Confessions Of A Rock'n'Roll Manager

Chris O’Donnell began working with Thin Lizzy immediately after Eric Bell’s departure. He eventually took over the full-time management of the band, working with Chris Morrison, negotiated a new record deal and helped bring about the huge success the classic four-piece line-up enjoyed through the second half of the ‘70s. He remained with Lizzy almost until the end.

“I’d been working as an agent with Chris Morrison, who’d taken over management of Thin Lizzy as a three-piece through a relationship he had with Decca records,” he explains. “I remember him calling me and saying Lizzy have this record out, ‘Whiskey In The Jar’. I went to see some band in Swansea and driving back home I stopped at a café for a bite to eat. I heard ‘Whiskey…’ on the radio and thought it was a smash hit. So I went to see Chris. He said he was finding it difficult being their agent and their manager, and asked if I could come onboard. They were just bringing out Vagabonds when I became their agent. On the New Year’s Eve after Eric left and Gary stepped in, I became their manager.”
The first thing O’Donnell had to do was find them a new record label – no easy task despite the success of ‘Whiskey…’.
“By that time, Island, EMI and RCA had passed on them. Phonogram’s Nigel Grainge, who used to shop at Ted Carroll’s record store, heard a demo of ‘Still In Love With You’. He loved it and signed them up. I think it was for a three album deal, with options.”
Two albums into their new record deal and all was not well: the failure of both Nightlife, which Chris says sold just 9,000 copies, and the follow-up, Fighting, threatened the band’s existence.
“After Fighting, Vertigo was going to drop the band. There was an A&R meeting and there was a bit of a show of hands in the room. One guy was so passionate about Lizzy he fought their corner. He said he went to every gig they did. The crowds were getting bigger and bigger. So they agreed to keep the band on. I knew we had to deliver. I wanted a great record. For what would become Jailbreak I got in John Alcock, who had put together Rampart Studios for The Who.”
O’Donnell clearly recalls the moment Lynott found the inspiration for ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’.
“We were doing a gig in Manchester and Phil was slow plugging the lead into his bass. He said to the audience, ‘are you out there?’ and there was a huge roar back. I said to him it would be great if he could encapsulate that roar in a song, which is what he did with, ‘The Boys Are Back…’. Initially, it wasn’t as strident as it would become. It was Scott and Brian who came up with the riff.”
O’Donnell says that when he took Jailbreak to Phonogram they weren’t impressed.
“They said ‘it’s a shame there’s no hit single’. But then we went to America and KSAN in San Francisco started playing ‘Boys…’and the phones lit up. There was no going back.”
Thin Lizzy had now arrived, in style. For the next four years, the band worked non-stop, touring and recording.
“Once you become successful no-one wants the gravy train to stop,” O’Donnell reflects. “The demands are incredible. It’s all about the album, the tour, the merchandise, promoters, venues and road crew. An awful lot of people become dependent on the success of the band. Hindsight is a great thing – Phil could have taken five years off and he could be touring right now. The energy and drive that got him to the top was the cause of his demise. All he knew was if he kept driving himself he’d get somewhere.”
Arguably the band’s greatest triumph, Live And Dangerous, was O’Donnell’s idea. He insists that it was never meant to be a “live” album.
“I had read an article that said, ‘great live bands don’t make great studio albums’. I didn’t want a live album per se. I wanted to imagine what a Lizzy show would be like on record so I rang Tony Visconti and asked him to do a studio album. He said he didn’t want to do that so we captured five or six live shows on tape, then went back into the studio and cleaned it up. That audience sound is from the BBC sound library, mixed in with the original audience. That was always the idea. People keep saying it was never live, it was overdubbed etc. It was never meant to be. It was meant to be an approximation of a live album.”
Towards the end of their business relationship O’Donnell says he became disenchanted.
“Suddenly Phil had a coterie of people around him and they would call me up and say, ‘I’m Phil’s new friend and he wants to do this or do that’. I wanted everyone to stop and take stock and lose these new found ‘friends’. The truth was he was heavily into smack. I’d be going out one door of the studio and the drug dealers would be coming in the other.
“It came to a head in New York. I wanted Phil to do some artwork for the Thunder And Lighting album. He was in a room with Willy Deville and they were injecting. I just freaked out, got on a plane and flew home. Then the band closed ranks. Phil was angry, realising that I knew what was going on. Much later Scott said to me that the problem was I was too good. ‘Every time we had a problem it was ring Chris,’ he said. It was true. I remember Caroline ringing me one day after they bought the house in Kew telling me they were freezing. I said ‘why don’t you turn the heating on’. She said, ‘It’s not working. Phil told me to ring you’. That’s the way things were. Phil never went to a bank. He’d call the office and we’d send money over.”
Still, Chris O’Donnell says he’d rather remember the good times.
“I keep seeing these talking heads on TV documentaries going on about how fucked-up his life was. My memories of Phil and the band are that they were incredibly hard-working. It’s a cliché but when you’re struggling in the early days, that’s the fun part. People say ‘what a sad demise’. I spent over 10 years working with Phil and I’m not going to spend too much time talking about the three years where things went downhill. It wasn’t all about leather trousers and swagger. This guy wrote great songs with beautiful lyrics. The rest is what happens when you drink from the poisoned chalice.”