Leo Lyons (Ten Years After, Hundred Seventy Split) Interview

1969 was a banner year for heavy blues firebrands, Ten Years After. After a couple solid years of gigging around the globe and experimenting in the studio, the band solidified their reputation as a musical force to be reckoned with, thanks to the release of their third studio album, Ssssh. Lying at the crossroads of English blues, tripped out psychedelia, and explosive hard rock, Ssssh not only foreshadowed a string of equally masterful Ten Years After albums to come, but the direction rock as a whole was headed come the early ’70s. Now, 56 years since its original release, Ssssh has been given the deluxe remix treatment: Complete with new and improved sonics, and a bonus CD of live material that’s never seen the light of day. We sat down with founding Ten Years After bassist, Leo Lyons, to discuss this new reissue, the difference between American and English audiences, and producing the likes of UFO and Motörhead.

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

Leo Lyons: I’m doing great! Thanks for having me on the program, or the webzine *laughs*. It’s much appreciated. I’m well.

I appreciate you taking the time for this interview. I’m really excited for the conversation we’re about to have, the crux of which is the band’s 1969 classic, Ssssh, which just received a massive rerelease, complete with a remix and bonus live CD. Whose idea was it to revisit this album and give it a revamp in 2025?

LL: Our former record company, and our current record company, Chrysalis. I think it’s out on the Chrysalis label, but they’ve released some stuff on Blue Horizon too. This is on the Chrysalis label, which it was originally in 1969. They told me they were gonna release it, remix it, 3 discs with the live Helsinki recording and different things. They’ve done a great job. I’m really pleased with it. I don’t normally go back in time and listen to stuff I’ve done *laughs*. They asked me to do some interviews, which I was pleased to do. I had a quick listen and yeah, it’s great. It sounds great.

I’d like to start by going back in time to June, 1969. Ten Years After are about to enter the studio to record Ssssh. Where was the band at this point in time and was there an overall shared goal in mind ahead of recording the album?

LL: Not really. It was the first time we recorded on 8 track. The records previous to that were all done at Decca, the Decca Studios, which is a very, very much establishment studio at the time. Two, three sessions a day with tea breaks, lunch breaks, one thing and another, and as I say, recorded on 4 track. By this time, our manager managed to get us a production deal, which meant we could record wherever we wanted to. We decided we’d go to Morgan Studios in London on our first 8 track. Roy Thomas Baker was the assistant engineer at the time, although he engineered two or three tracks on that record. Andy Johns, Glyn Johns’ brother, was the engineer. It was a whole new thing for us. 8: Double the tracks to record on, better stereo spacing, the opportunity to step out a little bit. When we were recording before, everything had to be live. You couldn’t go back and say, “Oh, I played a bum note. Can I drop it in?” Those things weren’t an option.

Would you say the 8 track approach was crucial as far as how those songs eventually transpired?

LL: I think it was. Again, it gave Alvin (Lee) and I a bit of a buzz to go into an 8 track thing. The Beatles started to happen. I know they were doing 4 track to 4 track, stereo to stereo, bounce-downs and one thing to another. They probably had the budget for it. When we were signed to Decca, as I say, there were strict hours that you made your record, so we didn’t have time to experiment. We had to go in and play as if we were playing live, which we were. “Yep, that sounded good.” Sometimes it was released in stereo. Sometimes it was released in mono. It was that transitional period. Moving to Morgan Studios, and onto 8 track, and with a little bit of freedom on the budget, it was a big difference.

At the time, I thought, “Yeah, this is the best record we’ve done.” That stuck in my memory, even though I never played the record after we’d finished it, it stuck in my memory for years and years and years. It’s only in subsequent years I’ve listened to some other record that we’ve done and I’ve thought, “Yeah, that was pretty good too. I like that.” All in all, I’m quite pleased. Retrospectively, I’m 81, 82 in a few weeks time. I think I play better now *laughs* fortunately. I haven’t slipped off the ledge yet. That’s really why I never listen to stuff I’ve worked with. I always think, “Ah, I could’ve done that right. I could’ve done it better or different.” But I think I’m pleased with it, and I’m very pleased with the effort that the record label have put into it and everyone whose been involved because it doesn’t happen very often.

