called the slow version shite, right to Phil's face, and Phil took it hard enough that he disappeared from the studio for a few days. Robertson later said he might have been a little harsh. While Phil was gone, Robertson and drummer Brian Downey sat with the tune and flipped it. Downey had already been thinking a shuffle beat would suit it better. He and Robertson pushed the tempo up, Robertson wrote the riff, and the engineer happened to have the tape rolling. When Phil walked back in they played him the new take. He liked it. They had even kicked around the idea of keeping the slow verses and then jumping into the fast part, but the single that came out in late November 1976 was the fast version only, backed with Old Flame in the UK. The American single from the album was Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed instead.

Downey remembered it years later for a drum magazine. He said the song had been knocking around for a few months as that slow blues thing, and one day before Phil arrived he and Robbo tried speeding it up. It came together quick after that. He played it on his old silver Rogers kit, two twenty-four-inch bass drums and a rack of hanging toms, and he used almost none of that hardware on the track. He kept it simple on purpose. Scott Gorham has told the story of timing the record out at Joe Elliott's place while they were remixing something, figuring it had to be around two minutes and forty seconds. It clocks in at two minutes and seventeen. Gorham laughed about it. They just never found a third verse that felt right, so they left it short and let the riff do the talking.

The words are Phil owning up to the old chat-up routine. He told Roy Carr at the NME that you go through the process of chatting up the chicks, playing the game, handing out the line, and most fellas will say just about anything to get a girl into bed. That is how he came to write Don't Believe a Word. If you believe every line a fella hands you, you will only get hurt. He did not want to dress it up. He would rather say something plain than get artsy about it. In another 1976 interview he pointed at this song, along with The Boys Are Back in Town and The Rocker, as the kind of real lads' talk that got some women mad at him, asking who he thought he was. The chorus lays it out clean. Don't believe a word, for words are only spoken, and your heart is like a promise made to be broken. Don't believe him if he says he wrote the song for you. There might be some other silly pretty girl he is singing to.

Robertson was sore about the credit. He felt he and Downey had rebuilt the thing and ought to have shared the writing line. The label put Phil's name on it alone. That kind of friction was already in the room. Johnny The Fox turned out to be the last studio album with Robertson as a full member. Personality clashes got him sacked, brought back, and sacked again. The sleeve has its own little tale. Artist Jim Fitzpatrick was up against a deadline and asked Phil for a title to hang the painting on. Phil told him to call it Johnny the Fox, that would do. Fitzpatrick reminded him there was no song by that name on the record. Phil said nobody would notice, the album would be massive. Fitzpatrick drew the fox and put the title on it anyway.

The slow version did not die. Gary Moore, who had been in and out of the band and was one of Phil's oldest friends from the Dublin days, cut a beautiful slower reading on an early solo record, with Phil's blessing. Lizzy themselves later leaned back into that old arrangement, and you can hear it on the farewell live album Life. The fast one is the one that stuck in the set and on the radio. Downey said that at the time everybody claimed anything Lizzy touched turned to gold, and he never believed the hype, but they were confident this one would chart. They were riding Jailbreak, they had time in the studio instead of watching the clock, and the single did what they hoped.

Phil Lynott did not arrive in that studio by accident. He was born in 1949 in England to a Dublin mother, Philomena, and a Guyanese father, Cecil Parris, and he was raised in Crumlin by his grandparents. He wanted to study architecture, took a short turn as an apprentice fitter at a foundry, hated it, and quit with his mother's backing. From his early teens he was singing with a local group called the Black Eagles, where he first played alongside Brian Downey. After that band folded he sang with a few others until Brush Shiels brought him into Skid Row in 1968. Shiels sacked him in 1969 while he was hoarse with tonsillitis, then did him the bigger favor of teaching him the bass and pushing him to write. Phil and Downey started a band called Orphanage. Late in 1969, guitarist Eric Bell and keyboard player Eric Wrixon, both out of Van Morrison's old group Them, came down to the Countdown Club on Mary Street and talked them into a new lineup. Downey has said he voted no in the dressing room. Phil told him Eric was going to play with them whether he liked it or not.

The name came from a comic-strip robot car, Tin Lizzie, out of the Beano, mixed up with a Dublin accent and a little of the old Ford Model T nickname. Bell was the one who floated it. Their first single, The Farmer, came out on Parlophone in July 1970. Five hundred copies were pressed and fewer than three hundred sold. Wrixon left soon after. They signed to Decca, cut a debut album in 1971 that Bell later said they were bombed for the whole of, and kept grinding through the clubs. The turn came in 1973 with their reworking of the old folk song Whiskey in the Jar. Bell left not long after that, Gary Moore passed through, and the twin-guitar lineup with Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson locked in. By the time they reached Johnny The Fox they were the band that had just put The Boys Are Back in Town on radios all over the world, and Phil was still writing like a man who did not trust his own line of talk.

If you want the band's own trail, the official home is thinlizzyofficial.com, and the history page there walks right through Johnny The Fox and the Don't Believe a Word single. Their shop still carries the album, track list and all, over at shop.thinlizzyofficial.com. The official Facebook page is Thin Lizzy on Facebook, the official Instagram is @thinlizzy, and the official account on X is @ThinLizzy_. Fans keep a big active room going in the Thin Lizzy Family group, thousands of people trading stories and set lists. That is the company this record keeps. Short song, long memory, and it still sounds like a warning you are glad somebody bothered to sing.