Exclusive: Scott Gorham Discusses His Memories Of Thin Lizzy’s Sydney Opera House ‘78 Show & Reveals His Future Plans.

SCOTT GORHAM INTERVIEW

By Paul Davies

To not hear Thin Lizzy's classic songs on the radio, or elsewhere, is like a summer without swallows. It just doesn't happen and for very good reasons. They are perennially played and constantly in demand tunes that herald good feelings and a belief that everything is right with the world. Thin Lizzy's bulging bag of heavily played hits still bursts explosively with songs that fly around this ever-spinning globe of rock music thus proving that the boys are forever back in town; they never really left as the new release of Thin Lizzy Live At The Sydney Opera House CD/DVD proves.

The memories of this show are as fresh as his then long mane of hair as guitarist Scott Gorham enthusiastically recalls: "Of all the thousands of shows I did and hundreds and hundreds of tours I seem to remember this particular one extremely well."  And the reason for this instant recall? "On every country tour, continent tour, world tour, you expect everything to go perfectly every night, or as close to right, you don't want any screw-ups, broken strings or whatever. So, usually, there's no real drama, but on this day, in 1978, in Sydney, it was so close to becoming a total disaster." With the Sydney authorities taking a dim view bordering on the myopic of history in the making, Lizzy had a struggle on their hands to get the show on as Scott reveals the layers of obstacles for the band to negotiate around: "The first thing was the city fathers, the Mayor of Sydney, they didn't want us to play at the Sydney Opera House because nobody had played there before. It's their Taj Mahal. Anybody that sees a picture knows exactly where they are in the world. They were really frightened about some damage happening to it, but they got turned around. There had to be an audience cap of 6000 people and that was going to be it. We thought that’s OK; it was still a good group of people. On that whole tour, we played to between 12-15,000 a day, but six grand? That's all right." And here comes the rub: "In reality, what happened was, and this is what I've been told, is that a couple of days before the show a radio station went on the air and said, 'Well, ladies and gentlemen, you know that Thin Lizzy is performing at the Sydney Opera House steps this Saturday and we also hear there's that there are still tickets available', Scott continues, "which there weren't as they had been sold out for a couple of weeks. We have no idea why they said this. So, comes the day, it wasn't just hundreds of people that came down or thousands of people it was tens of thousands of people who showed up on the steps of the Sydney Opera House and their security was completely overwhelmed. They hired just enough security for 6000 people." As things were getting heavy, the strong arm of the Aussie law appeared: "They had the police come down, counsellors were talking about what if it could get nasty? So, it comes to the day, everybody was led in, and I've heard estimates that there were between 60 and 100,000 people. But let's go with like, say 65,000 which, in fact, put us in the Australian Guinness Book of Records for the biggest outdoor event in Australia. That record has probably now been broken by AC/DC or something. Anyway, that was problem number one, but it was fine. Problem number two came up when our sound guy up front said 'we're gonna have a problem the PA that we've got is only big enough to throw the sound to a 6000 audience. We thought it is what it is - we were just gonna go out and have a good time. The next problem we had was, it was about thirty minutes before we went onstage, the monitor guy came in and told us that all our side feeds were down and out for the count, and that included our drummer Martin Nauseef: he was not going to be able to hear anything. However, they did put a little tiny monitor in right behind him which was effectively nothing. But, as you'll see in the video, we were out front on these ramps, and then we run back to the drummer Mark to make sure that we're getting the correct count and all that right. So with all that said and done, you know, we just had a really great time that day and so did the audience."

One of the more noticeable aspects of this recording is a change of drummer as Scott explains: "For some reason, Brian Downey decided he was going to quit the band literally four weeks before we're supposed to get on the flight which threw myself and Phil into a little bit of a panic: the contracts are signed, the tickets are sold, and you gotta go! I gotta hand it to the management, they put together a VIP list of drummers for us to audition when we got out to Los Angeles. And that's what we did. And one of the guys was Terry Bozzio: what a great drummer from the first count in of 1234 he was beat perfect through the whole set, and he was OK with the money, the timing, and the travel and all that. But he made one stipulation that he wanted us to fly his girlfriend with us on every show and we just didn't do that. We didn't bring the wives and girlfriends on tour; it was all strictly business." So, onto the next sticks-man on the list: "That's when Mark Nauseef came in. We tried out more drummers and Mark was the last guy we tried out and he was perfect. Absolutely perfect. His demeanour and his character were right down our alley and his sense of humour was just great. We knew that we were gonna get along with him great. And then at rehearsal, we heard him play further into the set and we knew this is our guy, Mark is going to pull this off in a big way. So, he became the Thin Lizzy drummer." In many ways, it's no surprise given his previous pyrotechnical percussive credentials in Elf and the Ian Gillan Band.

Another 'new-ish' player in the band was a returning Gary Moore but this time as a permanent member whose fearsome fretwork, in tandem with Gorham, is one of the highlights of this show as Scott lifts the lid on the simmering tensions inside the band: "Brian Robertson did come back in the band. I got him back in the band and Phil agreed. Phil said, 'Listen, he's gonna fuck it up, man. He's gonna do something and he's gonna get kicked out again. I'm telling you.' I assured him that all is gonna be good." Scott sighs: "Sure enough, Brian did that one more thing, so Phil said, 'I told you, man, I told you!' I had to put my hands up. Gary was the obvious choice because he'd already been out on that massive Queen tour that we were on which was totally successful and a great time. We all got to see what a great musician this guy was. He was the kind of natural choice to get back into the band and get this thing rolling again."

