Laurence Archer – I’m not reliant on Phil or my past with Phil . Grand Slam is about this present day. It’s not a project, it’s a band

I had the pleasure to meet Laurence Archer in person in London, when Clive Edwards brought him along, actually Brian Roberston was going to be present too! We were at Basewater in a pub that Clive had in mind, since he’d been there after watching Led Zeppelin at Royal Albert Hall in 1970!!! It was there where Laurence told me that he would play me the tape with the original version of “Dedication” as it was recorded by Phil Lynnot and himself, which was quite different than what was released after the legendary rocker’s death. Well, that didn’t happen yet! But, given the chance of the new Grand Slam album, “Wheel Of Fortune”, release we talked about the band, the new work, the turbulent past and some co-workers that ripped him off, as well as his one and only hero, Phil Lynnot. Interview: Yiannis Dolas

Rockpages.gr: So you’ve got a new album which is called “Wheel of Fortune”. To tell you the truth, when I when I hear the words “Wheel of Fortune”, it reminds me of the famous TV show. But, that’s not the case here, right?

Laurence Archer: Well, it is to some extent. It’s not about the TV show itself, but it’s about the jeopardy. The title song, “Wheel of Fortune” is actually written about the people that when I reformed Grand Slam  wanted to jump on the bandwagon, the people that were sort of ripping us off and taking money and not doing what they said they were going to do and trying to be deceitful. So, the whole message is it’s really about, “look what you could have done”, which is which is essentially a phrase in another gameshow. So, in the in the song, there’s many references to game shows and it’s about the guys that basically messed up and tried to take advantage of our situation. They’re no longer with us because of that situation.

Rockpages.gr: From listening to the album for the first two times, one of the songs that like three months was “Star Crossed Lovers”, what can you tell me about that?

Laurence Archer: Well, “Star Crossed Lovers” is basically a reference to Shakespeare’s star crossed lovers (ed, Lovers whose relationship is doomed to fail are said to be “star-crossed” (frustrated by the stars), because those who believe in astrology claim that the stars control human destiny. William Shakespeare used the phrase to describe the lovers in Romeo and Juliet) It’s a song I’ve had for a while, and Mike (ed, Mike Dyer, Grand Slam’s singer) sort of worked with the lyrics, and we came up with this idea and if you know your Shakespeare, it’s basically about this whole storyline of star crossed lovers. I won’t go into too much detail.

I’d like to say that every song on the album sort of has a story behind it. “Trail Of Tears”… It’s important for us to tell the stories in our songs.

Rockpages.gr: The latest single you released was “Spitfire” referring to the historic airplane that was operating in the Second World War. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Laurence Archer: It’s not essentially about the Spitfire itself. Basically, it’s about the pilots who were conscripted to fly these planes. They were very, very young men who had no experience of flying or anything and within a short period of time they were sent up to fight battles in these incredibly powerful airplanes. The life expectancy was something ridiculous. It was like seven days, you know, or something silly like this. But, it’s about the young man that has to suddenly find himself in this situation where he’s he’s controlling this incredibly powerful machine and fighting the enemy and dealing with the fear and dealing with everything to do with controlling the machine.

Rockpages.gr: Also, I liked “Come Together In Harlem”. I think that in the album there is a vibe of Phil Lynnot. I’m not sure whether you had some songs written with Phil that you are having in this album or…

Laurence Archer: No, the song that you just mentioned, “Come Together”, has a partial element of the song that was written back in the day when Phil. But I’ve changed it completely. It has some elements of this song called “Harlem”, but I’ve changed the whole feel of the song, rewritten a new chorus line on it, because it wasn’t really a completed song at that time in my eyes.

So, that is the only reference to Phil directly on the album. The rest of it is all songs that I’ve written recently, or I’ve had in my pocket for a while. I’m always writing and sometimes, when you write songs, you come up with ideas and then maybe later it might be anything up to, you know, a couple of years later you go, “Oh, I’ve got something that will fit this”… And, you know, it comes together. But, all of the album, essentially is new. It’s all new recordings and new songs. Mike and I have been writing the album for over than three years.

