Making music with Phil...
"He did things really sort of differently. What he would do, is he would just kind of give you an
idea of what to play. For example, the song 'Solo In Soho', I played the melody line on mini-Moog.
There were no drums on it at all, just kind of a click track. And he had no idea what he was
trying to do, but he had it somewhere in his head and it just kind of developed as it went along.
And on 'Girls', we had finished it, and the drums that guy from Supertramp played, went on dead
last. So the whole track was completely done with vocals and a basic, very simple drum machine,
and then they brought the drummer in at the end to play on it. So the whole track was almost
complete and then we put the drums on last. It was kind of like 'woah!' You would play something
to him that you kind of thought was really mediocre, you'd just be pissing around, and he would
pick up on it. That song 'Ode To Liberty' was just one of my throwaway songs that I happened to
play for him. And he loved it; he thought it was just great. So it became a song through his
development. So he made things happen. You see Thin Lizzy were very structured in how they
recorded. Phil was very much in control of it, but they had a producer to deal with, and the
management were there and whatnot. With his own stuff, it kind of gave him a chance to play with
whoever he wanted. And he encouraged people like Midge Ure and the guy from Visage, and all these
kind of a new music people who were in London at the time that he was hanging with. Near the end,
Lizzy became less of a priority for management because of all of these bands and people Phil had
turned them on to that they subsequently ended up working with, and I know that bothered him."
Phil, the "big softie"...
"I mean, you'd go over to his house and he'd have Sid Vicious sitting there and Billy Idol. He was
such a nice person, a nice guy, that he just attracted people. I guess when he was growing up in
Dublin, he was one of very few black Irish people, so he took a lot of shit for that when he was
growing up. It made him really tough but you couldn't hide the fact that he was a big softie
actually. I mean, I saw him stick a few guys out, and it was no problem at all. He knew exactly
how to take care of them. And he was a big guy too. But he was such a nice guy, and I was
destroyed when he died. And I think about it even to this day. Every so often I would hear 'The
Boys Are Back In Town' on the radio, and I would think, 'God, I hope you're having a good time up
there, man.' Because I really miss the guy. You know, at the end too, he played me some stuff he
had done in a small studio and he was really writing some good stuff and wanted to work together.
I don't know whatever happened to it, but he was back on a really positive musical avenue just
before he died. It was so sad. Drugs just took over and Phil died. He was "Big Phil" on the
outside but all his organs were in rough shape. I'm fortunate to have lived through it. Phil
wasn't. In terms of my own recovery, I've been trying to keep regular. I've been clean for about a
year. They encourage you to do regular work which is a good thing. I've been spoiled all my life,
really."
The Dio years...
"We were doing Wild Horses in a recording studio in Dublin, and Sweet Savage was doing stuff in
the morning so I introduced Ronnie to Vivian Campbell. Viv was interested despite doing the demos
with Sweet Savage. Viv and I shared an apartment together. The first album was really raw. Ronnie
was producing and we had this really great engineer who was a big part of the sound. Towards the
end of Dio it got to be too much though, with the stage show and the spiders and the guitar that
shot lasers. When we first started on Holy Diver, playing with half a drum kit and all, we just
knew it was magic. I had stuff from Wild Horses, Viv had Sweet Savage stuff, we were all writing.
I wrote a lot on the first two albums but it just got harder and harder to come up with stuff. We
all thought Last In Line was a bit smooth, although I liked everything about it, the cover,
everything. By the time Sacred Heart happened, I looked at that monster on the cover and thought,
he's laughing at ME now! Touring was always a blast. I was famous for being lit up and still being
able to play. I even fell over a few times. It was like it was part of the show. Ronnie and I got
pissed together a few times but I always got carried away and had to be carried to the limo and
stuff. But as long as I played live and was creative and wrote songs, it didn't matter. Toward the
end, Ronnie was having fights with Viv, and you get to a point where you just think you've got it,
and you think you can bring in keyboards and play with the arrangements. I always thought we had
such a unique sound, we could just be Dio. We didn't have to try write like anybody else."