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Wah… wah-wah-wahwah-waaah… I wonder how you’re feeling, there’s ringing in my ears…’
Another day in spring 1976, another strip mall in the American Midwest, and another blast of Peter Frampton’s Show Me The Way. Thin Lizzy were touring the US and had stopped to buy cigarettes. Show Me The Way, and its chart-topping album Frampton Comes Alive!, were inescapable. Every time Lizzy got near a radio they heard that ‘wah-wahwah…’ talk-box intro and then Frampton’s audience screaming when he sang the song’s opening line: ‘I wonder how you’re feeling…’
Bass-playing Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott was well schooled in wowing an audience, but Frampton’s noisy reception annoyed him. “It’s a good song,” says Lizzy’s gatekeeper, guitarist Scott Gorham. “But after hearing it for the millionth time, Phil said: ‘What the fuck, man. Why are they cheering? Is he turning somersaults? Gimme a break.’” After a pause, Lynott uttered the prophetic words: “We could do that. We could do it even better.”
In June 1978, Lynott’s boast became reality with Live And Dangerous, the album against which all past and present Lizzy releases would be measured. An upcoming 45th-anniversary super-deluxe edition proves that the answer to the eternal question: Which is the greatest live album of all time?, remains the same. Live And Dangerous captured Lizzy’s on-stage swagger and joie de vivre, but also succeeded in bottling lightning. The ‘dream team’ of Lynott, Gorham, guitarist Brian Robertson and drummer Brian Downey were a combustible mix, and part of what made them such a thrilling live act eventually ripped them apart.
Gorham and Robertson, aka Robbo, are one of rock’s great odd couples; like long-divorced parents who don’t talk and only meet up at an offspring’s wedding. Their offspring being Live And Dangerous.
“I loved every second of it and I’m proud of it,” says Robertson today.
“There’s just something about these songs that does it for me,” says Gorham.
A self-professed “uppity little Scotsman”, Robertson has been largely under the radar since his 2011 solo album Where Robbo is blunt and critical, Gorham – all silvery hair and beard and smouldering vape – is a fount of polished anecdotes and positive energy. In February he guests with Black Star Riders (the band who started life as the redux Thin Lizzy) on their tenth-anniversary tour. After which he’s hoping BSR frontman Ricky Warwick