Rockpages.gr: Would you say that it’s easier if you have some material written, like you had on the first album, “Hit The Ground”? Or is it easier for you to start from scratch?

Laurence Archer: Well, the thing is, with the first album, the songs that I wrote back in the day with Phil,  the reason I did the first album and included those songs on there was because I wanted the fans and the Phil Lynott fans and everybody that heard it, I wanted to give them a proper representation of what the song would have been if we got to a point where we had done an album. Because, people have released work in progress demos on social media, YouTube and various other platforms, and there’s been some record releases, which I have nothing to do with, by the way, which I wasn’t very happy about… So, for a long period of time, I’ve been wanting to basically give the correct representation of what I perceived of the end result of the song would have been.

On the first album it’s half and half. It’s new songs and old songs. On this album, it’s all new songs. But, when I say new songs, there are songs in there that have been in my head for quite a few years that have come together over the last three years with Mike and some of them only literally weeks before we did the album. We only did two days rehearsal for the album with the band and it was pretty fresh and I wanted to keep it pretty fresh when we recorded it. But, I find it easier to be in control of what I want the end product to do, which is, why I produced and mixed this album with my with my good friend Peter (ed, Pieter Rietkerk)

But, as far as writing goes, I haven’t changed my writing style or the way I write since I first started writing for Lautrec or Stampede or for whoever. It never really changed, it’s just the way I write and some of the ideas that I may not have used on a UFO album or on another album, sometimes I pick them up and go, “oh, that’s a that’s a good idea”. I can work with this and change it up, make it more modern and maybe more up to date.

Rockpages.gr: You are also re-releasing “Hit the Ground”. Why are you doing this? Is there any are there going to be any changes in the songs on the album or the production?

Laurence Archer: Well, there’s a couple of reasons for the rerelease. One is that we wanted to bring the album up to this.

The new album has me, Rocky (Ed, Newton), Mike and Benjy (Ed, Reid) on it. So, with the new bass player we wanted to be respectful to him and put him on that album and rerelease it. And I wanted to have a remix on it and I wanted to put Rocky on it and bring it up to date for the present lineup of the band. Also, which is something that actually found out is that you journos, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews over the last couple of weeks and what I’ve found is a lot of journalists have reminded me that when we released “Hit the Ground” it was literally only a month before everything closed down for Covid. So, we couldn’t do our plan; promotional live shows. We did like a two week tour in UK and we had plans to do Europe and even America and everything had to come to a stop. So, it wasn’t really a fair showing for us for the release of “Hit the Ground”. Having a second chance to get it out there and make it fresh, change the artwork, remix, remaster, rerecord the bass and the keyboards on it… It was an opportunity. After we recorded the new album, we went back into the Chapel Studios, the same studios, and overdubbed Rocky’s bass and redid the keyboards remotely and so it seemed like an easy process.

Obviously, people say, “oh, it’s it’s just another way of making more money” out of “Hit The Ground”. But, it’s not! It cost us a lot of money to get to this point. It’s not a cheap thing to record, master, fabricate a new album. It’s not a money making thing these days. You don’t make money from music, especially record sales, except if you are Taylor Swift, or Ed Sheeran or something…

Rockpages.gr: Actually, Mike saw Grand Slam back in the ‘80s, when I guess he was like 16 years old. What did he tell you about that experience? Because I’m sure you’ve talked about that.

Laurence Archer: Well, as far as I’m aware, he’s always been a Phil Lynott fan, he comes from Liverpool, he has close ties to Ireland. Mike is a similar stature to Phil strangely. He’s a tall guy, same as Phil. Phil was a hero to him, like it was to many people. And I think he met him back in the day when he was a kid, when Lizzy were playing in Liverpool.

