Early Diaries

1971

March
Thin Lizzy’s first UK gig should have been at Sisters Club on Seven Sisters Road, Holloway, North London. Although the band was advertised to play as support to ex-Nice drummer Blinky Davidson’s Every Which Way, the gig had to be cancelled as Lizzy were unable to leave Ireland in time to make the gig. A scheduled gig at London Speakeasy on March 19, supporting Patto, was also cancelled. Thin Lizzy’s first ever London gig was on Tuesday March 21 1971.

Tueday 23: Upstairs at Ronnie’s, Soho (1st UK gig) – £10.
Friday 26: Thingamajig Club, Reading – £30.
Saturday 27: Marquee, London – £10.
Wednesday 31: Blaise’s, London – £10.

April
Friday 2: Blues Loft, High Wickham – £5 (supporting Patto & Screaming Lord Sutch).
There were 20 dates in all during April 1971. The highest paying was a headlining gig in the Cromer Pavilion in Norfolk, on April 30, which yielded a fee of £40. The last entry for April reads:
Thin Lizzy LP No. 1 on Kid Jensen’s Jensen’s Dimensions on Radio Luxembourg.

May
There were 15 dates during May 1971. The last show in Kirklevington Country Club, Yorkshire (supporting Head, Hands & Feet), on Saturday 29, should have been the pick of the bunch, yielding the band’s biggest UK fee yet, of £75. However…

Kid Jensen drove up from London with Ted Carroll to see the band live for the very first time. They stopped for a meal on the way and arrived at The Country Club at about 8.15pm, just in time to hear the final strains of Thin Lizzy’s last number. The band, who had been due onstage at 8.30pm, had to go on early as Albert Lee’s band, Head, Hands & Feet, who were “getting it together in the country” at a nearby cottage, had been booked at the last minute. They had become regulars at the bar downstairs and had promised to play a gig for free, and this was the last chance to do so as they were returning to London the following week. Afterwards Kid Jensen and his girlfriend drove back to Manchester and partied with Thin Lizzy until the early hours in the bar at the Clifton Grange Hotel (owned by Phil’s mum). However Kid had to return to London the following morning as he had to be back in Luxembourg in time for his Sunday night show, and so could not stay to see Lizzy play the Manchester Apollo…

June
There were 16 dates in June, a month that was complicated by recording commitments. The biggest fee was a record-equalling £75 at the Redcar Jazz Club on Sunday June 20. There was a date at Strangeways Prison in Manchester on Monday 7, which paid a princely £10.

Monday 14: Recording New Day EP at Decca’s West Hampstead Studios. Recording and mixing took about two or three days. We asked Decca to release it in a picture sleeve, but they refused on the grounds of cost. So the band decided to do their own sleeve. A guy named Rodney, who was recommended to us by a friend who worked for a band booking agency in Bristol, was enlisted to furnish the artwork. We decided to go the whole hog and make the cover a gatefold (possibly the first ever gatefold 7 inch cover ever released in the UK). The sleeve was printed in Dublin by a friend, Tony Bradfield, who we knew from around the club scene. We printed 2,000 covers and shipped most of them to the Decca pressing plant in New Malden. However they arrived late. and the first 500 copies went out without the picture sleeves.
Tuesday 15: Recording Decca, West Hampstead.
Wedneday 16: Finished mixing at Decca, then gig in evening at Mr. Fox, The Winning Post pub, Twickenham, London.

July
There were 16 dates in all on an Irish tour that was notable for paying far more than the band earned in the UK. The tour, which included a free gig in Blackrock Park in Dublin, generated total revenue of £1,659.10.

Thursday 22: Kilkenny – £100.
Friday 23: Castlebar – £100.
Saturday 24: Sligo – £127.
Monday 26: Donnycarney – £100.
Tuesday 27: Dundalk – £115.
Wednesday 28: Derry – £80.
Thursday 29: Limerick – £80.
Friday 30: Tramore – £137.
Saturday 31: Bundoran – £103.