At this point in time, how would the band go about creating music? Would Alvin come in with the songs already written for the band to expand upon from there, or was it common for the songs to be born in the rehearsal studio out of jam sessions?

LL: Mostly out of jams. One or two songs Alvin had. He did a little demo. He said many times, “I wrote the lyrics on the way to the studio.”, but they were always jammed out. We were a jam band. Alvin and I developed jamming when we worked in Hamburg at the Star Club in 1962, when you had to do an hour on, an hour off throughout the night. You learned to extend the numbers by jamming. We were pretty close, Alvin and I, so everything ends up being a jam. That was Ten Years After *laughs*. I just had a quick listen before I did this interview. I think there’s one track…I think it was “Bad Scene”. It could be another one, but you could hear Alvin saying, “Tell me where we come back in.” *laughs* Of course, you wouldn’t have heard it on the original record, but somebody heard it and pushed it up a little. Strange things that happen!

That’s a perfect segue into the next question. When it comes to the new 2025 remix of the album, are there any details of certain songs that stand out to you that perhaps weren’t noticeable on the original 1969 release?

LL: Well, that thing, as I said. You hear a little bit more of the keyboards. There’s a tendency sometimes with people who don’t remix sensitively that they think, “OK, I’ll get a better drum sound. I’ll sample the kit. I’ll do this, that, and the other.” All of a sudden, it loses something about 1969 and becomes completely different. That hasn’t been done in this case. To me, it still sounds like, a better audio, if you like, but it still sounds like 1969. It’s still true to what it is. Hats off to the engineer who did that, because I’m a recording engineer and a record producer. I wouldn’t wanted to have had a go of mixing that myself because I’d be tempted to make this sound better, but it wouldn’t fit together the same. It would’ve been a nightmare for me *laughs*. Total nightmare. I’d be too close to it. It’s interesting, as tentative as one might be giving something like a remix to someone and then wondering what it’s gonna sound like, I was very pleasantly surprised.

Sidetracking slightly, you mentioned you’re a producer and engineer, and have had quite a successful career as such in the decades following Ten Years After. You’ve obviously seen the way technology has evolved over the years.

LL: Oh golly, yes.

From the era of Ten Years After to today, things have changed a lot. Would you say these technological advances are a blessing and a curse?

LL: It’s a blessing and a curse because you’ve got so many options. You can go in the studio and, I mentioned the drums before. You go in the studio, record the drums, get a drum sound that sounds pretty good. Being a bass player, I slightly change the tone that I get on my bass to fit in with the kit. Then, you go away, and this is not on record I’ve produced, but records I’ve played on, different records. Then, someone decides, “Actually, we’ll change the snare sound. We’ll put a sample on the snare, a sample on the bass.” All of a sudden, the kit sounds different and the bass doesn’t fit. Then you start thinking, “Oh, we better re-amp the bass, play it back in the studio get a slightly different sound.” And there are a million options.

There’s an old saying that if you polish a turd so much, it becomes perfection, but it loses the soul of the record. A lot of records are like that. This whole thing, compression was a big thing that came in, but with mass overdubs and one thing or another, there’s no silence on a track now, very few. I’m generalizing. There are some great recordings of 2025 and such, but it becomes like wallpaper. You don’t hear virtuoso musicians playing on it anymore. There are virtuoso musicians playing on a lot of the records, but you don’t hear it anymore because it all fits in with that orchestral sound that comes out. For me, it may be because of my age, I can’t hear the lyrics on a lot of it. All those changes are there. That’s the difference.

Technology’s gotten a lot better. You can retune somebody that can’t pitch *laughs*. “Make me sound like Ray Charles.” OK! There are a lot of plugins with presets. Seeing young engineers now, there’s a danger that they put their favorite presets on a track before they even listen to the instrument. Whereas I’m like, “What do they sound like when they’re playing?” I won’t mess it about too much because when they get it tight, it’s really gonna sound a lot better than it does now when it’s messy. It becomes tight. The lesser you do, in my opinion, the better.