So, he knew that it was big shoes to step into, but, he was willing to take it on. When you do this, you set yourself up for a fool. Because, people will always criticize you first before giving you praise for what you do. And I was very worried about that, when I did the album, when we signed to Marshall, on “Hit The Ground”. But, incredibly, we’ve had no disrespectful, or bad reviews. Everybody has been very positive and certainly very positive about Mike and his vocal approach. We’re not designing anything to sound like anything. We’re just playing. I’m writing and we’re playing the songs naturally the way we would in any in any way, it’s a it’s a natural thing. Mike sings the way he sings, and that’s never going to change. Even on some of the new songs people have made reference to… “it sounds a bit like Phil”, but I think people are looking for that character in Mike’s voice. But, I don’t see it like that. I see it just as Mike singing. When Mike did the first album when we have to basically sing the songs that I’ve written with Phil back in ‘84, he just sang his way, but his phrasing and the way he does it is similar.

It’s a very common thing these days, when people form bands, or they get guys in to sing, they want the next Paul Rodgers, or Bruce Dickinson or Steve Perry from Journey. They want this type of voice and I never wanted that type of voice. I wanted a voice that was going to be clear and suiting the way I write, because I write songs essentially with my voice in mind, because that’s the way I hear and write songs. So, you know, Mike’s candor and his tone and his thing, is similar, but much better than me, obviously, but it’s similar. So, he fits into my way of writing and my melodic element. He fits into that absolutely perfectly and we have a very strong connection. We’re both Scorpios! His birthday are one or two days after mine and we have a similar age, similar likes in music and similar influences over our musical career.

When Mike was in my band, called Rhode Island Red, back in 1998, he was a different singer then. Maybe, due to the times, he wanted to be the next David Lee Roth. That was the thing people were going for back then. But, when I went off and joined UFO and left that project, Mike went off to the theater and basically sang in the theater for ten years. And when we got together again, his voice had developed and grown and become bigger and larger than life than it ever was before, which suited everything. Five years ago, just before I put the band together, I did a 3G guitar show in England and I put a band together to back me and I wanted to do “Dedication” and a couple of other Grand Slam classics like “Sisters of Mercy” and I phoned Mike and asked him to do it. I said, “how do you fancy coming to do this?” And he came. We put the band together. I did the show. Since I finished the show, I just went, you know, this is the right drummer, this is the right singer, these people need to be part of the Grand Slam going forward. And that was my plan.

Rockpages.gr? Did you think, or maybe did you have in the back of your mind the idea that some people might say, that you’re trying to take advantage of a Phil Lynnot? It’s not exactly the same, let’s say in Thin Lizzy, where when the band split up, since Phil died. Scott Gorham and Brian Downey with Jon Sykes they had Thin Lizzy again. They played some shows. Later on they got another singer, Ricky Warwick, they carried on, then they changed their name. They said, “we’re not playing Lizzy anymore”. But, then they started playing Lizzy again. Did you think about that? That some people might say that you are trying to take advantage of Phil?

Laurence Archer: Well, I mean, they can say what they want, but that’s not the reason I did that. You’ve got to understand, I waited 30 years before I did the album. In fact, longer. When Phil died, I got asked to do many tribute shows, you know, “The Vibe” in Dublin and various other things. And I refused doing those for like six, seven years. I didn’t want to jump on any bandwagon of the Phil Lynnot thing, he was a good friend to me and a good mentor and a good fellow musician and writer. He taught me a lot and I had a great relationship with him. I didn’t feel comfortable that people were potentially making money out of Phil’s legacy. I don’t have that feeling because essentially, I wrote those songs with Phil and if I was going to do that, what I would have done…

Naming no names, what a couple of other people have done is actually rerelease work in progress, demos that was basically stolen out of Phil’s studio where we used to work and write. They basically sold those tapes to record companies for their own benefit. I could have done that at any point, but I had no ambition to do that. My whole goal for this was to have proper representation of the songs that we wrote back in the day, rather than all these awful demos that were being put out. That might be third or fourth generation on cassette, or whatever they were, and some of them were just literally work in progress demos. They were not finished songs.

So, that’s why I wanted to do it, not for my own benefit. And certainly I haven’t benefited out of it in any way at all. It cost me huge amounts of money to do it.

