THE VAGABONDS RETURN

With the release of Thin Lizzy's new Acoustic Sessions, with Phil Lynott's 70sera vocals, guitarist Eric Bell and producer Richard Whittaker tell us about grassaddled sessions, unfinished business and why this project definitely isn't Al.

-  Henry Yates

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.”

This distant memory, like so many others he’ll share, has been triggered by Bell’s recent work on Acoustic Sessions, a 10-track release billed as the first new Lizzy studio album in 42 years. This is the band’s cult early material as you’ve never heard it before, mostly pared back to the wood and wire of Bell’s acoustic guitar, Lynott’s howled street poetry and Downey’s supple, jazzy beats.

“Phil had two sides to him,” says the 77-yearold. “One side was the rock image. ‘I want to be rich and famous.’ That was his classic line. And he did it. But he had a very different side which was more poetic and lent itself to acoustic stuff.”