I kept saying that we were working on it, but I felt really uncomfortable about that question anyway. Then it became crunch time. It was pee or get off the pot. I said to the guys that I didn’t feel comfortable recording a new album under the name Thin Lizzy without Phil being there.

I think Brian Downey was relieved because he was feeling the same thing. There was a bit of relief for the other guys in the bad too.

Playing live is one thing, but to record records is a whole other ball game. The next logical thing to do was to end Thin Lizzy things for a while. We’ll pick a date and from that date on we’ll be that new entity. At the end of the Kiss tour in Australia, we said ‘that’s our last gig as Thin Lizzy for a while’.

Was it a relief that you could record the album without people make comparisons with the Phil Lynott-era Thin Lizzy?
I think that was always going to be an element. I didn’t really want to get tied down with that, especially with something I had already done before. It is a terrible word to say that we were constrained. I don’t mean it like that, but it is the only word that I can come up with, but we were free to do things anyway we like.

There are a couple of songs that do sound like Thin Lizzy on the album. I don’t know how intentional all that was, but it is where we come from. It is kind of hard to avoid that.

Was there any issues legally involved in recording under the Thin Lizzy name?
We never even got it that far. I’ve been asked this before. On reflection, probably Phil’s family (his widow Caroline controls the estate) would not have liked it had we recorded under the Thin Lizzy name for whatever the reasons, but I don’t really know.

All I know is that I think we made the right decision. I feel good about it. Thin Lizzy will be back on the road at some point and we include some Thin Lizzy songs in our set. Remember, we’ve only got one album as Black Star Riders. I could tell you what Lizzy songs we’ll be playing on Saturday night, but that will spoil it.

Does playing in Dublin mean something special to you?
It means everything. There are probably three or four spots that your stomach turns a bit because of the nerves – Los Angeles, New York, London and Dublin. Every place else just turns into just another city. Maybe I shouldn’t say that! LA and New York has such a concentration of media. In London and Dublin, it is the fans. That’s where you take particular care and it is a bit more nerve-wracking. Thin Lizzy is known as an Irish band so you can’t let the side down.

Do you think Thin Lizzy retained that Irish identity though a lot of the band members including yourself are from abroad?
Well I think it always had the Irish feel to it, the Irish essence. Phil was a great believer in bringing the good word of Ireland to any interview that he did. There were times where you might be in Idaho or something and the interviewer would make some comment about Ireland and that was it. We didn’t talk about music any longer.

Now Phil is going into the history of Ireland and this and that and I had to rein him back and remind him, ‘dude, you’re here to plug the new album’. When I started in Thin Lizzy, I was 21 years of age. I didn’t know anything about Dublin. Phil knew that. He would take me by the scruff of the neck and give me a history of the city. It was almost too much. You couldn’t take it all in.

On the opposite side, we landed in New York, Phil slapped his hands together and said, ‘so, Scott, tell me about New York’. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘shit, I’ve never been here before in my life’.

What’s your proudest achievement with Thin Lizzy?
God, there’s a whole ton of them. Probably, when we went into do the Bad Reputation album. There was just the three of us writing and arranging. I did most of the guitar work, harmony and lead-wise. We were pretty proud of that one. That album, when it came out, sounded very well.

There are so many things that we have done, the places that we’ve played, the amount of people that we have played to and all that. It’s kind of hard to calculate what is the best of anything. People ask me what my favourite Thin Lizzy song. I don’t have a favourite Thin Lizzy song.