They'd Come to Claim the Emerald

A St. Patrick's Day ranking of my favorite Thin Lizzy studio albums

Phil Lynott reassures a suspicious Officer Big Mac that, contrary to rumor, tonight there will NOT be a jailbreak — somewhere in McDonaldland or anywhere else. (Photo by Chalkie Davies)

St. Patrick’s Day is here again, which is a great excuse to fire up some Thin Lizzy — not that I ever really require one.

I always associate the band with this time of year, anyway; it was in March 1990 that my friend, bandmate and housemate Jason brought home an import Lizzy CD called The Collection home from his gig at Dr. Wax. A compilation of album and non-LP single tracks plucked primarily from the band’s first three albums, that disc — along with the following month’s domestic CD reissues of the band’s entire 1970s catalog — turned me from a casual Thin Lizzy fan into a raging Phil Lynott obsessive. I’m not saying I started wearing hoop earrings around this time in tribute to Ireland’s greatest rocker… but I’m also not saying that had nothing at all to do with my choice of adornment.

I have been downright evangelical about Thin Lizzy ever since, and forever frustrated by the fact that one of the greatest hard rock bands of all time is mostly remembered on these shores for “The Boys Are Back In Town” — which, however perfect a summer anthem as it may be, is really just the tip of the Lizzy emerald. In Philip Parris Lynott, the band boasted not just a charismatic frontman, melodic bassist and evocative lyricist whose tough-yet-tenderhearted songs drew inspiration from Irish legend, Wild West mythos and American comic books, but also one of rock’s great characters. Throw in a wonderfully dynamic drummer (the still-underrated Brian Downey) and a string of fine guitarists (including the long-serving California refugee Scott Gorham) who fleshed out Lynott’s unique musical vision with Gaelic-flavored leads, and you had a top-notch outfit who could easily blow away all comers on any given night, and whose discography largely still holds up really well to this day.

Lynott’s personal story is both a deeply inspiring and profoundly sad one. Having grown up amid poverty and prejudice in 1950s and ‘60s Dublin, the son of a Black American sailor and a fiercely independent Irish teen essentially willed himself into becoming an internationally renowned rock star, only to have unhealed traumas and rampant addictions ultimately result in the breakup of his band in late 1983 and his death just over two years later at the age of 36.

For more on Lynott’s (and Thin Lizzy’s) story, I highly recommend Graeme Thomson’s Cowboy Song; the film documentaries Phil Lynott: Songs for While I’m Away and Phil Lynott - The Outlaw also have their moments, but Thomson’s book really gets to the heart of Phil and what drove him to greatness, along with unsparing details about that which sadly took him down well before his time.

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In honor of St. Patrick’s Day and the late, lamented Lynott, I’ve decided to attempt to rank Thin Lizzy’s dozen studio albums, from least favorite to most — as well as pick the most “Irish” (or at least most St. Patrick’s Day-appropriate) track from each album. Please bear in mind that I’m only talking here about the original LPs; expanded CD reissues aren’t part of this particular conversation, nor are band’s various live albums (including 1978’s mighty Live and Dangerous), Phil’s solo records, the new Acoustic Sessions LP (which I haven’t heard yet, though its combination of vintage vocal takes plus new guitar overdubs seems a bit to me like barrel-scraping, at least on paper) or post-Lynott “reunion” albums.

Also please bear in mind that when I do these kind of exercises (like my Kinks list from last year), it’s not meant as any sort of hard and fast proclamation — your own mileage may, of course, vary. Besides, the order of my favorite Lizzy albums has changed radically over the years; the following list is just how I feel about them at the moment, from worst to first…

12. Thunder and Lightning (1983)

I know a lot of Lizzy fans who swear by the band’s final album, but I rarely pull it out these days — in part because Darren Wharton’s synthesizers and (especially) John Sykes’ forays into sub-Randy Rhoads shredding come off as awkward attempts to “modernize” the classic Lizzy sound, but mostly because songs like “Cold Sweat,” “Bad Habits” and “Heart Attack” are pretty painful to listen to now; they were obviously cries for the sort of help that Phil didn’t get until it was far too late.

Most Irish Track: Nothing really sticks out here on that score, so let’s just go with the album’s best cut, a bar fight tale that makes particularly thrilling usage of the exclamation “Goddamn!”

11. Shades of a Blue Orphanage (1972)

Much as I love the sound of Thin Lizzy’s second album, which combines vestiges of prog, hard rock and psychedelia in an appealingly down to earth manner, Phil was clearly hurting for new material in the wake of the band’s beautiful 1971 debut (more on which in a little bit) and the equally tasty New Day EP that followed it. About half of the tracks (“Buffalo Gal,” “Sarah,” “Brought Down” and “Baby Face,” to be specific) are still pretty good, but the unfocused seven-minute opener “"The Rise and Dear Demise of the Funky Nomadic Tribes" and the equally trying seven-minute title dirge make Shades the worst by far of the band’s three albums with guitarist Eric Bell.

