MusicTown gives Dublin a week with Philip Lynott

Dublin City Council and Foggy Notions have dedicated a special edition of MusicTown 2026 to Philip Lynott. The week-long programme runs from 28 September to 4 October across various venues in Dublin, forty years on from the Thin Lizzy frontman's death in January 1986. The line-up brings screenings, gigs, talks and a four-day exhibition into one week. The focus is Lynott's life, work and legacy — as a mixed-race Dubliner, a songwriter, a style icon and a cultural figure — set out in the city where that presence still lands hardest. MusicTown curator Leagues O'Toole has described the week as an intimate, interpretative reflection rather than a standard tribute. That distinction shapes the bill. The programme is not a parade of familiar hits alone. It places the writing, the recordings and the public figure under a closer light, with room for both archive and new performance.

Screenings, talks and the exhibition Events feature contemporaries such as Jim Fitzpatrick and Eamon Carr alongside younger artists. Talks turn to subjects including Lynott's impact as a black Irish artist and previously unheard home-studio recordings. The four-day exhibition sits inside the same week, giving visitors a sustained encounter with the work and the image rather than a single-night memorial. Screenings and discussions run in parallel with the live shows, so the programme moves between looking and listening. For an audience that already knows the Thin Lizzy records and the solo sides, the value lies in that mix: the chance to discover material that has not circulated widely, and to hear contemporaries and younger players set Lynott's craft in their own terms. Lynott died in January 1986. Thin Lizzy, the Irish rock band he fronted, left a catalogue that still turns up on stages and on the radio across Britain and Ireland. MusicTown's choice to treat him as songwriter and cultural figure — and specifically as a mixed-race Dubliner and black Irish artist — puts the anniversary on ground that goes beyond simple nostalgia. The week asks how that presence still reads in 2026.

The Story Of My Life A related release follows close behind. The Story Of My Life, an eight-CD anthology compiling Lynott's solo work with rare and unreleased material, is due out on 30 October 2026. The set includes the track 'Can't Get Away', recorded in the weeks before his death. The anthology extends the MusicTown focus from the public programme into the discography itself. Solo recordings that sat alongside the Thin Lizzy years are gathered with pieces that have remained unheard. For listeners who know the band better than the solo sides, the October date offers a documented path through that other body of work. What remains open at this stage is the full day-by-day schedule of venues and ticket details for individual MusicTown events. The frame is set: seven days from 28 September, the exhibition across four of them, the conversations with Fitzpatrick, Carr and others, and the solo anthology on 30 October. Dublin City Council and Foggy Notions have put the anniversary in the hands of a festival that prefers interpretation to spectacle. The records, the unheard tapes and the city itself do the rest.