THIN LIZZY Guitarist Discusses PHIL LYNOTT's Death

In a recent interview with icLiverpool, Scott Gorham, the charismatic axeman in the THIN LIZZY line-up that produced the classic album "Jailbreak", reflected on the last time he saw his old friend, late LIZZY frontman Phil Lynott.

"I'd been clean for a year when I went round to Phil's house and found he was even worse shape than I'd last seem him," said the axeman. "He was making sounds about getting back on the road again, but to do that mentally and physically you've got to get your shit together and I looked at Phil and thought you're just not there, man.

"Three weeks later he was dead."

Scott was devastated by the death — "stunned would be an understatement" he says — but confesses that he felt he'd done all he could to help his old friend.

"When you're a drug addict the only person who's gonna help you is you. You can talk to someone until you're blue in the face but in terms of kicking the habit it's not gonna happen until that person wants to do it themselves."

The writing had been on the wall a couple of years before.

"We had been through close calls before with him and others but the D word (death) never came up — we thought we were just having fun," said Gorham. "But in 1982 it had got very bad with the drugs. We'd just finished another tour and I went to Phil and said look, all I see now is that my guitar playing has become a bag of shit. Let's walk away with our reputations intact.

"But after walking into his house wanting to quit the band I ended up walking out of it after agreeing to do one more album and another world tour! "That was a measure of Phil's powers of persuasion. He was a player who would never give up."

Gorham finally did give up when the band went their separate ways after recording that final album "Thunder and Lighting" in 1983.

"I knew I was in big trouble with coke, heroin — you name it, it was all class A baby," laughed Scott grimly.

"I put my guitar in its case, stoved it under the bed and went to see this doctor who had helped Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend with their problems. And that's how I finally got off them." Read more.