Great Scott

When we catch up with Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham, he's preparing to begin rehearsals for the band's reformation tour, commemorating the 25th anniversary of Phil Lynott's death, with former Almighty frontman and solo artist Ricky Warwick assuming vocal duties.

“We had a one-day get together a few months ago, just to see how this was gonna work out,” he reveals. “You can pretty much tell on the first day how people are gonna gel. As soon as I saw him step up to the mic and heard him sing on the first song, you knew it was there. I recorded with him, a couple of tracks on his first solo album a few years ago. That’s when I got reacquainted, ‘cos I’ve known him for about 20 years now. A lot of people have a lot of really great memories of Phil, so whoever sits in the middle there is going to be judged against what Phil did in the past. But Ricky’s got a big personality, and his vocal tone is pretty much in the same range as Phil. He’s one of those guys you end up loving.”
Given that twin-guitar synergy is integral to the Lizzy sound, who’s been Scott’s favourite guitar partner over the years?
“That’s always a good question, because there’s so many guys on the right hand side of the stage who have come floating through. It’s been particularly interesting for me because there has been no cookie-cutter kinda thing, each guy’s been completely different from the last, and that was done for a reason. Each person that came in we always wanted to get a little bit of a change happening. What was actually said to each guy was, ‘Okay, there’s history here, and you have to go along with the history, but from that point on it’s time to bring your personality out.’ We’d always let the new guy have his moment, to get him integrated into the whole system.
“Now as far as a favourite guy to play with, that is a tough one, just because the styles have been so varied. You’ve got Robbo, who had the British blues style, and Robbo liked to improvise a lot around what he was doing, off the shoulder guitar solos, all the delays and the wah-wahs and all that thing. Gary (Moore) was always a little bit more precise in what he did, he was a much more regimented kind of player, he wanted all the ducks lined up there. Snowy (White) was a flat out blues guitar player, and he was asked to play in this rock genre, and I don’t think Snowy was actually ever completely comfortable with it. I think he had a lot of fun and we did a lot of great things together, but in the end he was probably a little relieved on the day that he left so that he could actually go out and play blues guitar again.
“I guess I was a little bit more of the anchor of the whole thing. I had no problem with whoever’s on the right hand, just let him fly. At the time I felt I was a little bit more of the glue than on the improv side. I’ve kinda gone over to the dark side these days, everything’s gotten a little looser, so it’s changed. But then you’ve got a guy like Viv (Campbell) coming in, he kind of does it all. You ask him to do something, he can get it done. I love that ‘cos it takes a lot of weight off my shoulders, being one of the last of the original guys in there. I’m gonna really enjoy playing with Viv this time around.”
Any particular Lizzy songs that still give him chills to play?
“I always like playing ‘Still In Love With You’ because whoever’s up there playing it along with me is throwing the passion into that one. It’s taken on a new meaning now, for almost everybody. The first time we went out and played it without Phil in Dublin, I thought it was gonna be okay: ‘There’s not a problem, all the emotions are in check, I’m used to everything now...’ We got to that song and I started to well up, I got a lump in the throat and I had to take three or four steps back and kind of gather myself, and I didn’t think that was gonna happen to me. But it did. Even when you’re playing it you feel these things.”
25 years on, what does he remember most about the man?
“Well, I’ve just been up at Joe Elliott’s place in Dublin doing a few remixes on some of the old material, and Ronan the engineer brought up Phil’s voice, and it was so crystal clear it felt like he was sitting right next to me. And it’s those kinds of times that a whole shedload of memories come flooding back, even from the very first time I met him, walking through those doors and seeing this big tall black guy standing in front of me, thinking, ‘This has gotta be the guy. He’s gotta be number one around here.’
“Phil was a real forceful personality, he was a real driver of people. He’s probably the only guy I ever worked with where I never actually saw him get tired. The rest of us, you’d be out on the road for six months and your ass would be draggin’. It never seemed to get to him. He was always up for the next show: ‘Let’s go, we gotta keep the energy up, don’t flag on me now.’ The energy on that guy was just amazing.”