Something I’ve always loved about the albums from that late ’60s and early ’70s heavy rock era is if I crank the volume loud enough, it feels as if the band is in the room with me. It’s like, “Wow, Ten Years After is right here!” You don’t hear that warm, organic sound anymore.

LL: No, you don’t. Particularly the vinyl, for all its delicate handling and the crackling and the distortion and one thing and another, it does have a front to back perspective. It’s not just left or right. It’s front to back. You can hear the depth. I did a record 5 or 10 years ago. We decided to do it on vinyl and it sounded like you were in the room. You felt like you were in the room rather than across the hall. Huge drum sound, huge guitar sounds. Everything’s in your face, but you can hear that front to back depth. I like that.

Stonedhenge, the album that proceeded Ssssh, saw the band incorporating many progressive and experimental elements.

LL: Oh yeah.

Was Ssssh the band’s way of reeling it back in? I’ve always viewed the album as the foundation for that heavy blues sound the band would become known for.

LL: Yes. I think Stonedhenge was a little bit self-indulgent *laughs*. Everybody did a little bit. It’s interesting if you look at it that way. Our producer, Mike Vernon, who’s a good friend of mine, Mike was starting the Blue Horizon label at the time. He was giving us a lot of free reign in the studio when he wasn’t there, and we took advantage of it. Stereo had just come out. I think it may have been the first record that we recorded with stereo in mind, so you get things moving across the stereo and that kind of thing, but Ssssh was a return back to what we’d be doing onstage rather than trying things out *laughs*.

Ssssh was the first Ten Years After album to be self-produced. What led to this decision and in what ways did it impact the development of the album? Was there a specific reason why Mike Vernon wasn’t called back to the helm?

LL: Mike was starting his own record label, Blue Horizon, with his brother. We still came out, originally, on Decca Records, but through a production deal, so there were no staff producers involved. I think Roy and Andy happened to be working at Morgan at the time. They did it. RT Baker, who produced Queen among lots and lots of other things, engineered. He was supposedly the assistant engineer, but he did actually record two or three of those tracks, as well as Andy, Glyn Johns’ brother. It was a whole different thing. We had a free hand, but in a rock n’ roll sense. With being able to record on 8 track, which sounds very small now, we were able to get more separation on the instruments. If somebody played a bum note, you could drop it in, whereas…I don’t recall many drop-ins, to tell you the truth. I could probably go and find a few mistakes that should’ve been dropped in *laughs*, but I don’t think there were that many.

It was enthusiasm. We wanted to make a recording like we were playing live. That’s pretty much what we did with a couple of takes, a few overdubs, and some sound effects. That sort of thing. That’s how it was. Stax and Motown, there was a similar thing going off on those early records. Great feel, great songs, great play. A few mistakes, but it didn’t matter. It was the energy, the feel of something. That’s what really we were trying to capture, particularly on Ssssh and moving towards an 8 track studio.

In what ways would the production of Ssssh impact you and your own production career that would ensue come the ’70s?

LL: I’d always been interested in recording. Even before Ten Years After started making records, or had success with records, I had a little home recording setup. I was doing that, but obviously it had an impact. Every record you play on, whether it’s good or bad, has some sort of impact on what you do next, what you learn. I’ve always been interested in improving, figuring out what people do and how to do it and add it into my arsenal of ideas. Yeah, every record is a learning process, I think. And every record that you’ve done, you think, “I could’ve done that better now.” I don’t normally listen to stuff I work on. I’ve got an amount of time to do it.

We had a bit of space on that (Ssssh), but it was not a long time. It may have been 12 days, 14 days maximum, to do it. It wasn’t as if you could go in the studio for a month and mess about, which happened in the late ’70s. Now, it’s so much tighter. I’ve recorded stuff in Nashville. You get a load of session musicians in and you try for 4 tracks in a 3 hour session. Maybe you’ll get 3, and maybe you’ll redo the vocal, because we used to do vocals live whilst we were tracking in Nashville most of the time. I don’t know. In the late ’70s and the early ’80s, I guess there were a lot of drugs and big budgets going around. A lot of money and time wasted, but some good records came out of it.

