“I used to ask, ‘What was Hendrix really like?’ All Noel would say was, ‘He was a black blues player who took a lot of acid’”: Eric Bell tells the tale of how he joined forces with Noel Redding, after leaving Thin Lizzy as a self-confessed ‘basket-case’

Eric Bell.

During a New Year’s Eve gig in 1973, Eric Bell drunkenly threw his Strat in the air, kicked over his amp, walked off and passed out backstage. The next day, he quit Thin Lizzy – ushering in their first Gary Moore era.

Bell left his seedy attic dwelling in London and hightailed it home to get clean. ”I moved back to Dublin with my girlfriend and tried to get my health back together,” he tells Guitar World.