Los Angeles-born guitarist Scott Gorham joined Thin Lizzy in 1974 at the same time as guitarist Brian Robertson, marking the beginning of the classic Lizzy line-up that found worldwide success two years later with the Jailbreak and Johnny The Fox albums. He remained with the band until its breakup in 1983, and was the longest-serving member after founders Phil Lynott and Brian Downey.
The first time we met was at the aftershow for the final night of three at the Hammersmith Odeon on the Johnny The Fox tour, in November 1976. Guests included George Best, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, Johnny Rotten, several Sun Page 3 girls, various TV stars, and Huey Lewis, then of Clover. Lizzy attracted a high level of celebrity to their shows.
Well, I guess we did, because I remember shaking hands with a lot of people I probably didn’t think I’d ever meet. Then you’re having a conversation with them, then you become friends with them. But all the parties and all the people that you meet, when it came down to the music, it was all business. That’s the part that I’m really proud of.
1976 was Lizzy’s big breakout year, starting with Jailbreak, in March, which went gold here and in the US, and the big single from it The Boys Are Back In Town, which hit the Top 10 both here and in the US.
Yeah, that year was the explosion.
Did you know as you were making it that Jailbreak could be the one?
No. Our first two albums were dismal failures. For the third, Jailbreak, we literally had everyone saying to us: “You’d better do it on this one or there’s the door.” Record company, management, I even think what few fans we had at that point were saying it. So we doubled our efforts. We demoed and demoed and demoed and wrote and wrote. That’s why Jailbreak and Johnny came out in the same year. We wrote probably two and a half albums’ worth of songs.
Also, The Boys Are Back In Town was so big worldwide, we pretty much knew we were gonna be on the road constantly. We didn’t know if we’d have time to make another album in the space available to us.
At the same time as being incredibly prolific, it was also a time of great turmoil for the band. Phil got hepatitis, causing the cancellation of your summer 1976 US tour. Then your fellow guitarist Brian ‘Robbo’ Robertson injured his hand so badly in a fight at the Speakeasy involving Frankie Miller, the start of your next US tour was cancelled too.
That was another crazy-ass period. America became like the bad-luck territory for us. We could tour anywhere else in the world – which we did – and not a damn thing would go wrong. The tours went off beautifully. We’d get to America, and bang! Something happens. Got to get back on the plane and go home. I think the American fans thought: “If I buy a ticket are these guys even gonna show up?” I don’t blame them. You can’t keep people’s trust if you keep cancelling tours.
Yes, Robbo fucked up. But I still love the guy, and I had so much fun, being his guitar partner that came up with all the harmony lines that became the Thin Lizzy sound. I had such a great time with that man. But he just could not keep his shit together.
There was a review of Jailbreak in which the guy said something about “that classic Thin Lizzy sound of the twin guitars”. I said to Robbo: “Hey, man, can you believe it, we got a sound!” That’s why you saw it in a lot of the Thin Lizzy songs, the twin harmony sound. I would write specifically to put these harmony guitars in certain areas, because I knew a lot of it would be like your second hook. You’ve got Phil doing his thing, he’s got his vocal hook. Now let’s go for the harmony-guitar second hook.
Talking of that twin-guitar harmony thing, moving forward a couple years, I heard Waiting For An Alibi on the radio the other day and I hadn’t heard it in… I can’t remember how long. I turned the radio up and I thought: “God, that sounds great!” And it didn’t sound like anything we’d been listening to on the radio for the last hour and a half. I was kind of proud of ourselves for sticking to our guns. This is what we do. This is the way it’s gonna be played. This is the way we like it.
What about the Irish influence? Both you, an American, and Robbo, a Scotsman, seemed to have that Irish ‘diddly-diddly’ in your guitar playing. Was that conscious? Did you have to work on it?
When I got into Thin Lizzy I didn’t really know what ‘Irish rock’ was. When I met Phil, this black guy who talked with an Irish accent, I had no idea what was going on here. I hadn’t even heard a lot of traditional Irish music at this point. It was Phil that introduced me to the whole Irish music genre. He would point things out. I would listen, and realised it was really cool and really subtle.
