Album Review, Greatest Hits - Thin Lizzy ***** In January of 1996, I stood in a tatty, sticky floored venue in Liverpool awaiting Marillion, Fish came onstage before the gig, he said he had some news for us, some very bad news, Phil Lynott had just died, so passed another of our brightest stars, another shining young life wasted by drugs. I'd almost forgotten just how good Thin Lizzy were. Despite the drugs, booze, women, fighting and chaos that surrounded the band throughout it's career, they managed to produce some of the finest rock music you could wish to hear. Lizzy's first big hit was the rocked up folk song 'Whisky In The Jar' and this sort of softer edged rock was the musical form Lynott preferred to write, although they produced a few absolute barnstormers like 'The Boys Are Back In Town' and the excellent cover of Bob Seger's 'Rosalie', for the most part their music had a melodic, sometimes almost poppy approach. Younger music fans might not be aware of the fantastic wealth of music Phil Lynott and the various incarnations of Thin Lizzy left behind, but their line ups read like a who's who of rock, Gary Moore, Snowy White, Scott Goreham, Brian Downey, John Sykes, (bizarrely - Midge Ure), and many of their songs will be familiar, 'Out In The Fields', 'Do Anything You Want To', 'The Rocker' and you'll recognise the electro pop of 'Yellow Pearl' if you ever used to watch Top Of The Pops. People often say that Thin Lizzy were a rock band with soul, if you listen to their music it certainly sounds that way, Lynott put a lot of feeling into his work whether it was a dedication to his newborn daughter 'Sarah' or his frustration over Elvis Presley's untimely death on 'Kings Call', and how prophetic a song did that turned out to be. I really would recommend this album for anyone who likes rock, it's a superb career retrospective of one particularly talented man and the equally gifted satellite band members, it's feel good music, puts a happy smile on your face, and who wouldn't want to back in '82 again, aged 15, down at the front row in the Queens Hall Leeds, just for the night, singing your lungs out to 'The Boys Are Back' and thinking it was never, ever going to end ?