Another thing that’s changed since those Ten Years After days is now, it’s not uncommon for bands to take up to 5 years to release a new album. Meanwhile, you guys were cranking out at least an album a year, if not multiple albums, every year into the early ’70s. On top of that, you’re touring virtually nonstop.

LL: That is correct.

Maybe it’s just hard to imagine such a vigorous regiment through today’s modern lens, but how did the band function for as long as they did at this nonstop pace?

LL: Yeah, it was hard on Alvin. I have been a staff writer in Nashville. I do write songs, but it was always difficult. Alvin always wanted to write the songs himself, for whatever reason. Possibly a financial reason *laughs*, but it put a lot of pressure on him. As you said, three albums a year, touring constantly, sometimes taking days off, or afternoons and evenings off whilst we were in the middle of recording to go and do a gig if we were in the UK. It was a tough thing. In the end, it burnt Alvin out. He’d had enough towards the end of the band. He’d had enough of touring, which is a pity.

In retrospect, things could’ve been slightly different, maybe in the latter years. I always enjoyed touring because it wasn’t much pressure on me, but I can see how it gets to you. If I had to go out and tour now and do 3 albums a year and 27 or 28 weeks in America, 3 tours, and then 2 tours of different places in Europe, and a UK tour, and have time off to see my family and write songs and go in and record…I think it’s a tough job for anybody, really, but people did it. I don’t think Ten Years After were necessarily unique.

Now, I think people have the opportunity and the time to not have fillers on a record. I was watching a thing on one record, some YouTube thing that Bruce Springsteen was recording. I don’t know what record it was. It was mid-career. He had about 50 songs, and he was trying them out going, “That’s not good enough.” The guys in the band are going, “That’s brilliant! That’s great! That’s fantastic! Why don’t we do it?” “No, no, no.” That wasn’t a thing. “We’re touring on the 15th of May and we gotta finish the album by the 5th of May because it needs to be…” That’s the way you go *laughs*.

Amongst the originals on here is a cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little School Girl”, which would become a staple of the Ten Years After catalog. Was that a song that the band had featured in their live repertoire prior to recording it in the studio?

LL: Not that much. Funny enough, the first time I’d heard that song was a recording by Larry Williams. I worked up a riff. It’s a slightly different riff to the one I used. To any of the recordings, it’s reminiscent of that riff, but it’s a different riff with a bit more energy and a bit more hardness. I kept playing that riff over and over and over again whilst we were on tour. In the dressing room, Alvin and I started jamming on to it, and then we ended up doing that. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’d done it live until we’d recorded it, but we had jammed it. If we had done it live, not very much. Before Ssssh came out, it wasn’t a staple in the band’s repertoire. Then, of course, we developed it and it became longer and what have you, but the basic format was the same.

In fact, I’m looking at it now, as we speak. I don’t think we’d done any of those songs on a tour. I’m pretty sure. In fact, I can say we didn’t because no one else will remember *laughs*. I’m damn sure we hadn’t done any of those. We’d mess about with them. Alvin did little home demos and I did home demos. Sometimes they got mixed together. Then, we went in the studio, played around, jammed around, and came up with…the arrangements were blues arrangements, fairly simple. It wasn’t too complicated. It was like riding a bike for us by then. That’s why we knocked them off, I guess, and enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much.

In between the recording and release of Ssssh, Ten Years After would play a career-defining set at Woodstock. What events led to the band getting added to the festival and was there any idea ahead of time that this would be more than just another gig?

LL: No idea. We played the Newport Jazz Festival. We played the Atlantic Blues Festival and the Texas Pop Festival, all on that one tour. We were doing pretty well. I think we were playing on our own, the big club venues to 2,000, 3,000, 4000 people a night, so we were on a nice climb, and enjoyable. It was brilliant. This festival came up and our agent put us forward for it and we did it. As it happened, some of the guys in the band didn’t want to do it because we were in St. Louis, Missouri the night before and it meant getting up at 6 o’clock in the morning, going to do a gig. There was all sorts of “I don’t wanna do it. Why are we doing it? Why can’t we get a later plane? Why do we have to do the gig anyway?” Nobody knew what was gonna happen to it.

