"I had women with babies they said were his, women stripping their clothes off on the doorstep." My chaotic life as Phil Lynott's girlfriend

A decade ago, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of his death, I interviewed the only woman the young Philip Lynott ever really loved: Belfast-born Gale Claydon. Gale had always refused requests for interviews about her relationship with Phil. Her name rarely appeared in any Thin Lizzy biographies, except Phil’s mum Philomena Lynott’s My Boy. But Gale and I had a personal connection: she had been the producer of Monsters Of Rock, the weekly Sky TV show I presented in the late 80s.

Unruly circumstances beyond my control meant that only a fraction of what we discussed that day made it into print. What follows is the story that should have run then but is no less fascinating now, 10 years later.

“Isn’t it amazing that it’s still so big?” she said, referring to the many events planned to mark the anniversary of Phil’s death. “He’d be amazed if he knew. He’s ended up with a longer career now than when he was alive!”

She paused. “I can’t imagine him being old, though. I can’t imagine him coping with arthritis and all that. You look at Status Quo or whoever still going, but Phil?”

They met when she was 18 and he was 20. She’d just finished her A-levels when Lizzy played Queen’s University. “They were penniless then,” she recalled, “so they stayed at one of the student’s flats.”

Returning the favour with an open invitation to stay at the band’s place in Dublin, Gale and her friends journeyed down from Belfast the following weekend. “We met them in the Bailey [famous Dublin watering hole], which was just amazing! And we slept on the floor of their flat.”

After they went home, Gale decided to return to Dublin alone. “Belfast was really small, you couldn’t grow there.” She rented a room at the band’s flat. Then on the night of Phil’s 21st birthday, in August 1970, “we became a couple”.

She laughed as she recalled Phil tiptoeing to her room “for a chat” when the party was over. “I thought: ‘This is strange, where’s the girlfriend?’ Because there were hundreds of birds there, all stunningly gorgeous. I felt sorry for him, and we chatted all night long. It was only years later I discovered how naïve I’d been. He’d already been with four different females that evening! And there was me feeling sorry for him. Ho, ho, ho! But we got on so well.

Phil fell deeply in love. He even wrote a song about her, Look What The Wind Blew In (geddit?), which spoke of the ‘Many lovely ladies’ he had known. ‘Then somewhere from the north, this gale I knew just blew in…’

When Phil relocated to London with Lizzy, Gale went too. But they struggled to find a place to stay. “We were poor as church mice, and in those days it really was ‘No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish’.”

They moved into a one-room bedsit near Camden Town. Gale got a job at an advertising agency in Knightsbridge. “I earned about twelve pounds a week and the rent was seven pounds. Egg and chips was our main meal. If we went out it was for half a lager, and you made that last as long as you could.”

She recalled how Phil’s mum Philomena paid for most of the petrol and repairs of the band’s Transit van. “She had sent money home when Phil was a kid. Now she would give him a few quid whenever she saw him.”

Even before Lizzy made him famous, Gale recalled, “anywhere I’d walk in with Phil it would be: ‘Have a drink!’ I didn’t really drink then, but there’d be about nine Bacardi-and-Cokes on the table before we’d even sat down.”

She sighed: “Philip was really shy. He would enter a room and not want to be the centre of attention. Because [of Lizzy] he couldn’t be anything else, but he was really insecure. He had a lot of chips on his shoulder, which he managed to hide [from most people].”

Lynott was so insecure, said Gale, that “he had to continually be proving his attractiveness. What other explanation can there be for the behaviour? I fell for it for years. But it was all lies. There was a lot of guilt there. He nearly drove me insane.”

He would phone from the road demanding to know where she had been the previous evening. “I’d go: ‘I was here in the flat.’ He’d go: ‘No you weren’t! Where were you? Who were you with? It went on and on to the point where I developed a stammer. I actually thought I was going insane. That’s why I left in the end. I thought: ‘I can’t deal with this any more.’”

Despite his own serial philandering, “he was the most jealous person on the planet. He might have trusted his mother, but I don’t think he ever trusted another living human being. I was convinced in my naiveté that all he needed was somebody he could trust one hundred per cent and then he could learn to trust. But I was accused of screwing everybody on the planet, and I was totally, one hundred per cent faithful.”

As Lizzy’s tours got longer, Lynott’s paranoia grew exponentially. “If I saw somebody we knew that I bumped into and said hello, if I didn’t report that to him and he found out about it first, he’d decide I was having an affair with them – it was obvious! My confidence evaporated.”

Gale believed Phil’s deep-seated fears – the roots of all his troubles – went back to his appalling childhood. “My childhood had a few problems, but mine was Disney compared to his.” It wasn’t just the poverty – everybody was dirt poor in Crumlin, the Dublin ghetto Lynott grew up in. It wasn’t just the stigma of being a ‘bastard’ in the unforgivingly Catholic Ireland of the 1950s. It was being the only black person anyone he knew had ever seen.

Gale recalled Phil telling her of the time as a child he was sent out to collect money on behalf of African orphans. “As though he was one! That’s why he grew up with such an attitude. He was gonna beat the world! That’s where his determination came from. His fire.”

When Gale introduced Phil to her parents, “It was excruciating. They knew he was black but they hadn’t actually met him. He had this huge Afro hair, tight jeans and legs eight foot long. They were okay in the end.”

Gale finally left Phil in 1976. It wasn’t just the paranoia and jealousy. After the huge success that summer of The Boys Are Back In Town, she now had “mad people ringing the doorbell! Women with babies they said were his. Women stripping their clothes off on the doorstep…”

She still looked back on the early days as good times. “Phil had a dream. We all had dreams. He worked hard, sitting there writing stuff all night. He was totally committed. He was on management’s case twenty-four-seven. He had it all covered.”

Well, nearly all.

Gale chuckled ruefully as she recalled how, years after they split, whenever they met “he tried to pull me every single time! I don’t think he could help himself”