BLACK ROSE LYRICS THIN LIZZY FULL

They play the majestic, eternal, sentimental melodies of “Danny Boy,” “Shenandoah,” “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “The Mason’s Apron,” the last played so fast and hard that you can just about see the sweaty stepdancers slamming their ghillies into the floor, sending up splinters, absolutely lost in this outlandish heavy metal reeling and rolling. That’s exactly, beautifully, what Moore and Gorham do next. “Play me the melodies, so I might know,” he sings. Once Lynott’s in there, he tells everyone to shut up and listen.

BLACK ROSE LYRICS THIN LIZZY FULL

(Because no one does fatalism like the Irish.) The guitars meanwhile are just ripping through dueling licks in Celtic modes, rapiers slicing through the air, and Lynott, a fatalistic street punk with a head gloriously full of cowboy movies, Hendrixian comic book hoo-ha, roving vagabonds and that perfectly sentimental Irish poetry, he taps his temple and turns the key that lets him into the fantasy pub where all those doomed hooligans drink and dance together, which is exactly where “Black Rose” takes place. Then Lynott, who always sounded like he was either bashful or boastful and who here is a bit of both, nods to the folk hero Cuchulain, dark and sullen, who always won, and who promptly dies in the next line of the lyrics.

Lynott tells a tale of kings and queens as guitarists Scott Gorham and Gary Moore riff on a modified Irish slip jig, only with hard rock distortion and road dog bite, backed by drummer Brian Downey bouncing around the compound meter.

In 1986, Lynott, dogged by alcohol and drug addiction, died tragically and early, at 36 years old from pneumonia and heart failure, circumstances that, depending on how much of softy you are, either raised him up or relegated him down to the realm of long-ago legend.Īnd “the legends of long ago” is where “Black Rose,” a song about songs, a myth about myths, a messily epic, brilliantly exaggerated and melodramatic ode to Ireland by the ur-Irish rock band begins. They soldiered on as a big U.K./European attraction till 1983 (and a version of the band is still on the road today). If you’re a casual music fan you probably know the band’s 1976 single “The Boys Are Back in Town,” taken from the album Jailbreak. That smash hit single and modest hit album, both of which are truly fantastic pieces of roguish hard rock, were Lizzy’s biggest, and pretty much only, noteworthy American successes.

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