I know it sounds very, umm, bourgeois, but faced with the problem of people throwing guitars at you free, what do you do? Mind you, it's one of them things that if I turn too fast it drags me with it. In the old days, we used to think it was the pickup or the amp, but I think an awful lot now depends on the actual bass itself. One of the things I like about the Ibanez-it's huge, a big guitar that I've got-and I'm convinced now that if you've got a good piece of wood, from that comes your resonance. It's a lovely neck, a lovely piece of wood. But once I did, well, it's a beautiful guitar. It was totally bizarre trying to get used to it. A fretless is good fun to improve your technique. I have a fretless Schecter that I've used on this album, and it's great. They're afraid they'll find something like Alien jump out at them, you know? This sweat monster jumping out, this fungi living inside my guitar. We have jokes that the road crew are scared to open up the inside of my guitar. I just sweat that much! So you really need a strong guitar. One of the reasons I can't use a Rickenbacker stereo is that the sweat goes right into the pickup and it cancels the pickups out. It just seems that this one gives me the sound. I got a couple of them, but I just use the one. They're very, very sturdy, because I hammer them. Well, they came up to me, threw a few guitars at me, and I found their guitars are great. That's what I'm used to, honestly, that's what I was used to.īut then the Japanese crowd were just falling over backwards to do the merest whim: "Do you want your name on the guitar, do you want this, do you want a triple neck guitar?" They're throwing them at me free. And there were all these other guitars coming up that were passing them by, and they were sort of going, "But we're Fender." And they never did jack shit fire, you know? You could have a hundred of them, and nobody would even say thanks. But they slipped for a while, Fender-they didn't improve. And then I went to a Fender, and the Fender was ideal, you know? A Precision, yes. It was also good for the fingering-because it's so big, I had to get all my fingering right. Rickys have this habit of giving you an original sound. First of all, it was to learn an original tone, to get an original sound that was mine. I thought I was playing much faster than I was, but when I got on a big-neck bass guitar, I couldn't play, because that Dan Armstrong had two octaves or something. So then I found that this bass was playing me. It was very flash, but if you hit too hard, the strings got bent out of tune. See, when I started playing the bass, I had a perspex Dan Armstrong.
I went to Japan and to Ibanez, about two years ago. Phil, I noticed you've been using an Ibanez bass lately. Phil and I popped into the main studio room to have a chat, and we talked about his bass guitars and amps, his preference for touring rather than recording, his thoughts about the future of Lizzy, and quite a bit more. The band was just about to set off on a wide-ranging tour to support the new record. Phil and some members of Thin Lizzy were there in the control room at Battery as I arrived, busy trying to finish the mixing for their forthcoming album, Renegade. It was November 1981 when I went to Battery studio in north-west London to interview Phil Lynott (1949–1986).
These interviews will be appearing on Reverb in the coming months.įor previous installments, take a look at Tony's interviews with Les Paul, Tom Petty, and Chet Atkins, as well as a deeper look into the recording of Sgt.
PHIL THIN LIZZY ARCHIVE
Editor's note: This post is part of a series of unpublished interviews from the personal research archive of noted guitar writer Tony Bacon.
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