Eric Bell: "The first album is basically the real, original Thin Lizzy"

Rock fans are for a serious treat with the new, 55th anniversary of Thin Lizzy’s classic self-titled debut from 1971, a truly sumptuous edition which, in addition to the original album, also features outtakes, BBC sessions, non-album tracks, fresh remixes and loads more treats. At the time, the group were a three-piece comprised of iconic frontman and bassist Phil Lynott, drummer Brian Downey and guitarist Eric Bell, a Belfast native who’d cut his teeth with a variety of acts, including Van Morrison’s Them and showband act The Dreams.

I’d planned to start our chat by asking Eric what he recalled of recording Lizzy’s debut – though I was forced into a rethink when I read a retrospective, where the guitarist explained he’d forgotten many of the details due to the amount of dope smoked during recording. Still, Eric speaks very vividly and compellingly about the nascent Lizzy’s initial steps into the world of recording.

“We were very nervous, because were in a London studio for Decca,” recalls the softy spoken guitarist. “That was a big deal for us. Philip had a little bit of hash, and he said to me, ‘Do you think your man would mind if I rolled one?’ He was talking about Scott English, who was our producer, a big American guy. Scott said, ‘What’s that man?’ and Philip showed him it. Scott opened this drawer, where there was a bag of grass, and said, ‘Help yourself!’ So you can guess what it was like. There were some good times recording the first album.”

Although Thin Lizzy would go on to exert enormous influence on both hard rock and metal, revisisting the debut, I was struck by the psychedelic feel, both in the artwork and the trippier moments moments on the album.

“There were a lot of influences,” Bell acknowledges. “Philip was into poetry in a big way, and the Irish gods – the Celts, the Vikings and so on. So he had that, and Brian Downey was into blues and BB King. Plus he loved The Beatles and all the rest of it. For my part, I was into blues and some very obscure albums. Also, I loved The Shadows and I still do. All those influences were in play, and there were acoustic guitars on the first album as well. The first album is basically the real, original Thin Lizzy.

“Obviously it went on to better things with the twin guitars, but we were playing some acoustic at the time, which Philip later dropped.”

When Bell first joined the group, what did he make of their prospects? Did he feel they had they had the potential to go and be as hugely successful as they were?

“At that point in time, I’d left the Dreams showband,” he explains. “I wanted a three-piece band and I had the great fortune to meet Philip and Brian. Then we joined up and started doing a few gigs, but we’d no idea anything was going to happen, it just didn’t occur to us. We just did the circuit with all the other groups.”

In retrospect, it’s quite remarkable that two of the greatest ever Irish artists, Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher, both released their debuts in 1971. As with Rory, there are some virtuoso guitar moments on Lizzy’s LP, with Bell at times venturing into Hendrix-style pyrotechnics – fitting as he would later join The Noel Redding Band, the titular ensemble of Hendrix’s bassist. Was Jimi an influence on Lizzy as they created their debut?

“Oh yes, definitely,” nods Bell. “Hendrix influenced everyone, all the top guitar players recognised he was just a new thing. He was incredibly experimental, and you couldn’t help but be influenced by that guy. He was a one-off – what can you say about Hendrix? After a while, I had the good fortune to join Noel Redding, who I was with for quite a while. But the thing with Noel is he never, ever told you what Hendrix was like!

“I was with him for over two years, and now and again I’d say, ‘Hey Noel, what was Jimi really like?’ And he’d say, ‘He was a black blues player who took a lot of acid.’ I never saw Jimi play live, but I met Mitch Mitchell and Noel – we were together in Noel’s house. It was quite strange playing with Mitch and Noel, with me in the middle!”

Eric Bell presented with the Oh Yeah Legend award at the NI Music Prize 2024

Amidst the eclectic mix on Thin Lizzy, on the more acoustic and folkier moments, there are also echoes of Led Zeppelin.

“Oh yeah,” says Eric. “We were listening to everyone who was anybody. We were definitely listening to Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles as well, absolutely. Other people too, like Captain Beefheart – he had some incredible ideas. It was a very exciting time around 1969 and ‘70, all this was going on. There were loads of bands, loads of hippies – everybody stoned! I thought at one time, ‘Society’s going to stay like this forever.’ You got that impression. But it’s just another phase, and a few years later, it disappeared.”

Thin Lizzy is also a hugely Irish album, starting with the psych-tinged opener ‘The Friendly Ranger At Clontarf Castle’. Lyrically, the song has a wonderfully trippy feel – I wonder what inspired it?

“Me and Phil got a house together in Clontarf at one point,” reflects Eric. “Phil and his girlfriend Gale lived there, and then my girlfriend Eleanor lived there. At that point in time, there were only four of us. Then word got around about this open house, so we had 15 to 20 people sometimes coming over at 1 o’clock in the morning (laughs). These groups would park outside and beep their horn, so a petition went out to get us out of the house. It was quite a crazy time.

“But I was sitting on the sofa playing acoustic, and Phil would walk by and say, ‘Is that yours, Eric?’ I’d say, ‘No, it’s off such-and-such an album.’ But he kept doing that. The next day I’d be sitting playing something, and he’d say, ‘Is that yours?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah’. So we would go down to his bedroom with two acoustic guitars, and sit and play over that idea. The first one was the intro to ‘Clontarf Castle’.”