Rockpages.gr: I’m sure that this whole story about the Grand Slam stuff getting re-released without your knowledge and your participation, have cost you a lot, not just financially, but also mentally. When you have your work stolen from you that’s very sad. But, I wanted to ask you, was there something that you could have done to avoid this? Do you think that there must might have been something that you could have done back then to stop this, or legally, try to stop this?

Laurence Archer: I probably could have done if I’d known about it. But, the problem is, the person that released these and the record companies that released these were not reputable people. They just wanted to make money. And they did it without my knowledge. When is there, printed and out for release, there’s so little you can do without costing you huge amounts of money, which I don’t have…

And if I’m going to spend any money that I have, I would rather do it in a positive way. But, don’t get me wrong, I always wanted Phil’s music to be out there. I wanted my music, the music I’d written with Phil… I wanted it out there. But, in the right way. Not in this way. Not in the way that it did happen.

Going back to it, mentally, yes, it’s been something I’ve been struggling with for a long time and to some extent doing the album and doing it properly… You know, we went into Vardis, I mean, we’re talking £40,000 up in cost to get this thing done. I was the one that basically made it happen myself, and Mike actually made it happen. It was my goal to be in control of it and do it and make sure it happened properly. I wasn’t in anything for a fast buck. That’s certainly not my thing. When I did it, it did feel like some weight had been taken off me.

Unfortunately, there’s been other releases from what I would call disrespectful record companies. Even in America, where they’ve released the same set of records and half of them are all lies… I’m not being funny, but some of these people involved, they’re not writers. They’ve never written anything. They put themselves down as writers on these songs. They’re not writers. They’ve been in other bands for 45 years, never written one song. They’ve never come up with an idea and for them to do what they’ve done, I think is very, very disrespectful. And if the truth be known, even the way those songs have been registered with the musical, you know, PRM and PRS… The way it’s being registered is totally disrespectful to Phil, because all the percentages and things like that have been put down completely wrong. It’s very difficult to get round all those things legally, and it can be very draining.

Doing the new album I hope that when people see is that… I mean, I’ve always written. I’ve written from the first band I was in. Stampede, UFO and Grand Slam. As well as my solo albums in Japan, for example. I’ve always been a writer and I will not ever stop being a writer. Hopefully this album will show that part of me, you know. I’m not reliant on Phil or my past with Phil or anything like that. It’s about this present day. That’s why I wanted to make it a band. It’s not a project, It’s a band. In some respects, sometimes it could have been easier for me if I told the band something completely different. But, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to call it “Grand Slam” because of the initial understanding of me rerecording those songs, not for any other reason, but to be honest. It probably would have been easier for me to call it, Laurence Archer’s Arrows or I don’t know, whatever…

Rockpages.gr: How was to hook up with Phil Lynnot when you were like 21 years old and he was Phil Lynnot and you were a young guitar player. How was that and how did that happen?

