This sadness it never ceases
A love letter to the lyrics of Still In Love With You by Thin Lizzy
The only good love song is an unrequited love song.
Being in love is wonderful when the feeling is mutual. It is something to sing about. Lots of people do. And that’s why silly, sentimental love songs are ten a penny.
But the lexicon of luvved-up bliss is limited, and the language has become commoditised through over-use. Surfeiting, the appetite sickens and so dies.
Love songs have lost the element of surprise.
Torment is much more interesting. There is a car-crash compulsion to eloquently expressed excruciation.
La douleur exquise, the exquisite pain, of unrequited love is the lyrical path less trodden by popular music. The language of anguish is more varied, and a more likely source of revelation, than the banal clichés of joy.
Unrequited love songs are the pink Smarties of the genre.
Until recently I would have sworn that For No One by The Beatles was the undisputed heavyweight unrequited love song champion of the world.
Now I’m not so sure.
I rediscovered Still In Love With You by Thin Lizzy. The live version.
It is more than thirty years since I last played it. Now I can’t stop. It is haunting me.
The lyrics have a stripped back, elemental eloquence. The performance is painfully sincere.
The song was written by Thin Lizzy front man Phil Lynott, according to whom there are three stages of grief, each of which has a verse devoted to it.
Confusion (Verse 1).
I think I’ll fall to pieces
If I don’t find something else to do
This sadness it never ceases
Oh I’m still in love with you
And my head keeps on reeling
It’s got me in a crazy spin
Oh darlin’ darlin’ darlin’ darlin’
Is this the end?
I’m still in love with you
Lynott is dazed. The enormity of his loss is dawning on him. He needs some form of distraction before he is driven to another. In his bewilderment he says darlin’ four times (he adds a few more in the live version). A line full of darlin’s doesn’t seem too clever off the page, but it is full of ache and incredulity when he delivers it.
Resignation (Verse 2).
You know some people out there are saying
Time has its way of healing
It can dry all the tears from your eyes
Oh but darlin’, they don’t tell you about this empty feeling
You know I can’t disguise it
After all that we’ve been through
I try my best but it’s no use
Oh I’m gonna keep on loving you
Is this the end?
I’m still in love with you
In verse 2 Lynott bemoans the futile platitudes of well-meaning friends. He is on the ferry to the nine circles of rejection Hell. He abandons all hope and rejects all tea and sympathy.
In this context, “Is this the end?” has to be the most rhetorical question in popular music.
Desperation (Verse 3).
And now that it’s all over
Woman I think there’s something you should know
Hey maybe cos my baby she had a baby by me
She might think it over one more time before she goes
Call on me baby
If there’s anything I can do for you
Call on me baby
Help me see it through
I’m still in love with you
Confusion, resignation, desperation.
Phil Lynott doesn’t do closure.
He does do a mean one-line chorus. Lest the woman in question should be harbouring any doubts about how he is feeling, he is, for the record, still in love with you.
He is still in love with you to the extent that he will beg and metaphorically prostrate himself at your feet. You are worth more to him than his pride.
He may be an emotional slave to you, but he is still the master of meter.
Hey maybe cos my baby she had a baby by me
This is my favourite line in the song. It is a masterclass in semi-alliterative, half-rhyming scansion. I pause, rewind and replay this lyric for the sheer rhythmic pleasure of it.
That one line is symptomatic of how I feel about the whole song. I can’t separate my appreciation of the lyrics from my admiration for the delivery. In this instance substance and style are indivisible.
And it has to be the live version. Performed live the song has added richness, depth and texture that are missing from the studio version. You can tell that Lynott is feeling every syllable. He is immersed. It is the musical equivalent of aging over oak in sherry casks.
This seems to be a common theme for rock songs of that era. The live versions are more woody and less tinny than the studio original. The vocals are more raw, the guitar solos more indulgent. It’s like the taste of blood and salt from a rare steak. It is atavistic.
The live versions of rock songs actually benefit from the the absence of production values. And, unlike live recordings in other genres, they bear repeat listening after the event. You didn’t have to be there.
I’m thinking Doctor Doctor by UFO. I’m thinking Kill The King by Rainbow or The Bands Played On by Saxon. I’m thinking the whole of the If You Want Blood album by AC/DC, with Whole Lotta Rosie being the most famous and most obvious example.
It is over thirty years since I recorded Still In Love You (live version) off Tommy Vance’s Friday Night Rock Show onto a primitive Binatone cassette recorder and played it to death for weeks thereafter.
I’m still in love with it.
