Have you ever listened to a Thin Lizzy song and thought, ‘mmm, this is pretty good but it would sound better with some synths on it, maybe get some hi-NRG beats in there, dust off the Oberheim DMX drum machine – hey, Phil, have you ever thought about pretending to be a robot?’ No, you haven’t, because the two just don’t go. But Phil Lynott, who it should be remembered had taken a lot of drugs by this point, had this very idea in his head as to where Thin Lizzy might go in the 80s.
It was an unsettling time for his band. The year was 1979 and Gary Moore had left (again) midway through a US tour and the group needed to find someone pronto to fill the slot. Phil Lynott had become pals with Midge Ure, formerly of New Romantic poseurs Visage and future writer of such 80s classics as Vienna and, erm, Do They Know It’s Christmas, and persuaded Ure to take a break from writing the first Ultravox record and play guitar for Lizzy. His time in the band was brief – he did have an era-defining debut album to get back to, after all – but Ure’s effect on Lynott went deeper than being a super-sub guitarist.