Lynott was certainly an original: one of the few native black musicians in Ireland in the 70s, although as Scott indicates, he defined himself more by nationality than colour.
“I think at that point Phil was the only black guy in the whole country, but I never heard him complain about it; it was never an outward issue with him. It was like it didn’t exist. I think he’d already made up his mind, ‘I am different, and I’m just gonna deal with it.’ And that’s what he did. Y’know, it seems absolutely inconceivable now, but when we first started to tour America a lot of people didn’t even know where Ireland was, so what Phil constantly did almost on every tour was he would walk into a radio station waving the Irish flag like you wouldn’t believe. A lot of people were stunned with this because they realised they really didn’t know anything about Ireland. And here’s this guy, this rock star, giving them a lesson about where he grew up. In Phil’s presence, if you said anything derogatory about his country, that was fightin’ talk – much more so than the black thing or the Thin Lizzy thing: ‘Go ahead, if you don’t like the band that’s fine, but don’t you ever fuck with my country.’ I saw him get into more than a few fights because of that very subject. He bled green. He was a true Irishman, bold Phil.
“When I joined that band, up to that 21 years I’d probably been in maybe two fights in my whole life. Within the first two years (with Lizzy) I’d probably been in 20. It was un-fucking-believable. Phil was a magnet for trouble. And I’ll tell you right now, almost every time it was not his fault. It was always some guy trying to make his mark. You’d be sitting quietly having a drink and there’s something kicking up and now you gotta jump into it to defend your gang. But this isn’t just mythology or anything – Phil was a fighter, man. You had to stand your ground. If there was an idea and you wanted to get it across and he or somebody else didn’t like it, you had to be able to argue your point, and really well. Sometimes you won, sometimes you didn’t, and you had to realise that when you lost you had to back off of it. There were a fair few, let’s say, heated discussions. Phil was the kind of guy who wouldn’t give up on it. There were even times where he knew he was fucking wrong and he wouldn’t give up on it because it might make him look bad.”
Asked to recall the high points of Lizzy’s 15-year career, Gorham cites the 1976 Jailbreak tour of the US.
"Here we are in another shithole club in the middle of God Knows and Who Cares when our manager Chris O'Donnell walks in," he remembers. "And he says, 'Well boys, it looks like we've got a hit single on our hands.' And almost simultaneously we all went, 'What song?' And he said, 'It's 'The Boys Are Back In Town'.' We all looked at each other and went, 'No shit.' Apparently there were two disc jockeys in Louisville, Kentucky that absolutely fell in love with the song, put it on their hot rotation, played it twice an hour for a month, to the point where other radio stations in the surrounding area picked up on it, and it kind of spread through America and started to do the hundred yard dash up the American charts.
"I remember I was reading this Stephen King short story and he even quotes in the book, 'We're laying out there in the sun drinking Coca-Cola and once again Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys Are Back In Town' is blasting over the radio.' And I sat up and went, 'Holy shit man, Stephen King! Nice one!' He was associating it with that summer of 1976, the heat and all the good feelings that people were having. It struck a chord for everybody that year. So when we got back to England we had a sold-out tour, and instead of playing at the Marquee Club we were playing Hammersmith. That was a pretty amazing and memorable shift."
Final question: what was the weirdest Lizzy-related situation he ever found himself in?
"Well, the absolute oddest one... Remember when Jimmy Saville had Jim'll Fix It? Their TV production company called us up and said, 'Listen, we've got a 78-year-old grandmother here that's always wanted to be a rock star, and she's picked you guys out. Would you go on TV and fulfill her dream of being in a rock band?' I think we thought that was so off the wall and totally weird that we just kind of had to do it. So there we were on Jim'll Fix It with a 78-year-old grandmother playing keyboards with us. She became the Thin Lizzy mascot for a little over a year. She probably died after that."