I think on my tombstone, it would say “Leo Lyons: The Man That Played Woodstock”. Of course, it was only a few hours out of my entire career *laughs*. We were lucky to have done it. Jeff Beck was with the same agency as us. Jeff didn’t want to do it. A few people didn’t want to do it. Some people didn’t want to be filmed. You think back at it now and think, good God, seeing it’s part of the American thing where they store…the Library of Congress. *laughs* It’s become a big thing, quite rightly. I think it was a beacon of light across all the communist countries where people couldn’t listen to the music that they wanted to.

Subsequently, we toured in those countries and people said, “When I first heard that, it was brilliant. It was fantastic.” I know people that’d been arrested and thrown in prison for listening to it in eastern Europe. It was very important: Peace, love, and the end of world wars. Of course, we’ve slipped a little bit now, the way it is *laughs*. There’ll never be another Woodstock because everybody tried to do it and turned it into more of a commercial thing or another thing. It definitely was a beacon of light, certainly.

And especially that performance of “I’m Going Home”. I’ll never forget being a very young boy, my mother showing me that and saying, “THIS was the best performance of Woodstock.” And I’m inclined to agree.

LL: Thank you! It means a lot! Of course, it was an encore. These strange things that happen, you know? Nobody wanted to do it, but we did it and then they filmed the encore *laughs*. They couldn’t film anything else because the tape machines broke down and blah blah blah. These things happen: A snowball rolling downhill sometimes in a band’s career. You don’t try for it, and all of a sudden, something happens. From 4,000, 5,000 people a night, going back after Woodstock to America, all of a sudden, you’re elevated up to the enormo-domes as Spinal Tap would say *laughs*.

Another thing that struck me about that performance was the speed you guys were playing at. I’d never heard any band play that fast. Then, a few years later, come about 10 years old, I’d discover Motörhead and Venom and thought, “Well, this makes sense! It’s Ten Years After, but faster!“

LL: *laughs* Yeah!

Speaking of gigs, in this latest rerelease, not only are we treated to the original 1969 mix of Ssssh and a 2025 remix, but a third disc featuring a recently unearthed show from Helsinki, Finland from the same era. Who came across those tapes and do you have any recollection of that specific show?

LL: Yeah, I remember the show. I remember the tour. Helsinki’s a weird place. The Cold War was happening and there were a lot of spies in town: American, Russian, and all sorts of things. I remember sitting in breakfast in the hotel and two guys looking at me. They looked like spies with their leather coats. It sounds ridiculous, but they did. I got up to go to the toilet and these two guys followed me out. The guy said to me, “Are you the American agent?” *laughs* It was a weird, weird thing! The gig I remember, yeah. Great, great audience, really good. It was always nice. It was a thrill to go to another country, play in a concert hall, and have it full of people that appreciated what you were doing. What more could you wish for *laughs*?

Having played all over Europe and the States at this point, was there a difference between European and American crowds in the way they behaved at rock shows?

LL: Oh absolutely. They’re more, what’s the word, louder *laughs*. A lot of the European audiences would sit with their arms folded, but enjoy the music, wait until it finished and show their appreciation, whereas American audiences were wild, very wild. It developed a bit more in Europe. When the band started playing the blues clubs in the UK, I always used to think my idea of an appreciative audience is some guy with a pint of beer in his hands with his arms folded saying, “OK, impress me.” And then they’d wait. They couldn’t clap crazily because they got a pint of beer in their hand. Then they’d go *does a gentle clap*. It was quite different.

Of course, we hit America in ’67. The first time we went there, it was California grass and the birth pill and free love and hippies and everything. The whole audience was quite different. I remember sitting in a restaurant, having a meal. A guy came up and said to me, “I saw you man! You burst into a ball of flame and flew around the auditorium!” Those were the audiences *laughs*. You’d get a lot of that. It was funny, people climbing up the outside of your building.

What was your first impression of touring America?

LL: Alvin and I in particular were huge American music fans, from Elvis and Sun Records, to Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Howlin’ Wolf, all those guys, and all the American movies, even the black and white ones. The Sunset Strip in Hollywood and California girls, Cadillacs: It was a whole diet of “Wow, it must be fantastic.” It was a great thrill to be invited to play in America and go over there. The first tour we did, it just blew my mind. When we came back to the UK and I got off the plane, I was in tears. I couldn’t wait to go back.

