Trouble Boy: The Ballad Of Phil Lynott
The short, extraordinary life of Ireland's greatest rock star.
“What’s it like being black and Irish?”
“It’s a bit like being a pint of Guinness.”
It wasn’t just lines like that that ensured Phil Lynott’s place in the rock pantheon. A string of great songs, trans-Atlantic album success, the tendency to wear his bass like a gunslinger – it was Lynott’s destiny to take a place among the gods of rock.
That said, if you’d have explained how things were going to work out to the mixed-race child growing up in Manchester and Dublin with a white Irish mother and an absent Guyanese father, it’s fair to say the kid might have given you a funny look.
The Thin Lizzy front-man’s life story is one that stands up to regular retelling. Born Philip Parris Lynott in West Bromwich in 1949, Phil was named after his parents – Philomena Lynott, an Irish nurse, and Cecil Parris who’d gamely swapped Georgetown for the West Midlands.
The couple’s union was brief and although Cecil did contribute to his son’s upbringing, he wasn’t present in the child’s life. Nor was Philomena, for that matter. After a spell in a home for unmarried mothers in Birmingham and a move to Manchester, Phyllis – as she preferred to be called – took her child back to Dublin to live with her mother and father.
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