And I would take my guitar and try and emulate what these Irish musicians were doing. But my style of playing was a lot more American, so it was never gonna come out as a bonafide Irish guitar line. But the intent was there all the time to try and keep the whole Gaelic thing alive that Lizzy had. Not all of it. But stuff like Emerald [from Jailbreak] that needed an Irish line, for sure.
When Lizzy broke big in 1976, you were not considered heavy metal. In fact you were most often compared to artists like Bruce Springsteen and Graham Parker. You were rockers but you also played a lot of funk, which you can hear on Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed. You had weepy ballads like Borderline, also from Johnny. You had Phil coming out with two books of his poetry during this period. You weren’t boxed-in worrying about pleasing rock and metal fans.
Sure. It wasn’t a cookie-cutter kind of thing. Every album was a little bit different from the last album. But in America I thought maybe that was part of our problem. We weren’t put in this box that all these fans could follow religiously. I said that in a couple of interviews, and I got feedback from all these different fans saying no, that wasn’t right at all. That’s why we love you guys, because you don’t keep repeating yourselves. You always come up with something different for different albums. And I thought, okay, there are people out there who actually get what we’re trying to do, right? I thought that was very, very cool.
Tell me about your relationship with Phil. On stage Robbo was kind of the lone wolf, very serious and not to be messed, while you and Phil were more chill, always smiling on stage, sharing a joke.
We were really comfortable with each other. We had the same sense of humour. We pretty much liked the same of everything. That’s why we got along so well. It was always Phil and I after a show. He and I going to the club. He and I going to the bar. “Hey Scott, see you in the lobby.” That kind of thing. It was always me and Phil. I think it was maybe kind of to the detriment of some of the other guys in the band, where they felt they were maybe being excluded a bit. I didn’t think so at the time.
But you’re right, it was always Phil and Scott. We would sit in his living room at his house in Kew with our acoustic guitars, hammering out these chords and song lines. “Hey, what do you think of that lyric there?” “Yeah, that’s really cool.” Egging each other on to write these songs, then present them to the rest of the band, who were gonna add whatever they were gonna add later on.
Did you feel you should have got more songwriter credits on the songs?
Thank you!
You once told me about Dancing In The Moonlight. How the first time Phil played it to you he was in bed, and he played this very simple riff on an acoustic and you dismissed it – until you and the band built it into the hit we now know.
What Phil did, he would start things out by going: “What do you think of this?” And he would play something really simple. And you’d go: “Ah, I don’t know. How about if we do it like this?” He’d go: “Yeah, man, that’s what I’m talking about!” But because he had come up with that little chord structure, he had written it, you know? [laughs].
Robbo has said how Don’t Believe A Word, the big hit from Johnny The Fox, was originally a slow ballad, until Phil left to do an interview or something, at which point Robbo came up with the galloping riff that we now know from the single.
Yeah, I think he should have got a credit. I attribute that version mostly to Brian Robertson. He was the one who came up with that great riff, which I latched onto immediately. Like: “I’m gonna put a great harmony onto that!” Which turned out to be a hit in all of two minutes and seventeen seconds. I think we had one more part to that song, and in the end in the studio we just went: “Naw, two minutes and seventeen seconds, that’s fine. It’s probably just going to be an album filler anyway.”
But the money side of being in a band never really interested me. It wasn’t a subject that I talked about a lot, or I was obsessed with. Maybe I should have been – according to my wife. My whole philosophy was I just wanted to be respected for being in a kickass band. That was my main goal right there. If we make money, we make money. If we don’t, at least we’re a kickass band. And Thin Lizzy was a real kickass band.
Lastly, is it true that whenever Phil was interviewing someone to join the road crew, his main question was: “Can you fight?”
Yes! Lizzy really was a gang. If anyone started any trouble with any member of the band or crew, we all piled in. You had to know how to handle yourself. And, oh yeah, we did.
Thin Lizzy’s 1976 box set is out now via UMR. Read the Classic Rock review
