MusicTown returns Phil Lynott's songs to Dublin rooms

The week ends today with a documentary screening and a live interview at the Irish Film Institute, after talks, a Crumlin school concert and an exhibition that set out different aspects of his work.

Dublin has spent the past week marking forty years since the death of Phil Lynott with MusicTown 2026, a programme of talks, a concert, an exhibition and a film screening devoted to his life, legacy and songs. The events ran from 28 September to 4 October at the National Concert Hall and other venues across the city, supported by Dublin City Council, and were free or ticketed, as listed on official sites.

Lynott, the frontman of Irish rock band Thin Lizzy, died in 1986. The anniversary treated that body of work as living material rather than a closed file: early recordings, the visual craft around the records, the south Dublin rooms that shaped him, and the songs themselves. The focus remained on the music and the places that still carry it.

Early recordings and a Crumlin stage

On 2 October, talks turned to his early recordings. The following day a concert took place at St Agnes' Community Centre in Crumlin, his old school. The resident choir and orchestra were joined by guests Yalah and Kellie O'Neill. Putting the show in that room tied the anniversary to the streets and the community that still claim the music as their own, and kept the evening focused on performance rather than ceremony.

The choice of venue mattered as much as the line-up. A school hall in Crumlin is not a heritage plaque. It is a working room, and the programme used it that way: choir, orchestra, guests and an audience gathered for the songs. For readers who live with these records every day, that is the point of a week like this — not a press statement, but the work heard again in a place that belongs to the story.

Exhibition, covers and the final screening

Across the weekend the exhibition Lost Love Of Romeo was open at Studio 10 on Wicklow Street. Curator Aila Harryson Lorigan described it as showing different sides of Lynott. Artist Jim Fitzpatrick, who designed Thin Lizzy album covers, took part in the MusicTown events, bringing the visual identity of the band's records into the same conversation as the writing and the voice.

That pairing is not decorative. Thin Lizzy's catalogue has always been heard and seen together: the sleeves, the lettering, the images that travelled with the songs. Having Fitzpatrick inside the programme kept that craft alongside the music, and it gave the exhibition a direct link to how the records first reached people.

On 4 October the Irish Film Institute screens the documentary Phil Lynott: Songs For While I'm Away, followed by a live interview with director Emer Reynolds. The film and the conversation sit at the end of the week as a chance to hear how the work has been framed on screen, and how those who made the film see the songs and the man who wrote and sang them. It is the natural close to a programme that moved from early recordings to a school stage, from an exhibition of different sides to a full-length portrait in cinema.

The week as a whole kept its discipline. It celebrated Lynott's life, legacy and songs without turning private biography into the story. What it offered instead was a city-scale reminder that the writing, the band and the sound remain part of how Dublin hears itself — forty years after his death, still in the rooms where the music first took hold, and still worth the time of a full programme rather than a single night. As MusicTown 2026 reaches its final day, the screening and the interview at the Irish Film Institute are what remain on the public calendar; the rest of the week already stands as a record of how the city chose to mark the anniversary.