When Philip first arrived in Ireland in the mid-1950s, he was cared for by his grandparents, Frank and Sarah Lynott. He moved into the house where his mother, Philomena, had been raised. For a few years, Philip had lived in England with her, but she was soon unable to cope with the sustained pressure of being an unmarried white mother to a mixed-race infant. Her parents agreed to raise him, in what was a courageous move, but one that was also open to ridicule and frenzied local gossip. It mattered little, as Philip later described being black and growing up in Dublin as being ‘no different to having cauliflower ears.’
Aside from introducing his ethnicity to the locale where he happily grew up, his fevered imagination – like any other youngster of his time – was hugely influenced by the local picture houses. The allure of the adventures presented on silver screens ignited his inner curiosity. It’s not inconceivable that the medium of cinema perforated Lynott’s incandescent creativity. As a pre-teen, when taken to the pictures by his then-teenage uncles Timmy or Peter, the adventures of Roy Rogers and Trigger, The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy were the types of fare that appealed to his growing sense of adventure. Dives like the Star Cinema (aka The Rats) located in Crumlin were a frequent destination where he found the sounds of Hollywood making sweet overtures to his pre-teenage ego. He and his friends watched many western flicks at The Star, The Rialto or The Leinster on Saturday afternoons. Many of these picture houses were affectionately referred to as ‘flea pits’. It wasn’t unheard of for eight or nine-year-olds to be left alone to develop nicotine habits in these places. Philip was fortunate to live in Dublin, as many of the biggest movies of the day premiered there before often taking months to appear across the rest of the country.
It was Saturday afternoons like these that funded his busy mind. When his family found that he might be drifting in his schooling, he dismissed their concerns. Simply, he was allowing himself to develop in a way he felt was a natural shift. As he constantly filled his notebooks with ideas for lyrics, stories and characters, he was acquiring an awareness of his nature. His own voice on paper allowed him to recruit the personality he felt was required to present these ideas when it came time to perform them onstage.
One of the more popular games in Ireland during Philip’s youth was known as the pitch and toss, where you would place an object known as a jack and pitch pennies to it. However, it was his interest in music that ignited his imagination and cemented his future – much to the annoyance of his grandparents, but very much so supported by his mother Philomena, who remembers:
Thinking back to his school days, he wanted to be an architect. He was good at drawing, but leaving that aside, I don’t know when you realise that your poetry could just maybe fit int
