Until one of the record company execs had the idea of The Boys Are Back in Town. “We were asked: ‘What do you think would make a single?’” Downey recalls. They had it perfect by 1976’s Jailbreak album, and its single The Boys Are Back in Town, which finally achieved Lynott’s aim of getting a US hit, albeit by accident. It was as simple as: you pick a melody, then you pick a harmony.” Scott didn’t have a grasp of scales at the time. It was something that developed instinctively, according to Gorham. “I had only been playing guitar for three years.” But together – after one failure of an album, Nightlife – they gradually worked out a way to play gorgeous, harmonised guitar lines that managed to seem languid and elegant, even when the band was pressing hard on the accelerator. “At this point, Brian was way more accomplished than I was,” Gorham accepts. But Phil was thinking about world domination, about getting to America.” It was nothing to do with the guitar playing. “Scott – we didn’t really want him in the band. Robertson, though, has a different version of events. Gorham says Lynott decided he would never again be let down by a guitar player – which proved to be a vain hope – and decided to get two in, so there was always a spare. Until, that is, their guitarist Eric Bell drunkenly walked offstage in Belfast on the last night of 1973, in the middle of the set, never to return to the band – although the Bell years are represented on a new six-CD/one-DVD box set, Rock Legends, containing all the Lizzy UK singles, dozens of demos and a disc drawn from a couple of 1980 live shows. The pair were in bands, then in bands together, one of them finally becoming Thin Lizzy. Singer Phil Lynott rehearsing in London, 1973. "He was the only black guy in the whole school," Downey says. Their roots stretched back to Downey and Lynott's time at the Christian Brothers school in Crumlin in the 1960s. It was a very cheap hotel and it had lots of senior citizens living there, so all of these people had help each other out of the hotel in the middle of the night while Gazza and I stayed in the room and tried to hide.Lizzy had already released three albums by the time Gorham and Robertson joined, with one UK hit single – a version of Whisky in the Jar that reached No 6 in 1972. Unfortunately the fire alarm went off and the whole hotel had to be evacuated. "In the early days with Lizzy we did a tour of Europe with Colosseum II, which was the band Gary was in at the time, and we did a gig in Arnhem, Holland. Gary came round my room at the hotel after the show with a crate of brandy. Needless to say, we had a great time and we ended up hosing each other down with the fire hoses in the hallway. ROBERTSON reflected on just one of his memorable Gary Moore stories: They were the best solos I'd ever heard at that point and I wouldn't let anyone talk me into changing that!" As it was time to record the guitar solos I refused to replace Gary's original solos. "When I first joined Thin Lizzy and we recorded the Nightlife album, there was this track that we had to do, a song called "Still In Love With You". Legendary guitarist BRIAN ROBERTSON recently took some time out to reflect and remember former band mate and friend Gary Moore, who passed away earlier this week. BRIAN spoke about the recording process of the Thin Lizzy "Nightlife" album and his refusal to re-record Gary's solos: On the cassette version, the positions of "She Knows" and "Showdown" were reversed. Still In Love With You - duet with Frankie Miller See also Deluxe Edition enhanced 2-CD version issued in 2012
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