Throughout his time in Thin Lizzy in the 70s and 80s, the resourceful and stalwart Gorham played with a VIP list of guitarists including Robbo, Moore, Snowy White John Sykes and a few more. What are his thoughts on these various sidemen? "When you play with players of that ilk, when they're that good, something is gonna rub off and I always say 'if you don't learn from really great players, then you're a fool' because you've been put in a great position to rub shoulders with all these great players, these innovative people. If you don't learn something, then you've wasted your chance there. So, I would say, I learned quite a bit from a lot of these guys that I've played with Brian Robertson included." Scott rolls back the years: "When I got into this thing, I had only dedicated myself to the guitar for three years. So, I was the musically under-educated guy in that whole band. I was constantly having to play pickup and all that to get my ass in gear. In saying that it was really Phil and me who were doing a lot of the writing. So along with learning how to write songs better with Phil, I was also getting schooled on the whole guitar side at the same time. So, it was very good. I would say that everybody that went through that band, and there were a lot of us that went through that band, everybody came out of it probably a better person and a much better player and songwriter."

An integral element to Thin Lizzy's trademark sound is the guitar harmonies that are as recognisable as Phil Lynott's inimitable voice. This is an area of songwriting that Scott is especially proud of but did he find it difficult to keep coming up with hooky thirds and fifths harmony lines: "I found it really easy myself. I was brought up on the whole country thing such as the Everly Brothers with their fifths and thirds and all that. So that was well drilled into my whole psyche. I never purposely wrote any harmonies with a seventh note in there because I just liked the sweetness of the Everly Brothers with the fifth and the third all the way that's really pleasing to my ear. I hear a seventh and I get very uncomfortable it kind of tweaks my head a little bit. I tend to stay away from all that." Scott opens on the writing process in the band: " I would say some of them became like the second hook of the song. How easy was it? Well, I don't think I looked at it as easy or hard. It was what it was. I would get an idea and would write the line and think well is that a line that's going to be memorable? Will people remember this line and stuff like that? That's when I would start to go over the harmony cycle. Let's see how the harmony notes fit in there: is it as sweet as I think it is? I was always after the sort of the melodic commercial side of things as far as the harmony guitars went so, yeah, I blame it on the Everly Brothers. I love those guys."

Looking back, Scott reminisces about his achievements in the band and ponders upon the band's status stateside: "Being able to stay together for nine years is a huge achievement. Knowing all the chaos, there were cancellations in America, that was just unbelievable, and America was always kind of our bogey country. I mean, we all wanted to make it in America. We got up to a certain level. But to get into that higher echelon, we didn't quite do it. I've been told a lot of it was because we just kept cancelling this tour and cancelling that tour and people had already bought the tickets. I think after a while, people started to distrust us, and wonder are these guys going to show up? Are they going to get off the plane? Also, I think it was a case of being right in the middle of that massive vocal harmony bank that a lot of bands had. In that sense. I think having the harmony guitars was kind of commercial enough for us. It's hard to say, there are probably numerous reasons why we didn't make it in America. And maybe they were all those reasons. It's hard to say but people still love the band and I'm so grateful for that."

Another memory Scott clearly cherishes is working with Phil Lynott: "It was amazing. When I first met him, all eyes were pointed at Phil especially from the two Brian's on that first day. I realised, this Phil guy he's the guy that everybody's gravitating to. I started to realise that he was the guy that was writing all the songs. So, we were rehearsing one day getting ready for the very first album, our Nightlife album, and I had this riff in my head I just started to play it and Phil turned around and said, 'What's that?' And I said, 'it's a riff I've had for a while', and he goes, 'have you got any more to it'?  And I played him the rest of the song and he says, 'Do you mind if I write some lyrics?' and I was like, 'Hell yeah, man, absolutely write lyrics to that.' The song is called 'She Knows' and it was the first track that I had written with Phil on the first album that I have ever done. And it turned out to be the opening track on it. If you ask me what it was like to work with a guy like Phil? It's kind of there in a nutshell! He was a generous guy. He wanted everybody in the band to write. He wanted everybody to have their own spotlight. He wanted all the fans to know everybody's name in the band. He was just a generous guy."

The events leading up to Scott joining Thin Lizzy had an element of serendipity about them: "I kind of had my own band in London called Fast Buck. You can't get any more American than that, right? And, what I used to do is try to get as many musicians as I could up on the stage, so I could meet as many people as possible because timewise I knew I was under the gun. At this point, just before I met Phil, I had thirty days left on my visa and I was going to step back onto the aeroplane and go back to LA. But this Irish guy I knew, Ruan O’Lochlainn, was in a band called Bees Make Honey and he played keyboards and saxophone and he would come up occasionally and jam with us and that was a kind of Irish connection. He knew that Phil and Thin Lizzy were looking for a guitar player and he said to me 'I think you're the kind of guy that they're looking for do you want me to put your name forward'? I said, 'Yeah’, so he did, and I went down and I met all the guys and pretty much hit it straight off the bat. I certainly did with Phil. As I can remember walking into that damn rehearsal room, the two Brian's both had their arms crossed, they saw me and their eyes go up like, oh my god, because I was number 25 of all the people that came down to audition. Unbelievable. I think they were just sick of it. Phil called me that night and asked me to join the band."

Scott is fermenting future plans for a possible Thin Lizzy touring band as he details: "Right now I'm in the process of writing some more songs with the band 21 Guns. I've talked to a couple of the guys out of the band and we're thinking of trying to get together for a writing session. Just last night, my manager called up and asked if I am interested in a special guest slot on an arena tour as Thin Lizzy in 2023? I told him that there really isn't a band right now. All the people that I would like to have in the band all have day jobs that pay very well. It's a hard band to put together with the right people and with the right timing. Let's see what happens, these are the kind of things that we are working on right now." You wouldn’t bet a fast buck against the boys being back in town on a tour playing Thin Lizzy’s timeless classics.