There was also another element feeding into the lyrics...

“Philip was very much into comics, like the Silver Surfer, Batman, Superman, all the DC comics,” Eric continues. “In terms of ‘Clontarf Castle’, one of Phil’s comics was a space, cowboy-western story. On the cover, there was a thing going, ‘The friendly ranger paused, scooping a bowl of beans, spreading them like stars.’ As far as I know, Philip took that directly from the comic. I don’t know if anyone knows that anymore, I might be getting into trouble here!

“But I think that’s where it came from – the riff that I came up with and his words. That’s the way we used to work.”

For my money, when it comes to rock songwriters, Phil Lynott was the greatest at writing about Dublin, capturing the feel and atmosphere of the city in an almost Joycean style. ‘Old Town’ I think is the greatest music video shot in the city, while the high point of Thin Lizzy is the sublime ‘Dublin’, an unforgettable paean to the city.

“Well, it’s funny you should say that,” says Bell. “To cut a very long story short, after I met Philip and Brian, Phil said to me, ‘Brian and I will form a group with you on two conditions. I want to play the bass and I want to play some of my own songs.’ I didn’t know Phil from Adam, so he could have been a bit of a chancer, you know? I said, ‘Okay, can you come up to my flat next week?’ Phil said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a tape with three songs.’ So he came up, and I knew this girl who had a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

“We sat and listened to his stuff, and the first track was ‘Dublin’. It just blew me away, I couldn’t believe how good it was. Everything about it was incredible – his voice, the chords, the lyrics. I thought, ‘Jesus, man.’ I knew there and then my guitar playing would fit his style of songwriting, and that’s how it started.”

How did Bell find playing the material from the album live?

“We didn’t do them all,” he notes. “That happens sometimes, you just can’t get the feel of certain tracks onstage. We did a few tracks – ‘Ray Gun’, ‘Look What The Wind Just Blew In’, ‘Dublin, ‘Eire’, a little bit of ‘Remembering’. So there were about five or six we did live, but sometimes it’s very difficult to play original stuff in front of an audience, when you’re also playing a lot of cover songs – that’s what people seem to want to hear. Thank god it’s not like that too much now – you can get a chance to play your own songs onstage these days. But back in ‘69, it was really difficult.”

It goes without saying that Thin Lizzy have an extraordinary legacy, with the group constantly being discussed, referenced and covered by some of the biggest bands in the world. On their recent stop in Dublin, Guns N’ Roses covered the Lizzy track ‘Thunder And Lightning’, while just a few hours after I chat to Eric, Metallica will take to the stage in the Aviva, where the band will jam on a version of ‘Black Rose’.

For good measure, the group also visited Phil’s statue in Dublin city centre – frontman James Hetfield even visiting the singer’s grave in Sutton – and at their second Aviva show, they broke out their wildly popular cover of ‘Whiskey In The Jar’.

“It’s incredible, it really is,” says Bell of Lizzy’s ongoing influence. “Because when we recorded the debut album, there was nobody interested. We couldn’t give it away. We would get write-ups in various English music papers, and they would give us a very tiny review. They would say, ‘They’re a three-piece from Ireland, blah-blah-blah – they should try and find their own style. Because every song on the album is completely different.’ And we went, ‘Yeah – so fucking what?!’ A lot of bands do that – they put an album out, and it’s like the first five tracks are the same song. We were experimenting at that point and no one was interested.

"Then, out of the blue, Kid Jensen got a copy, and he was one of the top DJs in Radio Luxembourg. He loved the album, and John Peel liked us as well. Looking back, it’s 55 years since this album was made, and there’s a lot of people talking about it. And I say, ‘Where the fuck were you at the time?!’”

Eric Bell, Phil Lynott and Brian Downey of Thin Lizzy on 15th November 1973. (Photo by Michael Putland)

When Lizzy’s career eventually took off, did Bell get to meet many musical heroes?

“We met a few people,” he says. “When ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ got into the charts, your lifestyle changed. All of a sudden, people are inviting you to their house. Ronnie Wood’s wife invited us to her house, and I think we were out of our depth! There were all these hardcore English musicians, and we were sitting on the edge of the settee. You start travelling in different circles whenever you have a hit – people start taking notice of you for a while.

“But our big mistake was that, after ‘Whiskey In The Jar’, the record company and our management said, ‘Right lads, what you want to do is, get another Irish song and jazz it up.’ And we said no! Philip was convinced the second single, ‘Randolph’s Tango’, was going to be a hit, and it was absolutely dire! It just disappeared completely, and Phil was quite freaked out.

“Because when we were on Top Of The Pops, we developed this sort of blase thing, where we went, ‘Oh yeah, it’s easy to get a hit record – maybe our second one will be a hit as well.’ And it fuckin’ failed dismally. No one talked about ‘Randolph’s Tango’. But that was Philip – he didn’t play the game.”

• Thin Lizzy (Deluxe Edition) is out now.