YMMV / Thin Lizzy

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: Lynott taking on the persona of a cowboy in "Cowboy Song" may seem like a musical equivalent of Colourblind Casting, but in fact a lot of cowboys historically were Black or Hispanic; it was only in the 20th century that people came to think of cowboys as primarily white.
• Anvilicious: "S&M" from Black Rose is a claustrophobic, musically awesome but lyrically anvilicious funk-rock song about a guy who gets aroused by beating the crap out of women, And That's Terrible.^note "This fetish could be foolish/It could lead to something dangerously reckless/To hold your lover helpless/Could lead to something called a mess" Doubles as a Clueless Aesop, because the song isn't really about consensual BDSM, it's about a violent and misogynistic Jerkass.
• Broken Base: Most Thin Lizzy fans have a favourite lineup and a least favourite lineup. This essentially always revolves around which guitarist's style a particular fan favors. Fans of Eric Bell like the unique approach and folk-rock sound he brought to the band's early albums. Gary Moore is widely considered to be the most technical skilled guitarist Lizzy ever had. Fans of Scott Gorham appreciate his understated yet melodic style and his consistency and longevity within the band, while Brian Robertson is lauded for his fiery solos and improvisational ability in a live setting, and John Sykes has been given praise for revitalizing Lizzy for one last album. However, all of them have their detractors—for example, Moore for overplaying, Gorham for being too timid a soloist, Robertson for his immature and unprofessional attitude, and Sykes for pushing the band in the direction of heavy metal. The only guitarist who it seems is nobody's favorite is Snowy White, mainly because it's felt that his more studious approach and low-key nature didn't fit well with Thin Lizzy's music.
• Crowning Music of Awesome:
  • "Roisin Dubh: Black Rose (A Rock Legend)" showcases the full extent of the powers of one of the band's best lineups, compresses most of the coolest tropes of Irish mythology into about six minutes, has a soaring melody, some blistering guitar duelling and it ends with Lynott cheerfully namechecking a bunch of dead Irish writers while the band riffs away behind him.
  • "Dancing in the Moonlight (It's Caught Me in Its Spotlight)" is a relatively light R&B-style song, but one of the band's most openly romantic numbers, capturing the happiness of walking home late at night from a really great date. (It also features two of Lynott's most impressive quadruple rhymes: "glance/dance/pants/trance/" and "moonlight/spotlight/alright/summer night".)
  • If you had to recommend just one Lizzy album to someone, it would be Live and Dangerous. Leaving aside the whole question of how live it actually was, the choice of songs is perfect, they're brilliantly sequenced, the performances are in most cases better than the original recordings, the band is firing on all cylinders throughout, and the whole album feels live. Not for nothing has it been included in the book 1001 Albums To Hear Before You Die.
  • Life is not as good a live album as Live and Dangerous, but the live version of "The Rocker", featuring five of the band's guitarists onstage together, is humongous.
• The Band Minus the Face: The surviving members of the band received much criticism when they reformed after Lynott's death. Brian Downey's departure from the band made it even more awkward as this means there are now no original members left and Scott Gorham is the only member who was in the band during its heyday.
• Covered Up:
  • In an interesting example of this, "Whiskey in the Jar", though a traditional Irish song, was so distinctly rearranged by Lizzy that a lot of artists have covered their version (most famously, Metallica). The original version of the song does not have the guitar riff and the lyrics and chorus melody are different — a famous recording is by The Dubliners.
  • Bob Seger more or less let the group have "Rosalie." He regarded it as one of his lesser songs and has never released it on CD. For most people, the Lizzy version simply is the definitive version of the song.
• Epic Riff: About 70% of their songs are built on one or several of these, "The Boys Are Back in Town" being the most famous example. Being Thin Lizzy, they also had Epic Bass Riffs: for example, "Dancing in the Moonlight" and "Renegade", both of which are immediately recognisable from their opening notes.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The band has a surprisingly strong following in Scandinavia (possibly due to the fact that the Gorham-Robertson lineup toured there extensively prior to hitting it big with the Jailbreak LP). Many fansites devoted to the band are run by Scandinavians, and Brian Robertson spends a lot of time in Sweden.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The final track from the band's last album Thunder and Lightning is called "Heart Attack". Less than three years after the album's release, Phil Lynott would die from heart failure.
  • Four years earlier than Thunder and Lightning, Lynott had seen the writing on the wall with "Got to Give It Up", one of the band's best songs.
  • In "Do Anything You Want To," Lynott sings "You can do anything you want/Just like I do," and in the spoken-word outro he says, "Elvis is dead. The King of Rock and Roll is dead." Lynott, like Elvis, would die prematurely from excesses in his personal life.
• Narm: Late in their career they tried to go with the flow and be a more conventional heavy metal band, but it seldom if ever worked; the live version of "Angel of Death" contains a particularly Narm-y monologue from Lynott with his voice through a ring modulator:
  Phil Lynott: In the sixteenth centureh...there was a French philosopher...by the name of nostradamus. Who PROPH-e-sised, that in the late twentieth centureh...An ANGEL OF DEATH-ahhhhhhh!...shall come and waste this land. A holocaust...the likes of which...this planet had never seen. Now, I ask you...do yooooouuu...believe thisssss...to be truuuuue?
• Older Than They Think: "Suicide" contains a solo section which, with its dueling twin guitars and running bass, is pure NWOBHM...five years before Iron Maiden would become famous for doing the same thing. Iron Maiden were influenced by Lizzy.
• Signature Song: Again, "Whiskey in the Jar" and "The Boys Are Back in Town". Other fan favorites and lesser hits are "Jailbreak", "Waiting for an Alibi", "Don't Believe a Word" and "Dancing in the Moonlight", plus many others.
• Sophomore Slump: It's generally agreed that Shades of a Blue Orphanage is the group's worst album due to rushed songwriting and poor production. It might have killed the group's career had they not had their hit cover of "Whisky in the Jar" a few months later.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The upbeat chord stabs of the hit "The Boys Are Back in Town" are reused in "Soldier of Fortune", "Get Out of Here" and "No One Told Him" to name a few, although subverted in that none were singles.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: From a lyrical point of view, "Sarah" was obviously influenced by Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely". Both songs are literally about babies in the family: a daughter in Wonder's case, and a granddaughter in Lynott's.
• Values Dissonance: The use of the phrase "half-caste", which Phil refers to himself as in the song of that name. This phrase is considered racially insensitive now because it dates from a time when black people were treated as second-class citizens to whites. These days, the more neutral phrase "mixed-race" would be used.