Driving Force

“I’m from Drimnagh originally, which is right beside Crumlin and I used to see Phil around when I was a kid.”

Gus Curtis is reeling in the years, looking back to what was a far more innocent time. He was Philip Lynott’s driver, his personal assistant and his friend and confidante from the early days in Dublin through to near the turbulent end. But for now we’re talking about the 1960s, when Dublin was starting to go through a major transformation. Music was springing up everywhere. The beat boom was in full flight in Liverpool and London. It started to happen in Dublin too.
“It was in our teens, knocking around town on the beat group scene, when I really got to know Phil,” Gus continues. “We got on very well and I also got to know Brian Downey around the same time. There was a few of us who became good friends, hanging around, drinking in the Bailey, which was our second home in those days.
“I was working away in a day job, while he was full-time with the music. They were all staying in various apartments around town – he had a place in Kenilworth Square in Rathgar for a few years and later he moved out to Clontarf.”
Back then, music and partying were the order of day and night. When Thin Lizzy and their friends on the scene weren’t gigging, they were busy socialising.
“We were always knocking around town and when the band was off on a Saturday night we’d go into the Bailey where there was always plenty of talent.” Gus isn’t talking about musicians. “After that, we’d head out to the flat in Clontarf and have an all-night party where we just sat up, listening to sounds.”
Clontarf is, of course, a major place in Lizzy lore, the source of the trippy romanticism of ‘The Friendly Ranger At Clontarf Castle’, which appeared on the band’s debut album, Thin Lizzy.
“The next morning, we’d go into town,” Gus recounts, “to the Coffee Inn on South Anne Street. The owner was an Italian called Luigi and he had a son we all got on with. Phil always had pizza and chips or his other favourite, which was spaghetti bolognaise or spaghetti ‘bollock-naked’ as he used to call it. And he’d always have a hot chocolate after that.
“We’d hang out there for a few hours then we’d go around to The Bailey for a few pints. Phil would drink nothing else but Smithwick’s in those days. If someone put a pint of Guinness in front of him, he wouldn’t go near it (laughs).”
When the band moved to London, Curtis stayed behind initially, continuing his day job. But the offer of a full-time gig with Thin Lizzy was, he says, too much to turn down. It was a life-changing moment.
“Every so often, Phil would ring me and ask me over to London and I’d have a great time,” he recalls. “I was there around the time they were recording the first album. When that was finished there was a big launch party which was great. I would come home when they were gigging but they always kept in touch. They started getting really busy and then Phil asked me to be his driver. He couldn’t drive – in fact he never learned to drive. There was something about it that he couldn’t handle.”
Maybe it was the long legs!
“I’d had a full licence from an early age, which was handy, and we used to have an automatic Mercedes in Dublin. He tried to drive once and nearly killed us all. Anyway, he rang me up in the house one day and said, ‘look Gus, man, I really need you over here, if you would consider a job driving me around’. So off I went. I was generally a driver and a sort of personal assistant getting him from A to B on tour and making sure he turned up on time, and of course, keeping him out of trouble. Brian Downey would hop in occasionally.”
As time progressed and the band became bigger, Curtis found himself becoming much more than just Lynott’s driver.
“He used to confide in me, telling me a lot of personal stuff. I think I was probably a good listener and he trusted me. He would go over the top sometimes, and he was well aware of it. He had a bit of temper – if someone was pissing him off he’d let them know about it but when things got out of hand I’d just say, ‘come on Phil let’s go’. I found him in a heap a few times and had to shake him out of it. But we never fell out in all the years I knew him. We never had a row.”
Looking back, Gus Curtis reckons that Philip Lynott would still be around if he had been able to slow down the hectic pace of his life and take a break once in a while. The irony is that he was too driven.
“He was a workhorse, he never stopped,” Gus says. “I sat him down when things were getting hectic and when the schedule was mad and I said, ‘Philip, man, take a break. Go to Paris and chill out’. He used to always say he would like to do what Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top did. They were good mates. Lizzy toured with ZZ Top in America. Billy just gave up everything for a while and moved to Paris, where he lived incognito. I said, ‘why don’t you do what Billy did?’
“But that wasn’t the way he was built. He had to be on the move, day and night. Sometimes we’d be on the go for literally weeks without much sleep. He’d be recording all night, we’d go home at six or seven and he’d probably go over some photographs of the band and we might go along the King’s Road, have a gargle and then go for a ramble, checking out the clothes shops. He was mad about clothes – he used to dress the band, drag them by the scruff of the neck and say, ‘Hey Brian, try this on, try that on’.”
When Thin Lizzy broke up, Gus came back to Dublin.
“It was kind of sad, in a way, the demise of Lizzy, the band he’d spent years slogging with. It was a conscious decision that it wasn’t viable anymore. They’d had a few problems along the way, with American tours costing them more money than they made. He asked me to work with Grand Slam and he put a lot of energy and money into it. But it didn’t take off. There were some bad reviews. We went on a few small tours, which were great. But he was huge in places like Sweden, where his solo albums sold more than anywhere else in the world.”
There was a moment when it became clear that everything was not right in Philip’s universe.
“Phil stayed on in London, which was a mistake,” Gus reflects. “I used to see him occasionally and I did see a change in him. The marriage break-up and the failure of Grand Slam had a devastating effect. I was hearing reports back from London that he wasn’t looking after himself. I was shocked, one particular time, when I met him, not long before he died, at a Clann Éadair gig in the Royal Hotel in Howth one Sunday afternoon. He looked worn out.”
Gus Curtis still lives in Howth, close to Philo’s mother Philomena, with whom he remains in close contact.
“Me and Phil had some fantastic times – too many to relate!” he says. “One highlight is when we both met Paul McCartney. He was doing a week in Wembley Arena, Harvey Goldsmith was the promoter and he got us in backstage. After the gig, McCartney requested Harvey to let Phil into his private room and I was allowed to go along too. The two of us had an hour with Paul McCartney. He was apparently knocked out by Phil’s song ‘Sarah’. That’s why Paul wanted to meet Phil in the first place. Meanwhile, Linda was cooking away, so I got lovely vegetarian nosh. It’s a great memory to have – just one of many.”