“I wanted to say, ‘There’s nobody out there. We gotta walk away from this.’ But I couldn’t. He was a great player”: The guitarist who saved Thin Lizzy – and made their last album hit like a “sledgehammer”

Scott Gorham has reflected on how the late John Sykes helped saved Thin Lizzy for one final studio album – and brought a little heavy metal guitar thunder to Thunder and Lightning.

In the early ’80s, Gorham recognized Thin Lizzy was a band in decline. After two bluesy albums with Snowy White – China Town (1980) and Renegade (1981) – and some unfavorable off-stage habits, the guitarist told vocalist Phil Lynott something needed to change.

His plan was for them to go away, get their act together, get clean and come back revitalized to “hit everybody over the head with a fucking sledgehammer”. Lynott, though, had a different idea.

“Phil says, ‘Let’s do one more album and world tour. I know this kid, he’s really good,’” Gorham recalls in the new print issue of Guitarist.

The kid in question was John Sykes, who was making a name for himself in a new-look Tygers of Pan Tang. The two albums he’d featured on, Spellbound and Crazy Nights, were full of standout, shrieking shredding that put him firmly in Lynott’s crosshairs.

“So John Sykes comes down, and I couldn’t fault him in any way,” Gorham continues. “I really wanted to say, ‘See, there’s nobody out there, so we gotta walk away from this.’ But I couldn’t. He was a great player. He was a one-guitar guy: never, ever did I see him play anything but his black Les Paul. And he looked great on stage, too. So what was not to like?”

Thin Lizzy were a one-guitarist group before Gorham came in for the outgoing Eric Bell, forming a tandem with Brian Robertson after a less-than-ideal audition. The American guitarist was willing to return to that set up go it alone, but the fire and fury that Sykes could bring to the band were too good to turn down.

“We were not a metal band,” Gorham underscores. “But John brought in that metal edge, and I stepped up my sound to match his.”

Their one album together, 1983’s Thunder and Lightning, more than lived up to its name. Lizzy’s fastest, heaviest, and most unapologetic album, it signs off the band’s studio catalog with one hell of a bang. At times during its creation, his new bandmates couldn’t keep up with Sykes’ gung-ho enthusiasm.

“Really, his strength was the quickness,” Gorham continues. “He wasn’t about subtleties. Every track he wanted faster. He’d turn around to [drummer] Brian Downey and say, ‘Hey man, can you kick it up a couple?’ And I’d have to say, ‘John, it’s getting out of control.’

“He wanted to show everybody how fast he was. But he was an excellent player, no doubt about that.”

The album’s muscularity didn’t appease everyone in the fanbase, Gorham admits. He says they either loved it or hated it – it was as divisive as it got.

Sykes passed away last year, with countless guitar greats paying tribute to his talents. Earlier this year, Guns N’ Roses covered Thunder and Lightning as a nod to his legacy.

Readers can pick up the latest issue of Gutiarist from Magazines Direct to read the full interview with Scott Gorham.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.