During a New Year’s Eve gig in 1973, Eric Bell drunkenly threw his Strat in the air, kicked over his amp, walked off and passed out backstage. The next day, he quit Thin Lizzy – ushering in their first Gary Moore era.
Bell left his seedy attic dwelling in London and hightailed it home to get clean. ”I moved back to Dublin with my girlfriend and tried to get my health back together,” he tells Guitar World.
“I was in pretty bad shape. I started cycling around Dublin and tried to cut down on the drink, the dope and the rest of it. My girlfriend was working as a travel agent, thank God, so I was sort of living off of her.”
During the downtime he got a phone call out of the blue from Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding. “I thought it was a friend of mine taking the piss,” the guitarist admits. “I said, ‘Yeah, come on!’ He said, ‘No – it’s Noel Redding.’ I was sort of like, ‘What the fuck?’
“Noel said, ‘Fancy coming down for a jam?’ I took it for granted that he was living in London or America, but he said, ‘No, mate, I’m in West Cork.’ So I got on the train, and when I got off, he was there. He still had the afro, the pink glasses and all the gear. He stood out like a sore thumb!”
How did the conversation go?
“We shook hands and he said, ‘Do you play darts?’ I said, ‘Sometimes,’ and he said, ‘Right. You’re in the fucking band.’ We went into this bar, had a pint of Guinness and played darts.
“Then he drove me to his house, which was about 30 miles away – an enormous farmhouse that needed a lot of work done. He told me about the band. I thought it would be a three-piece, but it turned out to be a four-piece with a keyboard player, who wrote most of the songs. I was very surprised; I wasn’t expecting a keyboard player.”
Given that you were accustomed to playing in a three-piece with Thin Lizzy, did you feel out of place?
“I found it difficult to fit in. The keyboards took up a lot of space, and I wondered what I was going to play. And then Noel was an obnoxious little bastard. At that point, he was drinking Guinness and cider during the day, smoking very strong grass, doing a few shots of whiskey and so on.”
What was the first rehearsal like?
“I was using one of Noel’s amps. I’d programmed it and we were playing away, and he looked over and said, ‘What’s that fucking tone?’ He started fiddling with the controls on the amp. I thought, ‘Will I tell him to stuff his fucking band now, or will I stick around?’ I stuck around!”
Did things get any better?
“It was very strange in this house in the middle of nowhere. One day I’m lying in bed reading a book, and Noel comes in with the drummer and the keyboard player, and says, ‘Right, we’re going down to the pub. Come on.’ I said, ‘I think I’ll just take it easy.’ He went, ‘Fuck me, he’s reading a book!’
“I just looked at him and thought, ‘What the have I let myself in here for? This guy’s fucking mad!’ I said, ‘Right, I’ve had enough. Fuck this.’ I got a lift back to the train station from a farmer and got on the train to Dublin.”
How did Noel take that?
“A few days later he phoned me and said, ‘We’re having another rehearsal next week.’ I said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not. I’m gone.’ The two managers – who turned out to be crooks, though we didn’t know at the time – phoned and said, ‘Eric, what’s this all about?’
“I said, ‘I can’t figure this guy out. He’s a fucking nut. I’ve been through this with Lizzy; I’m not gonna do it again.’ They said, ‘Will you have a meeting with us and Noel at a hotel?’ I went to the meeting, we had a long discussion, and Noel shook my hand.
“He said, ‘I’m really sorry; I didn’t know you were feeling this way.’ But the reason I really stayed was that there was an American tour coming up. I’d never been to America and I’d always wanted to go there.”
How did you and Noel get along on the road?
“His personality changed completely. He became one of my best friends. We were in America for 11 weeks – I’m still recovering! What a place. The chicks, the dope, the weather; it was just unbelievable. Then that band folded, though I ended up doing more tours with Noel.”
What did you learn about Jimi Hendrix during your time with Noel?
“It was really, really weird. I used to ask, ‘What was Hendrix really like?’ All Noel would say was, ‘He was a black blues player who took a lot of acid’ – that’s all he ever said!
No matter if we were drunk, stoned, or normal, I would say, ‘What was he like? What about this? What about that?’ And Noel would never, ever, ever talk about it. I look back on it now Noel’s gone, God love him, and we were very close. I just couldn’t believe he’d never talk about Hendrix.”
Do you think it’s because he missed Jimi, or didn’t realize how great he was since he was so close to it?
“I’d probably say because he was so close. Noel’s heart was more in 1950s pop music, not 10-minute guitar solos. Maybe he’d be into one solo that lasted 20 seconds, and you’re back into the song again. From what I gathered, these were the things he’d talk about in the studio, especially during Electric Ladyland.
“He said Hendrix would do a riff, maybe lasting about 15 seconds, then do it again and again. He’d come up with a rhythm part and do that again and again and again. He wasn’t trying different things; he was adding to the first thing, so they had a thick wall of sound.
“Noel said he was bored shitless because he just sat around doing nothing while Hendrix was doing all these things. People would say, ‘Jimi, you’ve done this, you know, hundreds of times.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, but I want to do it again.’ That’s really all Noel ever said.”
On the subject of Hendrix, you recorded Song for Jimi with Thin Lizzy during a brief reunion in 1980.
“There were bad vibes between us. I couldn’t blame them because I was a fucking basket case in those days. The way I’d left the band wasn’t great, so we weren’t close at all.
“But then, years later, I got a call from Thin Lizzy’s management, and they said, ‘Philip is doing a tribute to Jimi Hendrix. He wants to know if you’d play guitar on it.’ I went down, and that was the first time I had seen them in a long time, and we did the track.”
What do you think of Song for Jimi?
“I couldn’t hear any of my guitar work on there. They either forgot to put it on, or somebody said, ‘What a load of shit!’ I don’t know which, but I got this feeling that I wasn’t on it. I think I might have been playing the riff with Philip, which he was playing on bass. But I don’t know… I couldn’t hear my guitar.”
