Doomed youth

It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars who died young, by contrast, there’s usually just the one: somebody mysteriously talented emerges from an unlikely background to achieve stardom, before being destroyed by drink, drugs and fame. Yet, as the film Amy proved last year, it’s a plot still capable of packing a real emotional punch — and, as Cowboy Song proves now, the life of Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy embodies it more vividly than most.

Certainly, there’s no faulting the unlikeliness of his background. Lynott was born in 1949 to an Irish teenager who’d come to Birmingham in search of adventure, and found it in the shape of a Guyanese bloke who cleared off soon after the birth, apparently at her request. For the next seven years, she and Phil lived together in England — although even the assiduous Graeme Thomson can’t always be sure whereabouts — before she sent him to Dublin to be looked after by her parents.