Laurence Archer: Well, you know, Clive Edwards… I mean, after Robbo (ed, Brian Robertson) left Wild Horses, or he had a bust up with Jimmy, Jimmy Bain called me and said, would I like to join Wild Horses and take over Robbo’s part in Wild Horses, which I did for a short period of time. We only did a few shows, we did a residency at the Marquee and a couple of other shows. And then I think Jimmy ran off to do Rainbow, or Ronnie James Dio, I can’t remember! But, we were managed by Thin Lizzy’s management, we were managed by the same people. So, I met Phil then, when I was even younger, I was like 19, or probably not even 20 when I first met Phil. And Phil got up on stage when we played in the Marquee with Wild horses. Shortly after that he invited me down to the studio where they were recording. I think it was “Chinatown” at the time, and I sat and played and jammed with him for about 3 hours in the studio and the management started to hint to me about that maybe there might be a slot coming up in Thin Lizzy and your name is sort of in the frame. You know, you’re already managed by us and Phil’s looking for a new guitar player and he showed interest in you. But, by this time, Wild Horses was sort of coming to an end. And I’d already written some songs for a new project which became Stampede. We got signed up, like in a matter of weeks after Wild Horses, so I was off doing that. So, I didn’t really see Phil for a couple of years or a year and a half or something. And then when I came off a tour with Gary Moore, Stampede did a tour with Gary Moore in 1982, I came off that and we were waiting for the next advance to do the next Stampede album. I got a call late ‘83, I think it was, “ I’m going to send a car, going to come and pick you up and it’s going to bring you into town. Let’s sit down and talk”, which is what happened. I was sitting there, I was a mad cyclist at the time and I had cut my hair off. I was racing pushbikes and I got picked up and I was in my tracksuit, got in the back of a limo and I got taken into town and sat with Phil at Stringfellows and that was my introduction to Phil on a second time. And within weeks we were sitting in his house writing and discussing going forward with the band and then I ended up being on tour with Magnum, Magnum’s guitar player became ill ed, Laurence stood in for Tony Clarkin for “The 11^th Hour tour), and they asked me to cover for him. So, I ended up doing that tour for Magnum, and soon as I finished that, I came back and started writing and then we went to Ireland. I lived in Phil’s house in England for a while, but I lived in Phil’s house in Ireland with Philomena there in the house and we did pre-production rehearsals there with Brian Downey, and we went out and played some shows in Ireland, sort of supposed to be under the radar, but everywhere it was round, it was crazy.

Phil became a very close friend because I think I was different to a lot of people he was hanging around with because I was young, but I was married and I was quite sensible and I was still fit and I wasn’t taking drugs, I had a straight head on me. Also, my writing prowess, obviously influenced by Thin Lizzy back in the day, was very strong and probably, I wouldn’t say on a level with Phil obviously, but we had a mutual respect for the writing. I did become very close to Phil and it was very devastating for me when it happened, because Phil was even starting to talk about reforming Thin Lizzy back then…

Rockpages.gr: The question is, would you be interested to be a member of Thin Lizzy back then?

Laurence Archer: At the time, I was a young man and I, I thought “I have my own vision and my own career”. I had ambitions of my own and in hindsight it would have been a good career move for me. But, at the time I thought Lizzy were waning in their popularity. When they had Snowy (ed, Snowy White)  in the band, for example, I didn’t think it was the best of Lizzy. So, thinking back I wish I had pursued it.

It’s a difficult question, because when you are trying to forge your own career ahead you think it’s a better idea to do your own thing and be in control of that. But, it was probably a silly thing not to pursue it in some respects. Obviously, I’d always wanted be a member of Thin Lizzy

Rockpages.gr: Were you worried about the excesses and the drugs that were related to Phil?

Laurence Archer: Obviously on a day to day level, I was worried. At the time when I was very close with Phil and we were writing all the time and I was actually living at Phil’s house for quite some time, even though I only lived 10 minutes down the road. My house was only 10 minutes down the road. I ended up more or less living at Phil’s. We would write and record as much as we could. And then, we’d end up going out maybe in the evening, coming back. I’d crash at his place and then we get up in the morning and start writing and recording again. So, the times when that side of things showed itself, I wouldn’t say it affected us that much, but, some of it wasn’t pleasant.

I was a very clean living boy at the time. I was racing push bikes and keeping fit. My whole outlook, I was a, 19- 20 year old kid. I like to drink like everybody else, but nothing in excess. I started smoking, it was not peer pressure, but everybody in the band smoked back then. I was worried about Phil’s health

Rockpages.gr: Did you feel any emotion from Phil trying to protect you from all that, since you were much younger and since he was deep into that lifestyle?

