Boys Are Back In Town Thin Lizzy

Learning the Guitar Parts to That Famous Rock Track

Thin Lizzy's 1976 track is built around a specific dual-guitar arrangement that most people trying to learn it at home completely butcher. The chord progression itself is straightforward — E, A, B7, A in the key of E — but the real work happens in the harmony lines and the way the guitars interact. If you're just strumming power chords through this, you're missing what makes it sound right. The core riff uses a specific intervallic pattern based on the E major scale, mostly thirds and sixths played simultaneously. Phil Lynott and Brian Robertson (and later Scott Gorham) layered their parts so they wove around each other rather than playing identical lines. When I first tried to learn this, I spent weeks getting the intro riff sounding correct only to realize I was playing the melody one string too low. The actual riff lives on the B and high E strings, not down on the A and D where it's easier to finger. Moving it up gave me the right timbre but made the transition to the verse chords noticeably harder on the fretboard.

Boys Are Back In Town Thin Lizzy

The vocal melody sits in a range that's deceptively tricky. Phil Lynott sang it with a rasp that masked how many slides and hammer-ons he was actually using. For anyone trying to match the original pitch, start around the A note on the fifth fret of the high E string and work down. The chorus pushes higher, hitting up near the D on the fourth fret of the G string. Most cover guitarists skip the vocal layer entirely, which leaves the arrangement sounding hollow. Here's something beginners miss: the chord voicings throughout the verses aren't standard open shapes. The rhythm guitar actually uses suspended and add9 variants that give the track its slightly unresolved tension. An open A becomes Asus2 with the second finger on the second fret of the D string, then resolves to A major on the downbeat. This subtle move happens constantly, and playing it with plain major chords makes the whole thing sound like a generic rock cover instead of the actual record. The same applies to the E chord — it's often voiced with the Gon the third fret of the A string rather than the open low E, which changes the whole color of the progression. The drum part is also worth paying attention to. The main groove uses a broken hi-hat pattern with the snare landing on the two and four, but the tom fills during the pre-chorus shift into a different rhythmic cell that doesn't resolve until the chorus hits. Counting it out loud before you try to play along will save you a lot of frustration. I learned that the hard way after wasting an entire weekend trying to match the fill without understanding why my timing kept collapsing at bar twelve.

If you want an accurate tab reference, the Most Played by Ear transcriptions are reasonably close, though no free tab captures the exact vibrato and bending intervals that Robertson and Gorham used. The studio version has some subtle delays and phase effects on the guitars that you won't get from any tab alone. Playing along with the record at reduced volume through headphones is still the best way to pick up the timing nuances. The main bottleneck when learning this song is that both guitar parts demand fretting-hand independence that most intermediate players haven't developed. You need one hand handling complex harmony lines while the other maintains steady strumming patterns, and the transitions between riff and chord sections are fast enough that sloppy finger placement shows immediately. The workaround is to practice each guitar part separately at half tempo using a loop pedal, then gradually bring them together. It's slower than you want it to be, but it's the only method that actually works for this kind of interlocking arrangement.