The American Dream of Thin Lizzy

Midge is from Cambuslang in Glasgow, and Brian Robertson is from Clarkston, A very nice place indeed, but not from what BR told us when we first met him. He had us believing he was raised in the Gorbals. All was revealed when we were invited to his parents’ house, where he grew up, after a gig, not to find a rundown tenement building, but a very nice semi !!

 

In the book, i wrote so much of it when it was originally going to be called the American Dream of Thin Lizzy. The purpose was to show how important those American tours were to the making of the band. It is my account of what it what like to be part of that Dream.

I showed it to various publishers who were interested, and then suggested it needed more ‘ the wild man of rock and roll ‘ stories.  I responded that I was writing a journal and not a cliche-ridden book about being on tour with the kind of band that engaged in throwing TV screens into swimming pools and trashing hotel rooms.

During the pandemic, a friend sent me an email asking what it was like living in London at that time and to describe it. The reply was read and then shared with some friends. The following week, he wrote and told me how everyone had enjoyed reading it. I wrote back, and that turned into a weekly email that over 100 + people read each week. In doing this, I learned so much about how to get the reader to believe he or she felt like they were there with some of the things I was writing about. When we came back to work, and after reading what I had written,  it was very factual, but I couldn’t feel enough of what friends had told me about my lockdown emails that they liked so much.

I left it for a while, and then I had a moment when I realised what I wanted to say with a book. It was in the immigration line up on the first tour that when I got to the booth with my passport and the officer asked me the purpose of my visit. Now it may have been a dream to get to America, but after I told her about the tour, she stamped my passport and said, “Welcome to America, “ and with those three words, my life changed forever.