Laurence Archer (Grand Slam, UFO, Stampede) Interview

The bases are loaded and Laurence Archer is up to bat. The veteran hard rock guitarist first made a name for himself in the NWOBHM heyday, laying down the riffage for Lautrec, Wild Horses, and Stampede. Come the early ’90s, he’d end up playing for his childhood heroes, UFO. In between all of this, however, was a band that time nearly forgot, Grand Slam. Formed alongside Thin Lizzy founder Phil Lynott, Grand Slam had it all: Kickass tunes, killer hooks, and over the top live shows. Unfortunately, a record deal never transpired, leaving Grand Slam in the past tense…that is until Archer resurrected the band nearly a decade ago to properly record these songs once and for all. We sat down with Archer to discuss this new chapter in Grand Slam history, writing with Phil Lynott, partying with Lemmy, and more.

Greetings Laurence and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?

Laurence Archer: I’m very good, thank you. I’m very happy to be speaking to you.

I’m happy to be speaking with you! Grand Slam has just released their second album, Wheel of Fortune. How soon after 2019’s Hit the Ground did things start coming together for this album?

LA: I do have a bank of songs which I’ve had for some time. I write all the time, so I’ve always got material to go to. Obviously, in the time element, when we released Hit the Ground, unfortunately, it was only a couple weeks after the release we did one short tour of the UK before the whole pandemic hit. We had to cancel touring and sit on our bums for a couple of years *laughs*. I did have the opportunity; I was working in the Caribbean doing some film work. I got Mike (Dyer) the singer over and we recorded some of the new songs. In some we respects, we made useful time of the down time of the period. As I said, I’ve got many songs in the bag. I’m already starting to write for the next album. It’s my love and my passion.

What’s so unique about Grand Slam is how the past and the present are so intertwined for reasons we will be getting into shortly. How many songs on here are new and how many go back to the band’s original run in the ’80s?

LA: On this latest album, there’s only one real link to the past there. There’s one song on there which I’ve used let’s just say a small melodic element of what we did on a song called “Come Together”, which was a song called “Harlem” back in the day. When we did it back then, I wasn’t happy. It hadn’t been completed, so I’ve added a bit and changed the whole feel of the song. In regards to what you’re saying about how it’s sort of related to back then, I tell a lot of people as a kid, I was influenced by UFO and Thin Lizzy and all those bands of that era. I naturally write that way. That’s my go-to.

As an influence, everybody has an influence when they’re growing up or in their childhood or whatever. In some respects, a lot of it is related to that because I naturally write that way. It might be slightly old school or because I’m very heavy with myself regarding the melodic element of the songs. (No matter) how heavy they are or how light they are, I still want people whistling them when they walk out of the room. That’s my go-to.

They’re relative in…there’s probably a couple of songs on there which I’ve probably had for 10 or 15 years. On the first album, Hit the Ground, I wrote “Gone Are the Days” in 1986, late ’86. That was a song from back then in that era. When you’re writing, you build up banks of songs. Sometimes you don’t use them on anything, or you do use bits of them, or you don’t use. When it comes to putting an album together, sometimes I look at stuff that I’ve written in the past and I go, “How can I bring it up to date? How can I bring it into this present format of the Grand Slam thing?”

My writing can be a very ballady love song to very hard riffy stuff. I just cherry pick stuff that I think will work. If it doesn’t immediately work, I’ll throw it away. Some of the songs have such a strong melodic element that I want to keep them and I basically change the feel underneath the melody. I try and make it as rocky as I can, even though it might be a very sort of melodic song.

Was there anything the band did differently on this album as opposed to Hit the Ground?

LA: I would say as in time together as a band, on this album, I basically wrote and arranged most of the songs. In fact, maybe all of the songs before we got into the rehearsal studio. We only did two days rehearsal. We honed it a little bit more in the studio, but I had quite a strong idea of how I wanted the arrangements to be and how I wanted the outcome to be. When I write a song, a lot of the time, I have this thing in my head of how it’s gonna sound.

