THIN LIZZY’s “Nightlife” album is yet to see a deluxe edition, and when it does it will hardly include a piece that Jan Schelhaas, the British keyboard player most famous for his stints with CARAVAN and CAMEL, has posted on his Bandcamp: a cut laid down with Phil Lynott which would become the title track of the aforementioned album. Jan was credited with playing organ on “Mama Nature Said” and “The Hero And The Madman” on the “Vagabonds Of The Western World” LP – the platter already turned into a box set – but not a lot of people know he stayed a while longer with the Irish group.
JAN SCHELHAAS –
Nightlife (Early Jam)
The piece coming from Schelhaas’s private tape collection documents a rough jam Jan and Phil recorded at Lynott’s flat in West Hampstead on the latter’s reel-to-reel, with the players bouncing tracks along the way. That’s why there are timing and delay issues which made proper mixing impossible. How did it all come together, though?
“After a ‘Vagabonds’ session I played on, Eric [Bell] left, and the recording at Phil’s happened around this time,” explains Jan. “For a while things were in flux, myself and Brian Robertson being the interim lineup just before Scott [Gorham] came along. However, once Phil heard that two-guitar sound, he was hooked, keys unfortunately became redundant, and my path through endless session work and short-lived retainers towards CARAVAN in 1975 was set.”
