Johnny the Fox is the seventh studio album by Irish hard rock band Thin Lizzy, released in 1976.

This album was written and recorded while bassist/vocalist Phil Lynott was recovering from a bout of hepatitis that put him off the road halfway through the previous Jailbreak tour.

[1] Once Lynott had returned to the UK from the aborted US tour in June 1976, when the band had been scheduled to support Rainbow, he spent time in hospital in Manchester recovering from hepatitis.

After his release from hospital, Lynott joined the other members of the band and travelled to Munich, Germany in August to record the album at Musicland Studios with producer John Alcock.

Downey devised a faster shuffle rhythm and Robertson wrote the riff,[1] and Lynott was pleased with the outcome when he returned to the studio.

The whole thing really took off when Brian Downey sat down and put his personal funk take on it with the drums… And these characters – Johnny the Fox and Jimmy the Weed – they were real people.

[6] Irish musician Fiachra Trench provided string arrangements, for example on "Sweet Marie", on which he used one bank of violins and two viola sections.

[4] Trench also contributed a brass arrangement to "Johnny", while Kim Beacon of String Driven Thing sang backing vocals.

[3] Thin Lizzy toured the UK during October and November, supported by American band Clover, led by Huey Lewis.

[1][2] The tour was scheduled to continue in the US in late November, but was cancelled after Robertson suffered a hand injury in a fight at the Speakeasy Club in London.

The bottle cut his hand, badly damaging an artery and a nerve, preventing him from playing guitar effectively for several months.

[7] Canadian journalist Martin Popoff considered Johnny the Fox Thin Lizzy's first real masterpiece and described it as "a rich textural work of melodic, soft-edged metal, lyrically soulful, melancholy, in many places tragic".

[9] Stuart Bailie, reviewing the 2011 reissue for Classic Rock, described the album as "an exercise in tight, rousing tunes with the chiming Les Paul guitars and Phil's patented blarney", but wrote that the bonus tracks were "less revealing" than on other Thin Lizzy expanded editions.

[8] The track "Johnny the Fox Meets Jimmy the Weed" features on the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series of compilation albums.

[citation needed] Thin Lizzy Additional musicians Production ^ Shipments figures based on certification alone.