I’ve been very lucky in most of the things I’ve been involved with, including UFO. Although I don’t have a credit as a producer, I sat there on the desk all day long while the other guys would come in and come out, do their bit and go and whatever. It’s another part of my love for music. I want it to sound like how I’ve heard it in my head when I write it. I was very happy to be in the producer role on this album, which gave me a little bit more control over the end product.

There’s no shortage of killer old school hard rock riffs on this album. For you, what’s the key to a killer guitar riff and when do you know it’s right for a song?

LA: Generally, when I write a song, I write a song in a very straightforward, caught sitting down in my studio or even on my couch or wherever I am in a motel room or wherever. I try and write the melodic element first, and when I get the feel for the song of what sort of tempo and feeling it’s gonna be, I normally try and write the riff within that so it’s connected rather then…when I was in UFO, Phil Mogg told me he always used to struggle with the UFO stuff in trying to develop the vocal element over what was essentially just guitar riffs, where it doesn’t navigate him naturally to a melodic passage because it’s just guitar riffs.

I always try and sort of infuse the guitar riff thing within the melodic element of the song as a basis. You’ve got the underline and you’ve got the guitar thing on top. That for me is an important thing. As I said before, all the melodic elements are an important thing for me. I test out these songs and bits and pieces. I play stuff to people, friends and whatever. If they walk out the door whistling it, I go, “That’s a keeper.” It’s like that thing. I wanna see 20,000 people singing along and punching in the air. That’s what you do it for, to connect with the people.

Which is what I really appreciate about this album. It’s got that old school, dare I say “arena rock” vibe to it. There should be no shame in that, like you said, the prospect of 20,000 people pumping their fists, singing along, and having the time of their life. I imagine, being on the other end of that, is a surreal experience.

LA: Yeah, to some extent, the industry at the moment, and no disregard to any artist or band or whatever, however they work their thing, but I probably am a little bit old school in the way I develop things like that. Sometimes, what you just said there, what you just touched on, for me, it’s still important. It seems like there’s a modern element of people that think it’s so old school. When we play festivals or when we play stuff, and when I still look at festival lineups, in the industry, we get this thing, “What are you? An old band or a new band? What’s going on?” I emphasize that it’s a new band and I want it to continue as a band that’s very important to me to have it seen as four guys in this band, four different characters.

It’s a thing where, why is it on these festivals you’ll get a massive lineup of people, but still the two headline bands will be bands from the late ’70s or the ’80s? Do you know what I mean? Where does it make sense when promoters and other people go, “You’re not the new Metallica. You’re not the new Accept.”, or whatever you want to call it. I’m trying to stay true to myself and true to what I like. If I don’t like it, I won’t play it. I’ll dump the song. It’s important to me that we need to enjoy ourselves when we’re out there and do it.

I think people are coming around a bit more to that arena rock kind of singalong melodic material. There will come a time, I think, when people will have enough of incredibly heavy riffs, but you don’t come out of the stadium singing one of those songs, you know what I mean? It’s not something that you’re gonna go away and remember, and that’s what I really wanna put into it. I wanna write songs that people can connect to and get into and walk away going, “I can’t get that song out of my head.”

For those unaware, who currently plays alongside you in Grand Slam and what events took place that led to the resurrection of the band?

LA: Well the guys that are with me at the moment, I have an American drummer called Benjy Reed. I have Rocky Newton who’s the bass player who was with MSG and also with a band called Lionheart for a while back in the day. My singer is a guy called Mike Dyer who’s done a fair amount in the UK, but like me, he sort of dropped out of the industry in the late ’80s. He went into theater and he’s actually been singing in theater for many years in things like Blood Brothers and Jesus Christ Superstar and all that. Actually, it made him a stronger personality and a stronger singer. I worked with him many years ago. I had a band called Rhode Island Red, which was just before UFO. The only reason it didn’t continue was because I took the UFO gig.

Mike sort of, as a singer, he fills all the elements that I want in a singer. I didn’t want another Bruce Dickinson, Paul Rodgers, Steve Perry. I wanted somebody that had the cantor that Phil Lynott had in Lizzy. I wanted a strong clear voice, but no screaming high, no growling down there. He has a very clear, powerful baritone voice, I suppose. It suits my writing. I write what I write. I write for myself. I hear myself singing it. Mike takes it up to his level, but it means that I can immediately communicate to him about melodies and the emphasis and the dynamics within the song.

