(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 30 September 2025 4:00, UK
The first song that The Rolling Stones ever wrote was only created because their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, locked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards inside a kitchen.
The result was the song ‘As Tears Go By’, and while it might not be a classic Rolling Stones song, it was the one they needed in a bid to actually start writing material. “When you start writing, it doesn’t matter where the first one comes from,” said Keith Richards. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right? So Andrew locked Mick and myself into a kitchen in this horrible little apartment we had.”
The band needed to get their first song finished because, without it, they wouldn’t have gone on to write the great tracks that they did. Yes, some of them might have been met with some goodamn controversy, but a lot of the songs they went on to write were fucking classics and incredibly thought-provoking. One of the songs which comes to mind is ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, which was one of their more political songs that was met with adoration and controversy.
The band don’t take aim at a specific moment in time or political stance, rather, they sing about various moments in history as if they’re being told from the point of view of the devil. The Vietnam War was a big inspiration for this song, but it didn’t just talk about the Vietnam War, it spoke about plenty of different instances.
Explaining, “Songs can metamorphasise, and ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ is one of those songs that started off like one thing, I wrote it one way and then we started to change the rhythm. And then it became completely different. And then it got very exciting. It started off as a folk song and then became a samba. A good song can become anything. It’s got lots of historical references and lots of poetry.”
The Rolling Stones weren’t the only band who took a while to find their sound, either. It took Thin Lizzy a while to work out how they should effectively sound, as that two-tone, harmonised guitar style wasn’t an idea that they had right away. Those lines that you pick up on in the likes of ‘Fighting’ and ‘Boys Are Back In Town’ came with time, and while it might now be viewed as iconic, it took them a while to get there.
Once they had established their unique songwriting tone, they were able to run with it and come up with some unique interpretations of different songs. ‘Angel of Death’ is a great example of one of those songs, which many have previously compared to ‘Sympathy of the Devil’, because it uses imagery where the devil is overseeing bad things that have happened in the world.
One of the main differences between the two is the fact that Phil Lynott makes Thin Lizzy’s version much more personal. Lynott speaks about his own father in the song, who sadly passed away prior to the band writing the song. It wasn’t unusual for Lynott to use this kind of imagery, so while people have suggested his inspiration from the song might have been The Rolling Stones’ classic, he might have been looking somewhere completely fucking different.
It was a great way for the band to start their 1981 Renegade album, and really highlights just how well Thin Lizzy stepped into their exciting songwriting role.
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