“I’m waiting for the right player. I don’t want to break the chain of great guitarists coming through”: Scott Gorham on the future of Thin Lizzy – and how the late John Sykes gave them some thunder when they needed it most

The late John Sykes plays his Les Paul Custom as Scott Gorham plays his Strat during a live Thin Lizzy performance in 2006. Both are bathed in red/orange stage lights.

Thin Lizzy rolled with the punches on 1980’s Chinatown and 1981’s Renegade (both featuring the bluesier Snowy White on guitar). But in 1982, Gorham called a crisis meeting.

“I told Phil we had to stop this whole thing. The drug addictions. Phil losing his voice. The mistakes we were now making on stage: that really hurt because we were a band that just did not make mistakes, then you hear a recording and you go, ‘What the hell was that?’ So I said, ‘Let’s wrap this thing up. Let’s get our shit together and when we both get healthy, we’ll hit everybody over the head with a fucking sledgehammer.’”