As far as how it was created, in 2016, I got called from the guy who runs a festival called Sweden Rock, which is one of the biggest festivals in Europe. It’s massive. Everybody does it. KISS does it. Queen does it. It’s a big festival. He’s been a longtime fan of Grand Slam and Lizzy and Phil. He said, “How much would it cost to put a band together to go and play the Grand Slam songs?”, which we did, but that was really a session band. I had Neil Murray on bass and Mark Stanway and a couple of guys from Magnum.

Two years later, I did a 3G guitar show. Within that, in the set, I put about four Grand Slam songs. I put some UFO songs in there that I had written and some Grand Slam songs that I had written. I got the band together basically to do that. When I did that and we did the Grand Slam material, I immediately realized that Mike was the right guy for the job and Benjy, the drummer, was the right guy for the drums. We had an interim bass player before we got Rocky, but it was at that point that I made my mind up.

I got to a point personally where I said, “It’s always been my goal for 30 years to record these songs properly on the Hit the Ground album, the original songs that I wrote with Phil.” Although some of them were recorded properly, those recordings are not out there. There’s been very poor, basically stolen work in progress tapes from Phil’s studio, that have been released on YouTube and various other things and on independent bootleg sort of record companies. I wasn’t any part of that and I wasn’t very happy about it because I know Phil wouldn’t have been very happy about it either.

It was always my goal, really, to record the songs properly, which is why I put the whole project together. I was in the film industry and I got to a point where I said, “If I don’t do this now, I’m never gonna do it.” That was 2018. I finished filming actually in the Caribbean and I came back. I sort of mustered everybody together and we did a couple of weeks pre-recording rehearsals. We went in and recorded the album. That’s how it came together, but it was really my longtime goal to get these songs recorded so the fans could hear them in the way I think more relative to the way they would’ve ended up if we got to do the album with Phil.

As I said to everybody, this lineup is basically a continuum. It’s gonna carry on. The new album showcases that there’s not a lack of songwriting ability and the connection between the songwriting that I did with Phil in ’84 and what I’m doing now. It’s relative because it’s my go-to. The way I write, it’s not really changed since then. It will continue and we have a lot more to give. We just wanna grow. It’s been a slow, long process to get it here, but I’m so pleased that Lizzy and Phil and the original Grand Slam fans seem to be really on our side.

It’s been incredible, the response and the feedback from these guys. Doing it on whatever level you’re gonna do it, you always expect somebody to come back in a critical way. To be honest, we’ve had 99.9% positive and 0.01% people have made the odd comment. Generally, it’s been a fantastic response, so I’m very pleased and humbled by it.

I want to go back to the very beginning of Grand Slam. When did you first cross paths with Phil Lynott and whose idea was it to put a band together?

LA: Well, I was in a band called Wild Horses with Jimmy Bain for a very short period of time. Brian Robertson, who was also the other guitar player in Lizzy, had a band called Wild Horses after Lizzy with Jimmy Bain. Brian sort of became incapable of playing for a period of time. Jimmy asked me if I would fill that spot, which I did, but we were managed by the same people as Lizzy. I met Phil and spent some time with him. He came and got up at probably 2 or 3 shows that we did. He invited me down to the studio where they were doing I think it was Renegade.

The management was sort of nodding at me. “Looks like you’re in the firing line for the next guitar player of Lizzy.” type of thing, but I had already signed a deal with Polydor for Stampede. I went off and did that, maybe rightly or wrongly. I was 18, 19 years old at that point. That was my thing. Stampede was my baby at the time, so I went off and did that. When Lizzy finally finished, Phil called me. He went off and did…there’s a bit of misconception here about Grand Slam being around before I was around, but it wasn’t.