Laurence Archer: Yeah, I did feel that a lot, yes. The main thing, the main discussion that Phil and I had at the time was that Phil was trying to get away from all that. He was trying to clean up that side of his life. And I think it was another reason that we got on so well. Compared to him, I was the boy next door. I was young, fit and quite normal, you know, compared to a lot of people he knew…

Phil did his utmost to try and straighten up. Unfortunately, when you’ve gone down that path, as we all know, it’s a difficult path to get out of, it’s being put in front of you all the time and with Phil’s celebrity and being an icon and whatever, it would be put in front of you all the time. So, it was very hard for him to see it through. And it’s just a shame, really. I know that some were taken out of the equation, because of the connection with drugs and his history with drugs, myself, the management, the road crew we were all trying. Some of the road crew would change because of their long term history with Lizzy. From what I gather, quite a few of the road crew was as bad as the band. So, we changed quite a few of the crew to try and keep it away from the Grand Slam arena when we were playing and when we were home. But, it was very difficult.

Rockpages.gr: Would you say that people like Phil and like other rock stars, for example Keith Moon, had fallen victims of their own lifestyle. Becoming something beyond a legend made people expect stuff from them. People wanted them to be excessive, going to parties, having fun, making crazy things. So they kind of fell victims of their own lifestyle.

Laurence Archer: Yeah, I think if you’ve never lived that sort of life is hard to explain. The main reason for people to get high or to take some substitute is that when you’re on stage and you’re playing and you’re getting admiration from fans and you get all of that and that’s all happening in your life, in your working life… When you walk away in your private life, you just constantly trying to recreate that sort of euphoria again. And I think people like Keith Moon… Ηe was a crazy man Keith, he was a complete crazy man and lovely, I mean, the worst thing about this is most of these people that fall victim to this are, I would say, very nice, normal people. They’re not horrible people, it’s just something they fall into. And your lifestyle and what people expect from you.

Somebody like Phil, you know, he couldn’t walk out the door in front door without people. Everybody recognized him. He was a very recognizable character, the way he looked and the way he was. Being a black man with an Irish accent, it’s not the everyday thing.

Rockpages.gr: A lot of people nowadays keep repeating that rock is dead, that there’s no new rock stars. There’s no new Phil Lynnot’s, there’s no new Keith Moon or whatever. There’s no more recognizable people like you see somebody on the road say, “Ah, this is the guy who plays guitar for…” Do you agree with that? Do you think that rock and heavy metal, as we know it, is going to die when all the bands stop and the fans biologically are gone?

Laurence Archer: I don’t think what will die in that respect. But, I do think it is very difficult days with the amount of bands and the amount of people on social media and the availability… In that era from the early seventies, all the way up to maybe I would say the late eighties, or maybe early nineties, we didn’t have the immediate contacts with everything that was going on with these people. This creates an air of mystery and I think people could use their own imagination about what these people’s lives were like and what they did and what they got up to. And that happened naturally because, you know, these people were not available on the internet. They weren’t available. So everybody from Bowie and all those rock stars in the seventies they all had a mystique, because they you couldn’t really get close to them. And you didn’t know what they were doing in their day to day life, whereas now everything’s sort of in front of you with the social media and the internet. So, in some respects I think it has killed off a bit of that sort of individualism that you would get.

Also, there’s a lot more bands… There’s so many bands that there’s no way to keep on top of who’s good and who’s not. We played festivals and with no disrespect to these people in any way, but… I’ve never heard of these bands.

I think it was a different time and a different era. And I think to get those characters and to get that individualism you needed an air of mystique. I mean, even when I started, I had fans from Japan for example, who thought that I lived in a castle… They thought, “he’s in a rock band, he plays guitar in front of thousands of people, he must live in a castle somewhere”. It’s their imagination of what celebrity rock star life was supposed to be.

Back to those times, they were less bands and I think it was much easier to create characters. There was an element of glamor and the way people dressed, it was a lot more glam back then. Since the introduction of… I would say AC/DC onwards a lot of bands just walked on stage in jeans and t-shirts and there wasn’t really like looking up at some guy in a silver spacesuit, or something, all dressed up completely wacky. Some of that has come back now, because people like the Gen Z love all that ‘80s stuff, you know? But, I just think it was a different era that people would see pictures of these people in magazines or newspapers and maybe on TV, but they would never see them in real life and that was that created the mystique.