The songs that we most associate with the summer season, which unofficially gets underway this week, often have to with beaches or barbecues or convertibles tooling through a warm wind. But what if your locality marks the time not by a change in the weather, but by a change in the types of people that are around? If that’s you, you’ve probably got “The Boys Are Back In Town” by Thin Lizzy high on your list of summer songs.
Videos by American Songwriter
“The Boys Are Back In Town” turned into the Irish rockers’ biggest hit when it was released in 1976 as a single from the album Jailbreak, as it hit the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic. Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham told Classic Rock in 2015 that the band saw the song as just another track and that its success dumbfounded them. “We were playing in some club in the U.S. when our manager came in and said, ‘Well, it looks like we’ve got a hit,’” Gorham remembered. “We were like, ‘Which song?’ Seriously, we didn’t have any idea which song it was that had taken off for us.’”
Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy’s bassist and lead singer, wrote the song, and his streetwise slang and conversational ease makes it seem like he’s giving you all this information over clinking glasses at a pub. “Guess who just got back today,” he immediately beseeches, his voice booming with promise. Now that he has our full attention, he tells us about the “wild-eyed boys that had been away.” “Man, I still think them cats are crazy,” he explains, coming off like Frank Sinatra in Vegas. The chuckle in his voice lets you know that he doesn’t think of “crazy” as a pejorative term in this case.
The narrator then indulges in a bit of nostalgia, remembering the wild exploits of the “boys” in past summers. He sets up the story, like any good barfly, by first going off on a tangent about a particularly memorable hoofer. “Man, when I tell you she was cool, she was red hot/ I mean she was steamin.” Well, it turns out that she slapped one of the boys on his home turf, cracking up everyone in attendance: “Man, we just fell about the place.”
“The Boys Are Back In Town” rides high on the powerful twin guitars of Gorham and Brian Robertson, while Lynott skitters around the bottom end and Brian Downey pounds a galloping drumbeat. Thin Lizzy certainly could conjure a mighty sound, which they proved here, but Lynott’s voice, which trails off in a bittersweet way ever now and again amidst the backslapping and braggadocio, provides the heart.
In the final verse, the narrator casually mentions that violence is never too far out of the picture when the gang gets back together. “The drinks will flow and the blood will spill/ And if the boys want to fight, you better let ‘em.” But the song ends on an upbeat note, as this bunch of hooligans proves such a force of nature that they bring about a seasonal change simply by sweeping into town: “The nights are getting longer it won’t be long/ Won’t be long till summer comes/ Now that the boys are here again.”
Those last lines technically place the song in spring, but we as listeners know better. With “The Boys Are Back In Town,” Thin Lizzy drops us into the heart of the summer. After all, when these boys makes their rough and romantic return to the scene, the hear comes with them.