Basically, Phil went to Sweden and did a solo tour. He took John Sykes and Brian Downey with him. The other guys were session guys, but he went off and did a tour of Sweden. It’s when he came back from there that he called me and said, “I wanna put a band together. Lizzy is no more.” I only lived half a mile up the road from where Phil’s house was, so we got together. I had a couple of prior commitments. I had to go on tour with Magnum and I think I had a couple of Stampede sort of final shows to do. After that, I just ended up more or less living at Phil’s house, sitting there writing with him. At that point, Phil was incredibly excited about the new project. I think he was quite relieved to sort of move on from Lizzy and start something fresh. He was really going for it.

What was songwriting process like? How did you and Phil work together on a song?

LA: Basically, we would both bring ideas. Sometimes it would just be jamming in the studio. Generally, it was at Phil’s house. He had a little studio in his back garden which was basically a garage that had been converted into a studio. We used to sit in there endlessly. We had a strong connection because of me not being a gunslinger guitar player. I always considered myself to be a writer before a gunslinger guitarist. We had a strong connection on the writing side and we basically just used to constantly bring ideas in.

Sometimes, Phil had many ideas about…what he would do is he would put a drum track down, just for a feel. Then, we’d just mess around over the top of it. Sometimes something would come. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Other songs, I had just done a load of demos in the studio just prior to that with Fin Muir, the singer of Waysted, where I’d done “Can’t Get Away” and there’s a couple of other songs which I did which are now named something different because they put the work in progress things that were stolen out of Phil’s studio after he passed out on the internet.

We would both come into the studio with ideas and we would work on them. I would say that some ideas…I wrote in a slightly different way to Phil in that I would’ve got to a further point in the song before I carried it on, whereas Phil would sometimes work from a very basic level and develop the song. We would go into the studio and, lyrically and melodically, he would go in and try 10, 20 different ways of doing the song. That was his creative process. It was hours in the studio, jamming and doing previous ideas of things that we both had in the locker, as it were.

The shows Grand Slam played back in ’84 and ’85 quickly became the stuff of legend. In fact, one commenter on our webzine fondly recalled catching the band as part of the Kerrang! Wooargh Weekender in October of ’84. Which Grand Slam shows stand out to you the most and why?

LA: I remember that show in particular because we had a bit of a wild night with Lemmy because he was on the show. It was a great gig. The ones that really stand out to me are the bigger ones that we did in Ireland. We did the SFX (Hall) and we did Limerick. We played some big outdoor venues. The warmth and the fans in Ireland were just crazy man. When we first got together and put the set together, we rehearsed it in Ireland. I was living in Phil’s house. Phil had a house in a place called Howth in Ireland. We rehearsed in the local community center there and went out and did some shows, which was supposed to be just warmup, undercover shows.

We turned up to some of these *laughs* and we couldn’t even get anywhere near to the venue because they were literally surrounded by thousands of people. That was a mad and crazy time, but very enjoyable for me as a very young man. It was quite eye opening for me and a great experience. I would say playing in Ireland was fantastic, but I enjoyed all the shows. The bigger festival shows we did were great fun, but some of the smaller shows we did in Ireland were fantastic.

That’s an interesting dynamic, playing these festivals and mega arenas, but also playing tiny rooms. There’s two different energies there, but either way, I assume both are rewarding experiences.

LA: It is. To be honest, sometime playing a smaller venue is scarier than playing in front of 40,000 people. Generally, they’re 40 yards away from you, whereas in a small venue, their eyes are right there and they can see everything. It can be quite scary. I would say the intimacy of doing a small show, a couple of hundred people or 600 people in a small venue, it’s almost like you want the smallest venue with the largest audience. That’s the biggest pride because everyone’s there for a reason and everybody gets into it. I love playing festival shows. I really do love playing festival shows, but the little ones are great venue. Small venues are great fun.

Over the years, some of the Grand Slam songs were used by various bands, projects, etc. What are your thoughts on Gary Moore’s version of “Military Man”?

