Scott Gorham sat down with Eonmusic and revealed Phil Lynott’s final wish about Thin Lizzy before he passed away. When asked if it was true that Lynott was trying to get the band back together, Gorham explained:
“I went over to his house, I think it was three weeks before he died, mainly because I wanted to show him I was completely clean at this point. My skin was glowing, and I was, like, the picture of health, and I just wanted to show Phil; ‘you’ve got to follow me on this man, you’ve got to follow me,’ because he was looking terrible. He was having a hard time breathing, the asthma kicked in, and so I just wanted to show him this can be done; you know, ‘look at me. I was as bad as you, but we can do this.’ And he’s going; ‘yeah, I’m doing it. I’m getting off this crap. I hate it. This is terrible.'”
He continued: “He says; ‘you know Scott, we’ve really got to put the band back together again,’ and I’m looking at him and looking at the state that he’s in, and he sees the way that I’m looking at him, and I don’t need to say anything, and he goes; ‘yeah, I know, but I’m going to get off of this crap, man, and we’ll put…’ And I said: ‘okay, as soon as we get everybody healthy and road worthy, let’s do this, but you’ve got to do this, Phil, you’ve got to do this.’ And he promised me up and down that he would, and three weeks later, I got the phone call that he was gone. And that just crushed me. Absolutely crushed me. There’s no more to say about that.”
The band ended because of a trip to Paris. Gorham mentioned in another interview that introducing heroin to Lynott played a role in the frontman’s death, while also recalling the band’s time in the French city and why Phil seemed so obsessed with it. “The party started in earnest in Paris. Phil was in love with the place – the women, the wine, the drugs, the clubs. And we were there for about a month, so we knew all the club owners, all the bouncers, the chicks, the hookers. We knew all the dealers too.”
“I knew exactly what it [Phil had] was. We sat there, and we got totally f*cking thrashed. From that point on, the heroin dealer was knocking on the door too. That was the beginning of the downfall for Thin Lizzy. When the brown powder marched in, we were done for,” he added.
The band spent a month in Paris after their 1979 album ‘Black Rose’ topped the charts, and those drug-fueled days would set the course for Thin Lizzy and Lynott’s future.
