Eric Bell

Eric Robin Bell (born 3 September 1947) is a Northern Irish rock and blues musician, best known as a founding member and the original guitarist of the rock group Thin Lizzy, of which he was a member from 1969 to 1973. After his time in Thin Lizzy, he briefly fronted his own group before joining the Noel Redding Band in the mid-1970s. He has since released several solo albums and performs regularly with a blues-based trio, the Eric Bell Band.

Bell was born in England on 3 September 1947 and brought up as a young child in Belfast, Northern Ireland, by his adoptive sibling-parents Harold and Ivy Bell. From Jocelyn Avenue, Woodstock Road, in the east of the city, he attended Orangefield High School. As a boy he was enthralled by the music of Lonnie Donegan and "mesmerised" by the guitars in the Shadows. He began his career with local groups around the Belfast area, including the last incarnation of Them to feature Van Morrison, between September and October 1966. He also played with a number of other bands including Shades of Blue, The Earth Dwellers and The Bluebeats, before joining an Irish showband named The Dreams. He left in 1969, having tired of the showband format, and at the end of that year formed a band with Irish musicians Phil Lynott, Eric Wrixon and Brian Downey. Bell suggested the name Thin Lizzy, after Tin Lizzie, a robot character in The Dandy comic.

Organist Eric Wrixon left Thin Lizzy after a few months and the remaining trio later secured a contract with Decca Records. As lead guitarist, Bell played on Thin Lizzy's first three albums Thin Lizzy, Shades of a Blue Orphanage and Vagabonds of the Western World, as well as their hit single "Whiskey in the Jar". He co-wrote a number of songs with Lynott and Downey, including "The Rocker" which became a live favourite throughout the band's career. He also composed one song on his own, "Ray Gun", from their first album, Thin Lizzy.

Although Thin Lizzy gained in popularity during the early 1970s, the pressures of recording, touring, and the excesses of the rock star lifestyle began to take their toll. He left the band after a New Year's Eve concert in 1973, after throwing his guitar into the air, pushing the amplifiers into the audience, and storming off stage. He stated later that he had no regrets about leaving: "I really had to leave because of ill-health. It was exhaustion, and the majority of things that were available to me… I couldn't really handle it." He was temporarily replaced by Gary Moore.

In 1974, after a brief period fronting his own Eric Bell Band, Bell was recruited by ex-Jimi Hendrix sideman Noel Redding, along with guitarist/singer Dave Clarke and drummer Les Sampson, to form the Noel Redding Band. Bell was unsure of the musical direction Redding was taking, but went on to record two albums with the group before they split in 1976. A third album of unused tracks was released in 1995. Bell composed the song "Love and War" for the second album, Blowin'.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.