LA: At that time, I was actually really good friends with Gary, so it didn’t bother me. I let him get away with it *laughs*. I was more pissed off that my credit wasn’t on there as the writer of the song. There is a demo out there which is the Grand Slam demo which is incredibly similar. Gary came up to me. I had just come back from America with Huey Lewis. I was out with Phil at a magazine launch or something. Gary came up to me and said, “Hey man, I love your playing on this song.” I toured with Gary in ’82 and I got to know him then quite well. It’s an honor that Gary did what he did and sort of copied a lot of what I did on the Grand Slam demo, which people hadn’t heard yet. That version of that demo is not out there. Gary and Phil together were icons.

What’s the biggest lesson you took away from your time with Phil?

LA: Well, he taught me a lot. He took me under his wing. I was quite young, so he took me under his wing. His determination and his work ethic didn’t really falter. People go on about how the drugs and the drink and everything else, but his work ethic never really changed. He was always very passionate and always very professional about what he was doing. I learned a lot from that. In some respects, I learned a different way of writing. I was very concise about my writing and Phil was very loose about his writing until it came to a point where everything would come together.

I learned all the other stuff: How to deal with the press and how to deal with all those things that you think are gonna be easy, but sometimes are not. He did teach me a lot. He also taught me how to party a little bit *laughs*. I was a very clean living boy when I joined Grand Slam. I used to race bush bikes and go to the gym. I didn’t smoke and I didn’t really drink very much. They were good great times. I wouldn’t change anything.

Prior to joining Grand Slam, you play guitar for the NWOBHM bands Lautrec and Stampede. What memories stand out from those early days and the NWOBHM movement as a whole. Was there ever the sense that these bands were part of something larger than themselves?

LA: Definitely with Stampede, yes. My memories of Lautrec is I was very young then. I was 17 and we had done a demo and gave it to a DJ that was going out with Iron Maiden and Praying Mantis on a duel gig. I lived in Bristol in England at that point. I gave the DJ the tape and said, “Have a listen and play it on your radio show.” He was a well known rock DJ. I said, “If there’s anything you can do, we’re looking to play or get out there or get a deal.” Within two weeks, he phoned up and said, “Look, I’ve got gigs for you.” It ended up that we got the Wheels of Steel Tour with Saxon in 1980.

We were young kids sleeping in the back of a transit van, getting paid 50 quid a night to support Saxon, but we became very close friends with Saxon and the tour actually got extended because the album went to #1 and they sort of rebooked all the venues again and we went back out. They liked us so much that they said, “Do you want to come back and do the tour again?”, so we did. I’ve always been close friends with Graham (Oliver) and Paul Quinn and Biff (Byford). That was a great experience.

Stampede doing Reading Festival, doing a live album, recording at Battle Studio in Hastings. Then we did the Gary Moore tour, which was the Corridors of Power Tour. It was Gary, Neil Murray, Don Airey, and Ian Paice. John Sloman was singing on the very first part, but he only did a couple of gigs and then left and Gary started singing. Touring with those guys, you’re gonna learn every lesson in the book. They’re awesome musicians, absolutely awesome. I’ll never forget that.

The reason I got to know Gary pretty well and the big memory for me was that he actually started using my backline. I had certain Marshalls which he couldn’t get hold of at the time. He ended up using my Marshall heads on the second half of the tour. We got to know each other pretty well at that point. If you didn’t know him, Gary came across as quite a difficult guy *laughs*, but once you got to know him, he was just a big softie really, a lovely guy. That was a great memory for me.

You did feel like you were a part of something new happening with the NWOBHM thing. Stampede really had a bit of a political situation in that when we signed to Polydor, they didn’t have an A&R man, so the label manager actually signed us to the label. When they got an A&R man in, the A&R man already had a band called Heavy Pettin that he wanted to sign. Because Heavy Pettin didn’t have a manager, basically, he got our manager to manage Heavy Pettin and they sort of took our second advance for the second album *laughs*. We sat around for about 6 months not doing anything, which is when I actually got the call from Phil.

That’s how it went, but I think Stampede would’ve gone onto much bigger things. We had actually charted in England, not only in the normal rock ways, but we had a single in the charts that was being played on mainstream radio. More fault to Polydor because Heavy Pettin didn’t sell anywhere near what we did *laughs*. Anyway, it’s all in the past now. Great memories, all great memories. Obviously, from that point on, I did a solo album in Japan and I’ve done a few other projects.

