Rewind album: Jailbreak, by Thin Lizzy (1976)
Of all the hairy hard-rock bands that dominated the pre-disco, pre-punk airwaves of the mid-1970s, perhaps none were as influential, or produced music that has stood the test of time so well, as Thin Lizzy.
Thin Lizzy
Vertigo/Mercury
Of all the hairy hard-rock bands that dominated the pre-disco, pre-punk airwaves of the mid-1970s, perhaps none were as influential, or produced music that has stood the test of time so well, as Thin Lizzy.
Jailbreak was literally central to the band: the sixth of their 12 career albums, almost exactly halfway through their career, it was their big commercial breakthrough, featuring two of Thin Lizzy's three most recognisable hits, tough-guy classics Jailbreak and The Boys Are Back in Town (the other being their 1973 version of traditional Irish folk song Whiskey in the Jar). Both have become such classic-rock radio standards that it's easy to forget how brilliantly propulsive, instantaneously catchy, and filled with ideas they are.
But the whole of Jailbreak is full of similar scintillating, thundering, memorable Celtic-tinged rock. The album is borne along on the twin guitar harmonies of Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham, a sound quickly adopted by every rock act on the planet, and at its most thrilling here in the intertwined arpeggios of Angel from the Coast and the duelling guitars of album closer Emerald.
But the album's energy and drive are given shape and definition by frontman Phil Lynott's very obvious shiny pop sensibility, from Running Back, nearly chosen ahead of The Boys Are Back in Town as Jailbreak's lead single, with its winsome melodic hook and hand claps, to the slightly incongruous ballad Fight or Fall.