MIT: Gotta go with “Sarah,” Phil’s lovely ode to the Irish grandmother who raised him.

10. Renegade (1981)

The second and final Lizzy album to feature guitarist Snowy White (who was previously a Pink Floyd sideman), Renegade’s a mixed bag that features some truly great tracks — “Angel of Death,” “Renegade” and “Hollywood (Down on Your Luck)” — alongside a bunch that show Lynott trying to stretch out musically while also sadly starting to lose touch with the incisive lyrical eye and sly wit that elevated his finest songs.

MIT: Nothing explicitly Irish here, so let’s just go with the title cut, a moody and soulful salute to rebels everywhere. Phil’s vocal performance in this is hands down my favorite thing he cut in the 1980s.

9. Chinatown (1980)

Thin Lizzy’s first album with Snowy White is stronger and more consistent than the second, but despite the presence of several great tracks — including “Killer on the Loose,” “Genocide (The Killing of the Buffalo)” and the title cut — it’s still a couple of steps down from most of their ‘70s efforts.

MIT: It’s not one of the stronger songs here, but the raucous “Having a Good Time” — which begins with the lines “Me and my buddies/We’re going to get drunk” — certainly qualifies as a St. Patrick’s Day jam.

8. Black Rose: A Rock Legend (1979)

The only full Thin Lizzy studio album to feature Gary Moore on guitar, Black Rose is a fantastic straight-ahead hard rock slab, let down only by the goofy “S&M” and “My Sarah,” Lynott’s lovely but loungey paean to his newborn daughter. But those tracks are totally worth sitting through in order to get to the likes of “Waiting for an Alibi,” “Get Out of Here,” and the epic title track.

MIT: Was there any question? “Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend” packs a veritable lorry-load of Irish mythology, history, music and poetry references into seven stirring minutes, and listening to Moore and Scott Gorham trade off on the jigs and reels gives me goosebumps every time.

7. Johnny the Fox (1976)

Given that the album was recorded just six months after the band finished Jailbreak — and its songs were written while Lynott was in the hospital recovering from hepatitis — Johnny the Fox has no right to be as good as it actually is, even if it’s technically the weakest of the five albums by the “classic” lineup of Lynott, Downey, Gorham and Brian Robertson. I’ve always felt that this album would have worked better with a revamped track sequence (like, maybe start Side One with “Don’t Believe a Word” and save the exposition-packed opener “Johnny” for later on in the record); and while “Boogie Woogie Dance” is the very definition of rushed filler, it would have worked better wedged into the middle of Side Two instead of serving as an extremely disappointing album closer. Still, most of Johnny the Fox is good-to-great, and I reach for it often.

MIT: “Fools Gold,” with its spoken-word intro about Irish migrants fleeing the Great Famine for the promise of a better life in America, is the obvious choice here.

6. Vagabonds of the Western World (1973)

Thin Lizzy’s third and final album with its original trio lineup of Lynott, Downey and guitarist Eric Bell is a deeply underrated record. It’s the one that I would often pull out back in the ‘90s to demonstrate to friends that a) the band made some incredible music before the Gorham-Robbo era, and that b) Lynott was already finding ways back then to work harmony guitar leads into his songs, even though he only had one guitarist. (Bell’s absolutely stunning guitar work on the gorgeous “Little Girl in Bloom” was usually my Exhibit A.) The overlong “The Hero and the Madman” — complete with massively cringey narration by British DJ Kid Jensen — is a real stinker, but everything else on the album pretty excellent. Plus, it contains “The Rocker,” Thin Lizzy’s first bonafide rock anthem.

MIT: The hard-driving “Vagabond of the Western World” was partly inspired by John Millington Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World, and kicks off with a chorus of “Too-ra loo-ra, loo-ra, loo-ra, loo-ra, loo-ra, loo-ra lay”. Irish enough for ya?

5. Nightlife (1974)

Even once I became a massive Thin Lizzy fan, I avoided Nightlife for years, having heard that it was “soft” — a reputation reinforced by the three tracks from it that were included on the 1991 compilation Dedication: The Very Best of Thin Lizzy — and that the then-new guitar tag-team of Gorham and Robbo hadn’t sufficiently found their groove by the time the album was recorded. But once I finally picked it up, the album slowly worked its quiet magic on me to the point that I now consider it a Top 5 Lizzy LP. Yes, Nightlife is mostly pretty mellow, and the twin guitar outbursts are few and far between, but man does it have a serious vibe — it’s one of those records where I would happily crawl inside and live there if it were somehow possible to do so. Tracks like “She Knows,” “Still in Love with You” and “Showdown” are excellent enough on their own terms, but they really make sense when you hear them in the context of this LP.

