If Eric Bell closes his eyes and lets the music carry him off, he finds himself right back at the beginning. The scene is London’s Decca Studios, in the biting-cold winter of ’71, and the veteran guitarist is a young man once more, flanked by his Thin Lizzy bandmates, singer/ bassist Phil Lynott and drummer Brian Downey. None of the three Irishmen can believe their luck at being across the water, getting paid to do what they love. And it’s about to get even better.
“If you’d stuck your head into the studio for Lizzy’s first album sessions,” Bell remembers, “you’d have seen three big joints. What happened was, Philip had a very small piece of hash, and he asked our producer – an American guy called Scott English: ‘Is it okay if I roll this?’ And Scott went over to this drawer and pulled out, like, a pillowcase of grass. He just said: ‘Help yourself.’ And that was it.”