You get used to it after a time, like everything else. I’ve lived in America. I lived in America for 16 years. I’ve got a son and daughter and granddaughter that live in America now. I’m used to America now. I’ve got an American granddaughter *laughs*, and an American daughter in law. It may have merged a little bit now, but I’d say American audiences were always very enthusiastic. The era was so good. There were so many bands out there. I think Woodstock changed the business in as much that people saw there was money in it. The lawyers got involved and record companies allowed bands bigger budgets to go in the studio for 6 months and make a record, and one thing after another.

There were less people out on the road touring for however many years, so right at the height of that, before Woodstock changed it all, we would be touring, playing with loads of different people, just about everybody you can mention, a lot of my idols: BB King, Muddy Waters, people like that. Of course, all the contemporaries: Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, The Who, all those people. We’d all be doing gigs together, so it was an interesting time. And we’d have our jams. We’d do a lot of jamming with different people, which didn’t happen that much in the UK at the time.

Now it’s almost…I don’t know. People still get up and jam, but a lot of the time it’s an organized jam. Somebody’s doing a tour and oh, here’s Paul McCartney coming up for a thing! You know, well, I don’t know; I haven’t spoken to Paul McCartney for 50 years because I haven’t seen him for 50 years, but somebody must’ve said, it could’ve been Paul saying it, “I love your music. I’d like to get up and play with you.” Whoever it is says, “Well that’d be a good boost for me!” It seems a little bit different to how it was when it was, “Hey, you wanna get up and do one?” We played in New York and Jimi Hendrix, “Can I get up and jam?” “Yeah, come up and jam!” A lot of that was happening then. It was a great time for music and musicians.

Most definitely. I had read that here in Chicago, you played the famed Kinetic Playground.

LL: Yeah, many times.

One of those runs was with our very own Buddy Guy. Did you ever jam with Buddy?

LL: We didn’t jam with him, no, but I remember playing with him. Buddy and BB, I think. I’m not sure if they were both on the same show, but yeah, we did. I was a little bit shy of those people. We did 4 or 5 days in Sacramento in a club with Muddy Waters, who I loved. One of my early records was Muddy Waters’ At Newport, which I thought was great. I didn’t even have the nerve to go up and say hello to him. I think he was actually supporting, as was Buddy Guy in Chicago. I felt embarrassed. Now, reverently or politely, I would have to go knock on the door and say, “Hello, I love your music.” I was a little bit scared of doing that then.

While many are quick to proclaim bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple as metal’s earliest acts, I’ve always felt Ten Years After should be a part of the conversation as well, especially for the band’s raw musical delivery and loud blues-driven riffage. In hindsight, what are your feelings, if any on Ten Years After’s impact on the development of early heavy metal?

LL: I’m sure there is some. I know Sabbath. I know all the bands you just mentioned. I’ve recorded Motörhead too and I know what those guys have told me. They enjoyed Ten Years After. It’s all part of a transition. It all happens from country blues to electric blues to rock n’ roll to the tough stuff we were doing. We did a lot of swing stuff, Duke Ellington stuff. It mixes in. Then, someone comes along and they develop a little bit more. The musical sounds change the way that the music’s played.

I come from an era where say Duke Ellington, it was the drummer kept the time and the bass player did the groove. It changed over to now there’s a big drum sound and the bass player’s a little bit behind the drums in perspective. That all changed. I recorded three albums with UFO. UFO were a great band. A band called Magnum, I recorded. I did a little bit of recording, as I said, with Motörhead. I got the heavy metal stuff. I was asked if I would join Ritchie Blackmore, but it wasn’t my kind of thing at the time.

For Deep Purple or Rainbow?

LL: It was Rainbow. Don Airey is a friend of mine and Ronnie Dio was a friend of mine, although I didn’t know them at the time. It was Cozy Powell that put me up for the gig. Cozy and I played on quite a few different things, so I went and I thought, “I don’t think it’s my thing.” Also, I put so much time into one band. I should’ve just jumped ship and gone for it, had a different ride, but it’s the same thing. When Jimi Hendrix came to London and I met Jimi through Chas Chandler, his manager and the bass player with The Animals, Chas said, “We’re looking for a bass player. Are you interested?” I said, “No, no. I’ll stay where I am.” And I did.

