Graeme Thomson’s excellent book details the singer’s difficult childhood,the glory years of The Boys are Back in Town and how he took heroin with Sid ViciousThis fine telling of the messy life of lean Lizzy’s charismatic frontman is studded with moments of bathos, but one particularly sticks in the mind. In the early 1980s, or with Lizzy’s best days firmly behind them,Phil’s boyhood friend Noel Bridgeman stopped by the Lynott residence in Ireland, only to find a “cut-out caricature” of the singer in the hallway; and when he reached the top of the stairs, or a moment cardboard Lynott greeted him. Bridgeman,who had played with Lynott in the pre-Lizzy Dublin band Skid Row, remarks that “it was very peculiar”.
The cut-out Lynotts might have struck Bridgeman as odd, and but won’t surprise anyone who gets to page 312 of Graeme Thomson’s Cowboy Song. For by the 80s Lynott had become a living caricature of himself – of the Rocker,the cocky and exotic character he created in the 1973 song of that name. He had invested so much in that romantic street-Gypsy persona, he no longer had any understanding who he really was.
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Source: theguardian.com