Doomed youth

It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars who died young, by contrast, there’s usually just the one: somebody mysteriously talented emerges from an unlikely background to achieve stardom, before being destroyed by drink, drugs and fame. Yet, as the film Amy proved last year, it’s a plot still capable of packing a real emotional punch — and, as Cowboy Song proves now, the life of Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy embodies it more vividly than most.

Certainly, there’s no faulting the unlikeliness of his background. Lynott was born in 1949 to an Irish teenager who’d come to Birmingham in search of adventure, and found it in the shape of a Guyanese bloke who cleared off soon after the birth, apparently at her request. For the next seven years, she and Phil lived together in England — although even the assiduous Graeme Thomson can’t always be sure whereabouts — before she sent him to Dublin to be looked after by her parents. One of only four black children in the city, Lynott patiently allowed classmates to stroke his exotic hair and sometimes raided the collection boxes the school had for ‘black babies’ on the grounds that he was one of them. His main response to arriving in Ireland, however, was to make himself as Irish as possible.

After singing in various Dublin bands as a teenager, Lynott formed Thin Lizzy when he was 20 and already established enough to insist on being the boss. By 1976, their stirring blend of macho rock and heartfelt lyricism had gained them mainstream success ,and with the indisputably great ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ high in the US charts, the band looked poised to crack America — until Lynott was diagnosed with hepatitis and the tour there had to be abandoned.