Basically, Pete Way from UFO asked me to join UFO for about four years before I did because he lived locally to me and he knew of me. I didn’t know him that well, but I got to know him pretty well before I joined the band. He was adamant he wanted ang English guitar player. I know that they’d been auditioning American guitar players for a year and couldn’t find anybody that they liked or was right for the gig. Pete came back to me a second time and said, “Look, please do it. Please do it.” I finally said, “OK, I’ll do it, but you guys have got to go on the straight and narrow for a couple of years. I’m not gonna do this if this falls apart.”

*laughs* I had heard many horror stories about walking out from gigs and Michael (Schenker) and Phil not getting on and all that, but they did. They cleaned up their act and we had a great time. For me, that was a fantastic experience as well, but it was that experience that made me get out of the industry for a little while. When we built up this reputation again for about three years, unfortunately, Phil fell off the wagon and I came back from, I think we were in Russia or Japan. We were in Russia.

I came back from that after Phil had fallen offstage and broken his leg and just went, “All this great work for the face of UFO was now just being shot in the leg by Phil falling offstage.”, which really wasn’t his fault totally, but I decided to take a sabbatical form music for about 10 years, which I did. I came back and actually did a Medicine Head album, which is basically a guy called John Fiddler. I did that. Then, I raced motorbikes for about two years, spent all my money, and went to work *laughs*.

As the guitarist for UFO, not just creating new music with them, but tackling their back catalog live as well, what were the biggest differences between Michael Schenker’s playing and Paul “Tonka” Chapman’s? Furthermore, in what ways did you find your own voice as a guitarist in UFO?

LA: TO be honest, I tried to do it my own way anyway. I’d be lying if I said when I was a kid I saw Michael with them, but I saw Tonka. I really loved his playing, but as a kid when I first started playing guitar, a couple years after I started playing guitar, my favorite album was Strangers in the Night. I was just listening to that back to back. It wasn’t that much of a hardship to cover the material, but I wanted to do it my own way. It’s very difficult because when you’re doing something like “Rock Bottom”, it’s a 5 minute guitar solo that’s all set out in a certain way. I don’t think Michael plays it the same every night, but I used to try and do the main part of the theme of everything that happened on Strangers in the Night.

It’s a no-win situation when you get into a situation like that, being that people will always compare you to Michael or compare you to what was on the record. It’s a difficult situation, but I did my best on it and I’ve had many people give me great accolades and say it was brilliant. As in the studio album (1992’s High Stakes & Dangerous Men) which I did write a lot of, well most of it. People said, “You were a perfect fit for UFO.” It was a good time. I liked it very much and obviously I was in awe of being in that environment because growing up as a kid, Lizzy, UFO, Nazareth, AC/DC, all those guys that were hanging around then, they were the world to me. It was all good.

Leading up to this interview, I was looking for my copy of the Steel Crazy compilation, which I know I have somewhere, because it features not just Stampede, but Lautrec’s “Mean Gasoline”. Was that one of the first songs you ever wrote?

LA: Yeah, it was a song that I wrote a long time ago when I was a kid. It was the first rock song that I had written as in a straightforward rock song, so yeah. We recorded it in a tiny little studio in Bristol. It was a demo essentially.

In closing, what does the rest of 2024 have in store for you and Grand Slam?

LA: We’re just about to go to Sweden and then we’re in Ireland and then we’re back in Europe. We haven’t got any future plans. We’ve got some more videos to come. We’ve just finished about another three videos for the new album and we got some other exciting things coming along. We’ve done a couple of tracks which will be released on special dates and probably be with special artwork. There’s a very traditional song that we’ve done which our record company is excited about. We’ve got some things in the pipeline to keep the thing rolling before we get out on the road properly. We’re just excited to get out and play. That’s what we wanna do: Get out in front of people.

The new Grand Slam album, Wheel of Fortune, is out now on Silver Lining Music. For more information on Grand Slam, visit www.grandslamrocks.com.