August
Precise date unknown: Ballina – £80.
Precise date unknown: Seapoint Ballroom, Galway – £156.
Precise date unknown: Athlone – £89.10.
Friday 6: Arklow, Co. Wicklow – £72.
Saturday 7: National Stadium – Dublin – £220.
Sunday 8: Free Concert – Blackrock Park (with Mellow Candle).
Monday 9: Drogheda – £100.

September
September was a productive month, with the band touring the UK and doing Irish dates. Among these was Thin Lizzy’s biggest payday yet, with a £300 fee for playing the Miltown Festival in Miltown Malbay in Co. Clare on Saturday 4. However, not all was sweetness and light…

Monday 13: Quaintways, Chester (with Edgar Broughton) – £40.
The engine in the transit van, which had been bought off Grannies Intentions for £100, started knocking on the way home after the gig, and we had to keep stopping to let it cool down. It finally gave up the ghost on the M1, somewhere in Northamptonshire. We called the AA who towed us to a deserted garage and we then had to wait for about an hour for a taxi, which took us home to London. Cost £25… Net loss on the night £5 not counting petrol, oil and repairs to the van.

1972

February/March
Over the course of a 29 day February, Thin Lizzy supported Arrival on a UK college tour, playing a total of 24 dates.

The tour featured Arrival, Thin Lizzy and either Worth or Barrabas: Worth did part of the tour and Barrabas did the rest. All the bands travelled on a large single-decker coach and used the same PA etc. During the course of the tour, romance blossomed between Diane Birch, one of the singers with Arrival, and Eric Bell, and they ended up together for quite some time after the tour finished.

July
July featured an Irish tour, but a US tour planned for August had to be cancelled, leading to management changes…

