“Running Back” has a simple hook but is quite catchy and easy to have running in your head, while “Romeo and the Lonely Girl” has a memorable and melodic chorus. They even get close to a metal vibe in the darker and heavier tracks of “Warriors” and “Emerald”. As an album to represent the band, my conclusion is that this is a prime example of what to expect. To be fair, the whole album is very well done. What we have here is a typical hard rock album of the seventies, and that is one which includes a good balance of hard rock numbers and non-hard numbers. But Thin Lizzy didn’t start out very hard and if they even became a full-fledged hard rock outfit, I don’t know. They are solid hard rockers with good riffs and cool solos. The band is often included in hard rock and heavy rock lists because of songs like “The Boys Are Back in Town” or “Jailbreak”. Thin Lizzy is a band that I call “metal by association”. “Jailbreak” sounded like it could be a little edgier. So, as I checked out the year 1977 for hard rock and metal, I came to Thin Lizzy’s “Bad Reputation” but found the album to have too much non-hard stuff. It was just the first rumblings of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and “heavy metal” as it was known in 1977 included mostly bands that we classify easily as hard rock today. I was listening to Judas Priest’s 1977 album “Sin After Sin” and began pondering the state of heavy metal in that year. The reason why I finally felt inclined to buy a Thin Lizzy album is thanks to 1977. But it’s often the case that I’ll become interested in a band, buy a couple of albums and discover that I’ve already heard a song or two countless times, I just didn’t know whose song it was. I can’t think of any other Thin Lizzy songs I might have known. Classic rock radio tends to have that effect on music: it plays the same songs day in day out until they become as familiar and unnoticeable as the wallpaper in the staffroom at work. The song that was always on the radio was “The Boys Are Back in Town”, which for me was just another one of those classic rock songs that was played so many times that I became desensitized to it and basically ignored it. Bottom line, “Johnny the Fox” is truly an essential must have if you’re already a fan of Thin Lizzy and classic hard rock in general, and if you’re just starting to get into the band’s music, then this album here along with “Jailbreak” would be both great places to start with.I’ve never been a Thin Lizzy fan, and that may be surprising given my deep interest in seventies hard rock and metal. From the vocals, to the guitars, bass, drums, just everything on this album is just tight, polished, and played with pure professionalism throughout here. Every song is just perfect, essential, classic hard rock listening. This whole album is just wonderfully produced from start to finish.
Sadly though, the concept of this album here would prove prophetic for Phil Lynott as he would become a victim of the same lifestyle a decade later. “Overall, “Johnny the Fox” is a very underrated but superb and excellent album from Thin Lizzy, and is also the second of four “classic” releases that these legendary Irish rockers put out in the 70’s which also include 1976’s “Jailbreak”, 1977’s “Bad Reputation”, and 1979’s “Black Rose”.
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