The chorus, where the musical interlude is now, he used to sing 'if you save souls', but it just never went anywhere, it was like, you know... and then he came in one day and was like "I've got it, the album title, Renegade" he said. I was like "eh, why?" and he said, "well I saw this Thin Lizzy fan with Thin Lizzy on his back and 'Renegade' written underneath it," and he said, that's it. And he said "what we'll do is we'll get this flag that we're standing, holding." He picked up, I used to smoke back then, my cigarettes, which was gold and red, and they're the colours of the album.
- Chris Tsangarides interview, Hot Press, 2018
...he just came out with it [the flag idea], I don't know, was he thinking it or not, but it came. And that was kind of the way things were, it was very spontaneous with him, you know, so we'd never know, it was always like, even when we did vocals, it was like, "put the mic on, I want to do a rough vocal." So that's what we'd do at the end of the day, and I'd compile them into the main vocal by the end, and he'd sing it out, just words and phrases, whatever he wanted to do, an ongoing working progress throughout the recording. We'd finish off the day, doing some 'roughs' as he'd call them, and they ended up being what people heard.
- Chris Tsangarides interview, Hot Press, 2018
THIN LIZZY released their eleventh studio album on this day in 1981.
We did the first half early in the year, then did some Summer dates and then we finished it off just in time for the tour.
- Phil Lynott / Thin Lizzy interview, The Mal Reding Interview Archive, 1981