Around the end of July 1972, Brian Tuite and Ted Carroll decided that Ted would try to find someone in the UK to take over from Brian as co-manager. Brian wanted to concentrate on his business, and although Lizzy were still popular at home and starting to build a following in the UK, progress was slow and Brian was tired of having to continually lend money to the band.
Ted discussed doing a deal with Colin Johnson, Status Quo’s manager, who was working out of Billy Gaff’s (Rod Stewart’s manager) office over the Marquee Club in Wardour Street. Colin was interested and wanted to see the band play again. Ted asked Lizzy’s agent Chris Morrison to arrange a gig as soon as possible, at the Marquee, so that he could be sure that Colin would make a decision as quickly as possible.
When Ted explained why he wanted the gig, Chris responded: “What’s wrong with me? I’ve worked my arse off getting the band gigs and you want to take them to Colin Johnson?” At the time, Chris was managing a band named Danta, an Afro-rock band who had a single on CBS that hadn’t sold, but because of the band’s fire-eating conga drummer, they had plenty of gigs. Ted had thought of Johnson as a potential manager, because he already managed a successful band, and because Ted believed that he would be able to help shoulder the financial burden, until Thin Lizzy was able to become financially secure.
However, when Chris Morrison expressed interest, Ted agreed, as he had seen how hard Chris had worked on filling Danta’s date sheet and when the single was out, how he had telephoned CBS every day for sales figures. Ted figured that although Chris had no money, he would ensure that the band had enough dates to make ends meet.
After the lack of success of the band’s second album Shades Of A Blue Orphanage, Ted and Chris decided that they would try to get the band a release from its deal with Decca Records so that they could secure a new deal and raise some money to help finance the band. After discussions with Frank Rogers at Decca, it was decided that Lizzy would record just one more single and if that was not successful, then they would be given a release.
A recording date was set and Thin Lizzy started rehearsing the two songs that they were going to record. The A-side was going to be a heavy-ish but melodic song of Phil’s called ‘Black Boys On The Corner’.
Phil suggested that they might record ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ for the B-side. This was an old Irish folk song made popular about 20 years earlier by The Clancy Brothers. Lizzy had been including the song in their stage set for some months and Phil thought that it would be a good idea to include it as it had been going down quite well at gigs. Ted turned up at the final rehearsal before the band was due to go in the studios, and when the band had got through playing ‘Whiskey In The Jar’, Phil asked Ted what he thought. Ted replied that he thought that if the band could go in the studio next week and play it “just like you have now” it would probably end up as the A-side. Eric’s incredibly catchy guitar figure, repeated twice on the intro, and his flowing guitar solo in the middle complimented Phil’s hoarse vocals so perfectly that the combination seemed irresistible.
One Tuesday around the end of September, Ted came to the office with the latest copy of Sounds, the now defunt weekly music paper. Although Sounds officially came out on Wednesday, you could pick it up in Soho around lunchtime on the previous day. Ted had spotted a small news item about a forthcoming Slade UK Tour in November. No dates or other information were included, but Ted had guessed that Mel Bush would be promoting the tour. Bush had already promoted some major Slade dates including four big shows in the South West, and a concert at the Rainbow Theatre in July. Chris Morrison called Mel and asked him for the support slot for Thin Lizzy. Word came back within a week that Lizzy were on the Slade tour with no ‘buy on’ (it was customary for the support act or their record company to pay a substantial sum towards the cost of a big tour in order to secure a place on the tour and the exposure that it would bring). However, as Slade were using a new prototype PA system specially built for them by Charlie Watkins of WEM amplification, Thin Lizzy would not be able to use this PA and would have to carry their own.
Meanwhile, Lizzy had been in the new Decca Studios at Tollington Park, North London to record the single under the watchful eye of a young in-house producer Nick Tauber. Phil, Nick and the engineer (Derek Varnals, who had worked with The Moody Blues and had engineered ‘Shout’ by Lulu among other Decca hits) collaborated on the production and mix, and everyone was delighted with the result. The whole session was helped by the fact that it was taking place in this incredibly luxurious state-of-the-art studio that Decca had just completed specifically for the use of their star act The Moody Blues.
At the time, Lizzy were still using a 400 watt system with 4 x 100 watt columns. We heard about a new top class 1,200 watt system, that had only been used once for a UK tour by the Everly Brothers. We managed to buy it for about £1,400, although that did not include a mixing desk. We bought a 6 channel mixing unit to link with the one we already had, bought some multi-channel cable, and hooked the whole lot up and prayed that it would work.
About three weeks before the tour was due to start, we heard that Suzi Quatro had been added to the tour, and RAK Records wanted her to use our PA. We agreed and charged RAK £300 a week, which paid for most of the PA in one fell swoop.
When we first discussed purchasing this larger PA, one crucial element in the whole deal was physical size. We got exact dimensions from the company that were supplying the rig, and I very carefully calculated that we would be able to get the new PA, the band’s gear AND the band (and two roadies) into Thin Lizzy’s 35cwt transit van. This was essential, as we could not afford to hire a larger truck. I calculated that if we got rid of the second row of seats in the van, we would have room. We had a double seat from an old tram, that had come out of Grannies Intentions’ old van and had been lying around in my flat. This would only take up half as much space as the row of seats we had removed.
On Thursday November 2, the band were having a final rehearsal on the side altar of a Church near Stamford Hill in North London. The PA had been delivered, set up, linked to the new mixing system and everything was working. Now we had to pack the truck. Pete Eustace maintained that there was NO chance of getting everything in. I said that I was certain everything would fit, as I had calculated it all down to the last inch very carefully. Now it was time for the acid test. With a lot of puffing and panting, we finally managed to get the back doors closed and locked with everything inside. I heaved a mighty sigh of relief, as, for a few minutes, I thought I had miscalculated and it was not going to fit! Eric and Brian shared the cosy little tram seat for the entire tour, squeezed in beside a giant PA cabinet.

November
‘Whiskey In The Jar’ released.
A 21-date tour took Lizzy through to December 5 in the UK.

December
Lizzy make triumphant return to Ireland just before Christmas, as it is announced that ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ has reached No. 1 in the Irish singles chart. They embark on an Irish tour, promoted by Jim Slye, one of the owners of the Irish show business magazine New Spotlight.