In January 1980, Thin Lizzy entered Good Earth Studios in London to begin their tenth album, Chinatown. The Irish band had built a reputation on hard rock and blues rock, but this time the lineup was already shifting. Gary Moore was gone, and a new guitarist named Snowy White was in the room, a session player who had worked with Pink Floyd and Peter Green. Thin Lizzy released Chinatown on October 10, 1980.
Sessions Torn Apart by Touring
The studio time itself kept slipping away. Sessions moved to RAK Studios when Good Earth became unavailable, and touring kept pulling the band away from the record. Some of the live recordings from that period later surfaced on B-sides and an EP called Killers Live, a sign of how thin the time for proper studio work had become.
Snowy White's arrival was meant to steady the ship. He had played with Cliff Richard, Peter Green and Pink Floyd, and the hope was that his guitar would fill the space left by Gary Moore. But he was not the only new face. A teenage keyboardist named Darren Wharton was recommended to singer and bassist Phil Lynott by a friend in Manchester.
Darren Wharton's Week-Long Audition
Wharton came to London for an audition that turned into a free jam, but the band was too busy finishing the song 'Chinatown' to give him real attention. He went away, learned the entire Thin Lizzy repertoire in a week, came back and was accepted on a temporary basis. By the end of the year he was a full member, but during the album sessions he was still a teenager finding his place.
The band also had to deal with Midge Ure, who had been playing with them but left after the Scandinavian shows in the spring. A song called 'Didn't I' had already been played on tour in Japan with a temporary guitarist named Dave Flett. By the middle of June the group was back at Good Earth to finish Chinatown, but the album was not coming together easily.
Cutting the Track List Down
In August Thin Lizzy made a decision: instead of recording new material, they would cut the track list down. The only new song added at that point was 'Genocide (The Killing of the Buffalo)'. The single 'Killer on the Loose' reached number 10 on the UK chart, even though there were not enough copies of the record in the shops.
Critics were not kind. Greg Prato of AllMusic called Chinatown a disappointment next to the previous album Black Rose: A Rock Legend. He blamed the absence of Gary Moore and the producer Tony Visconti, and he pointed to drug problems affecting Phil Lynott and guitarist Scott Gorham. Prato still praised the first side, especially the anthemic 'We Will Be Strong' and the pop-perfect 'Sweetheart'.
Scott Gorham later called Chinatown a strange album and linked the difficult recording to growing drug use in the band. He admitted he could not remember recording some of the material. The album that started with a new guitarist, a teenage keyboardist and a studio schedule torn apart by touring ended up as a record that even its own members struggled to fully recall.
He admitted he could not remember recording some of the material.
Forty-six years later, Chinatown stands as the moment Thin Lizzy tried to keep moving while everything around the band was changing. The songs that worked showed the old fire, but the process behind them was fractured. It was an album made by a group running on instinct, and sometimes the instinct was not enough.