Try The Jail Phil!

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town

We have a family ritual, established aeons ago over a quintillion long car journeys. Basically as soon as Phil sings those lines we all sing out ‘Try the jail Phil!’, my kids have been doing it since they were four, occasionally chucking in ‘Try the post office Phil!’* instead for comic effect.

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I came to Thin Lizzy aged 14 via my dad’s copy of Bad Reputation which I picked up because I was impressed by how badass the cover looked compared to all his other LPs. I jumped from that to Live And Dangerous which I picked up 5 years later and only picked up a copy of Jailbreak in 2014, partly nudged into doing it by just how much my daughter loved playing ‘Jailbreak’ on Guitar Hero on the Wii**.

I should have bought Jailbreak decades before, I have no excuses. It would have been worth it for the tremendous Jim Fitzpatrick die-cut cover art even if I hated music. My copy is a slightly dog-eared original, much like myself recently.

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Like all good rock LPs do Jailbreak kicks down the (jailhouse? post office?) doors with the title track. It is absolutely superlative too, Lizzy are so clever the sound is basically really sparse, there isn’t much to it at all, just that perfect crunching riff and swaggering bass line. God bless Lynott too there is something so damned cool about the way he enunciates the verses. If you don’t dig this then you can’t be my friend.

I never know quite how to take ‘Angel From The Coast’, I do like the bristling tempo of it but somehow it never quite gets airborne for me. My favourite ever Thin Lizzy track is up next though, maybe it suffersbecause of that?

‘Running Back’ rides in on such a beautiful three note keyboard melody line^ and a lovelorn Lynott delivers his best lyric, selling it as only he can. For God’s sake, take him back woman! I would. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t forgive him for on this form. It’s a gentle pleasure of a song, albeit with a couple of seconds of whipped guitar notes.

I'm a fool now that it's over
Can you guess my name?
I make my money singing songs about you
It's my claim to fame
When they say it's over
It's not all over, there's still the pain

There is a touch of Springsteen about the narrative of ‘Romeo And The Lonely Girl’ and a truly appalling ‘Romeo / Own-io’ rhyme scheme that is utterly redeemed by some lovely guitar courtesy of Gorham and Robertson. Then we get all moody and macho with the leather clad ‘Warriors’, which is all menacing poses, mirror shades and flick knives.

Side 2 opens with a hidden Thin Lizzy gem that I’m sure more people would love, if only somehow they could ever hear it. Damn. Seriously though, has there ever been a better evocation of the excitement of a young night out on the town than ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’? It’s just one perfect moment where everything that is righteous and great falls into place – a perfect tune with great lyrics, meeting perfect delivery and THOSE guitar harmonies. Maaaan, it’s good.

Fact: my mates and I would always play this track before a night out on the razz, we loved it all of us and most of them weren’t rockers by any stretch of the imagination. It struck us years later that the night out was almost never as much fun as listening to ‘The Boys …’ had been^^.

The awesome cap guns and tin badge fantasies of the fabulously crunchy ‘Cowboy Song’ tend to overshadow the delicate charms of ‘Fight Or Fall’, another subtle addition to the Lizzy songbook with some lovely melodies. Still, just try not to air guitar your way through the loud bits of ‘Cowboy Song’, it may be impossible^*.

Even then we get to rock our baubles off one last time on Jailbreak with the mighty ‘Emerald’ and there aren’t many better opening lines than ‘Down from the glen came the fighting men’. I love every inch of it, especially the very Wishbone Ash-ish*^ twin guitar breakdown, which is masterful.

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Like all the very best founding fathers of hard rock nobody has ever sounded like Thin Lizzy before or since and almost every cover version I have ever heard of their songs is fucking awful. Just like Sabbath, ZZ Top and those Australian school children it’s all in the swing, so deceptively simple, so hard for lesser mortals to copy.

I think that having a main songwriter who was a bassist gives Lizzy a different slant, I am also so impressed with how none of Downey/Gorham/Robertson ever overplays anything by a scintilla, the spaces they leave are the key to it all. Phil Lynott’s voice is another reason too, the fact that he is so expressive, never seemingly losing his cool, slightly underplaying it all works wonderfully.

They don’t make bands like Thin Lizzy any more. They don’t make albums like Jailbreak anymore either, within a few years neither did the band, sadly. A brilliantly packaged, perfectly sequenced, perfectly played box of delights, redolent with romance, fighting and sex; rock doesn’t get much better than this.

If that chick don't want to know, forget her!

1128 Down.

https://youtu.be/iC6Cgb8nHwk

PS: I chose this LP to review inspired by a brilliant, if ultimately heart-breaking BBC documentary I watched on Phil Lynott a few weeks ago, called Phil Lynott: Songs For While I’m Away. It made me cry, of course.

*other municipal buildings evoke similar merriment.

**that look of ferocious concentration on her face as she hit her stride on that riff still makes me chuckle fondly to this day.

^played by an uncredited Tim Hinkley; I hate when bands don’t give full credit. There also seems to be some uncredited sax going on too.

^^The line ‘If that chick don’t want to know, forget her!’ became our ironic catchphrase; ironic because, very understandably, we soon ran out of ‘chicks’ we weren’t forgetting. Ahh, Carmarthen!

^*1537 Enterprises Inc. do not accept any liability for driving mishaps, or lost limbs/life/liberty/ability to pursue happiness that may occur if this injunction is followed while operating a vehicle or heavy machinery of any sort.

*^not to be confused with Wishbone Hashish, my entirely theoretical twin-guitar reggae covers band. Check out our version of ‘(Easy Skan)King Will Come’, if I had ever got around to doing it.