The Boys Are Back in Town

You know, Zoo Freaks, when the boys in Thin Lizzy laid down that track from the Jailbreak album, nobody in the band figured it was gonna be the one that blew the doors open. Phil Lynott wrote the thing during those sessions when the pressure was really on, after a couple of albums that just didn't catch fire the way they hoped. Scott Gorham has talked about how they rented a farmhouse, set up an eight-track machine, and just started cranking out songs, maybe twenty-five of 'em in three weeks. This one started out as something called GI Joe Is Back, with lyrics leaning anti-war because the Vietnam thing was still hanging in the air. Phil looked at it and said that angle had been done to death, so he flipped it into a straight-up gang song about Saturday night with your buddies, getting a few drinks in and having a time. Gorham remembers Phil playing him the bass line and scatting some ideas, and the next day at rehearsal Brian Downey laid down that shuffle on the drums that gave Scott the spark for the twin guitar harmony with Brian Robertson. They still didn't have the final title until Phil walked in one day and said he wanted to call it The Boys Are Back in Town, and when Scott read the lyrics he thought they were cool as hell. The crazy part is the band almost left it off the album altogether. Vinyl had those time limits back then, so they cut fifteen songs and picked their ten favorites, and this one wasn't in the pile. Their co-manager Chris O'Donnell heard the demo and insisted there was something special there, even before the harmony guitars were fully locked in. The label had their eyes on Running Back as the single at first. Then they were out on the road in America, playing some club, when the manager burst into the dressing room and said it looked like they had a hit on their hands. The guys just looked at each other and asked which song, because they weren't even playing it in the set yet. Phil's reaction was pure, something like well I guess we'd better put it back in. That's how unsure they were. It took two disc jockeys down in Louisville, Kentucky, who fell hard for the track and started spinning it twice an hour for a week or so. Other stations picked up on it, and next thing you know it was exploding across the country, hitting number twelve on the Billboard charts and pulling the whole Jailbreak album up with it. Gorham has said that without those two guys in Louisville, things might have gone a whole different way for the band.

Scott Gorham has been pretty clear over the years about what Phil had in mind when he wrote it. Phil always thought of the four of them as a gang, traveling around the world and trying to do as much damage or as much good as they could. The town was Dublin, no question, the place where Phil and Brian Downey were born, went to school, and started their first bands together. They had so many friends and musicians from those streets that it just became their thing. The boys are back in town, the gang is back in Dublin, and the boys are us. Gorham has said he always loved that idea. At the same time there are stories about a Manchester gang called the Quality Street Gang that used to hang around the club Phil's mother Philomena ran. She has said those characters would come in, and Philip liked them, especially the one they called Jimmy The Weed. When the song became a hit, Phil gave Jimmy his own gold album, and Jimmy showed up for Phil's funeral years later. Philomena has talked about how they were characters, not the kind of people who went around shooting anybody. Some folks point to lines like Friday night they'll be dressed to kill, down at Dino's bar and grill, the drink will flow and blood will spill, and figure it lines up with those Manchester nights. Gorham has pushed back on anybody trying to read politics or the IRA into it, saying it's just a good-time party song about going out with your buddies. He even told one interviewer who thought he had cracked some secret code that it was nothing like that, and the guy was shattered. The twin guitars that make the middle section so killer came together after the basic structure was there, with Scott coming up with the initial bit and Robbo jumping in on the harmony. Phil even played a little of that middle guitar idea on bass first, and they adapted it. It all came from that pressure of needing a hit, but once it hit, it became their calling card, the song that connected with folks who liked the rough-and-tumble side of rock and roll.

Phil Lynott was the heart of the whole thing, the guy who wrote the words and drove the band from the start. He was born Philip Parris Lynott in 1949 in West Bromwich, England, to his Irish mother Philomena and his father Cecil Parris from Guyana. The family situation meant Phil grew up mostly in Dublin with his grandparents in the Crumlin area, though he stayed close with his mother who was working over in England. He met Brian Downey at school, and they were tight from way back. As a teenager Phil joined a local band called the Black Eagles as the singer, and Downey came in on drums. They were covering Beatles and Stones stuff, playing a few nights a week and getting a taste of the stage. When that group fell apart, Phil got asked to join Skid Row, one of the hotter Irish bands at the time, fronted by Brush Shiels. Phil was the singer, tall and striking with that afro, and Shiels figured he'd pull in the girls. But the other guys weren't happy with how Phil sang, especially after he got tonsillitis and was out for a bit. Shiels decided to take over the vocals and slim the band down, which left Phil out. Feeling bad about it, Shiels taught Phil how to play bass, sold him a Fender Jazz Bass for next to nothing, and started giving him lessons. Phil took to it, and pretty soon he and Downey formed a band called Orphanage where Phil was writing his own stuff. Toward the end of 1969 they crossed paths with guitarist Eric Bell from Belfast, who had played with Them. Bell came down to the Countdown Club where they were playing, and after a short meeting they decided to start something new. Downey was a little skeptical at first, but Phil made it clear Eric was in. They brought in keyboard player Eric Wrixon too for a short stretch, and Thin Lizzy was born with Phil on bass and vocals, Downey on drums, and Bell on guitar. The name came from a character in the kids' comic The Dandy called Tin Lizzie, the Mechanical Maid, which was also a nickname for the old Ford Model T. Eric Bell said they should go with Thin Lizzy because in a Dublin accent it would sound the same anyway. They signed with Decca, moved over to London, and put out their first album in 1971. It took a few years and some lineup changes, including bringing in Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson for those twin guitar lines, before Jailbreak and this song turned everything around. You can dig deeper into all of it over at the Thin Lizzy official website, and if you want to hang with other folks who still love the band, check the official Facebook page, their Instagram, and the account over on X. There's also a long-running fan site at thin-lizzyfan.com that's been keeping the flame going since the mid-nineties, and an active group of supporters over in the Thin Lizzy Fans Club on Facebook. Right here on THE ZOO we keep spinning these deep cuts and the hits that still rock the Zoo Freaks just as hard as they did back when the boys first brought them to town.