MIT: “Philomena,” Phil’s tribute to his wild rover of a mother, which he sings with a far more exaggerated Irish accent than he usually brought to the table.

4. Bad Reputation (1977)

Other than “Dancing in the Moonlight (It’s Caught Me in Its Spotlight)” — a song I never really loved, even though I’m glad it made them some money — and the ripping title track, it took me a while to really get into this album. Tony Visconti’s production felt impenetrably slick to me, and most of the songs at first sounded like B-level retreads of things that Lynott had already written. In retrospect, however, I think Bad Reputation is truly one of their best; said songs are actually more refinements than rehashes, the performances (mostly just by Lynott, Downey and Gorham, as the estranged Robbo only appeared on three songs) are all really strong across the album, and Visconti’s production ultimately lent the tracks the diamond-hard sound they deserved.

MIT: “Soldier of Fortune,” Lynott’s poignant portrait of a conflicted mercenary who is sick of killing, yet cannot resist the call of the piper.

3. Thin Lizzy (1971)

Though Vagabonds was the Thin Lizzy album I would pull out to hip people to their pre-Gorham-Robbo existence, I love the band’s debut even more — but I rarely shared it with others, since it’s so far removed from “classic” Thin Lizzy as to practically not compute: Imagine if Jimi Hendrix had fallen under the spell of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and you’ll get the general gist. The propulsive “Look What the Wind Blew In” is the only thing here that really presages the power, swagger and self-deprecating wit that would characterize so much of Lynott’s best-known work, but the whole thing is pretty wonderful; you just have to be okay with acoustic guitars, mellotrons, and some heart-on-sleeve reflections from a sensitive young man who has recently left the home comforts of Dublin for an uncertain future in London.

MIT: An atmospheric affirmation of Irish freedom, “Eire” is way too short at just a hair over two minutes — but it absolutely deserves a place on any St. Patrick’s Day playlist.

2. Fighting (1975)

The “classic Lizzy” album that still somehow remains underrated, probably because it failed to chart in the US (and barely did so in the UK) at the time of its release — and because it was immediately followed by the band’s breakthrough album. But Fighting is a fantastic record from start to finish, even if Lynott only had a hand in writing 7 of the 10 tracks. (“King’s Vengeance” and “Freedom Song,” the album’s two Gorham-Lynott collaborations, hit harder than ever for me these days.) If all you know from Thin Lizzy are Jailbreak and Live and Dangerous, this one should be next on your listening list.

MIT: One of the most hauntingly perfect songs Lynott ever wrote, “Wild One” was inspired by both by what Graeme Thomson termed Ireland’s “complex dance with exile” and Phil’s never-resolved pain from being abandoned as a child by his mother.

1. Jailbreak (1976)

Yes, I know it goes against all music-snob conventions to pick a band’s best-selling album as your favorite, but come on — Jailbreak is nearly 36 minutes of tuneful hard rock perfection, it went Gold in the US and UK for good reason, and I love it unreservedly. The album’s nine tracks are appealingly varied yet sit perfectly together, and John Alcock’s production really brings out the incendiary magic of Gorham and Robertson’s guitars while still keeping the spotlight on Lynott’s vivid lyrics and animated vocal delivery. The presence of “The Boys Are Back in Town,” “Cowboy Song” and the title track would be reason enough to have this album in your collection, but the whole damn thing is just a joy from start to finish.

(And for you vinyl nerds out there, I highly recommend picking up the Vinyl Me Please Essentials reissue of Jailbreak from 2022; it is the best-sounding version of the album I’ve ever heard, by far!)

MIT: Without a doubt, it has to be “Emerald,” a rollicking tale of Irish clan wars highlighted by Gorham and Robertson dueling with wah-wahs and phasers like they were swords and pikes.

Bonus Track: “Whiskey in the Jar”

For whatever reason, three of Thin Lizzy’s most explicitly Irish recordings — “Dublin,” “Sitamoia” and their career-saving 1973 cover of the traditional ballad “Whiskey in the Jar” — didn’t make it on to any of their original LPs. But you can’t really have St. Patrick’s Day without a little “Whiskey,” so here’s Thin Lizzy’s fantastic Musikladen performance of it for ya…

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you all… and just remember that staying at home and listening to Thin Lizzy albums is a lot safer than chancing it out there with the amateurs.

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