I had my ears open. I was open to all those different things. It wasn’t that I thought, “Nope, I don’t want this. I don’t want that.” I enjoyed it. I enjoyed some of what became the heavy rock bands that I worked with. Whenever we tour with them, they always come up and talk to me. “Oh yeah, Ten Years After! I remember this record. We did a version of it.” It’s progress. It’s the way it goes along. I got an email a couple of months ago and I can’t remember the name of the band, but they were a huge ’80s or ’90s pop band. I mean worldwide huge pop band. The guy sent me this email. He said, “I don’t think I would’ve done what I did had I not seen you playing because it inspired me to do it.” That was really nice of him to say that. That’s how it is.

I should’ve said the same to Muddy Waters or Buddy Guy or BB King *laughs*. I couldn’t say it to Bill Black. Bill Black was one of my favorites, early Elvis bass player, because Bill died before I got the chance to meet him, although I did meet D.J. Fontana and I did record The Jordanaires. I was able to record some of them. Everybody learns something from someone else and continues to. If you’re serious about your music, and modest enough, you’ll always learn something from music that comes after you, as well as music that comes before you. You have to sort it out. There’s some good stuff!

Some of the recording techniques I don’t like so much now. I don’t like that everything’s compressed so much, everything’s mixed together so that it’s like wallpaper and it doesn’t give virtuoso musicians that much of a chance to show what they can do. Other than that, I spend a lot of time on Spotify, and I subscribe to it. I know how pitiful that is because I know what I get paid from Spotify *laughs*, which is nothing. That’s how I discover new stuff, and people tell me about it and I check it out. I love country music, always have too. A broad, broad taste, I think.

You mention working with Motörhead. What was that experience like and when did that take place?

LL: I can’t tell you the year. Maybe ’78 or ’79, maybe ’80. They were on a label that asked me to produce a record. Lemmy liked my bass playing. He was a bit of a fan. They wanted me to produce the record. To cut a long story short, the record company didn’t pay the studio costs, so our record was aborted, but it was interesting! When I’m producing a band, I like to go down to the rehearsal studio with them and listen to the material. I try to bring out the best in a band. I don’t tell them what to do, but maybe there’s an arrangement change that would make it better, and I get to know the songs.

We arranged to do that with Motörhead and the band didn’t turn up. It was only the roadies and me *laughs*. OK, we go in the studio, and I knew a couple of tracks we were gonna do, so we get to the studio and I get a phone call saying, “Lemmy’s not coming in. He’s ill.” We paid for the studio time, so I called him up and said, “Don’t worry Lemmy. I’ll do the bass. When you feel a bit better, you can come in and we’ll replace it.” Well, he came straightaway then *laughs* Like I said, the record company didn’t pay the bill. Whether someone bought the tapes and finished them off, I don’t know, but that’s my Motörhead story. We remained friends, but we never got it finished, the record. He’d call me up, “When are we going in? When are we gonna finish this record?” I said, “I don’t know, Lemmy. They haven’t been paid. It’s out of my hands.”

You also produced UFO during a pivotal time when they were changing sounds. What was your initial reaction to recording the band, and subsequently, a very young Michael Schenker? He must’ve been, what, 17 or 18 at the time?

LL: Something like that. Fortunately, I learned German at school and was in Germany playing the Star Club in 1960, so my German was, at that time, pretty good. It’s a bit rusty now. I could communicate with him at least. I thought he was great! UFO were a bunch of jokers, particularly Phil Mogg and Pete Way. Taking the piss is different in America to the UK, but they were joking, making a joke of everybody, which I think Michael found a little bit difficult, but he was professional. He had an idea. He learned that idea. He never jammed a solo. He worked out his solos, 4 or 5 different ideas. He’d come in and play the solos. “What do you think?” “I think that’s great.”, I’d say. He’d say, “Hm, for you, maybe. I wanna do another one.” That’s how we worked through it. He’d do another one and of course, by that time, you could drop in and we comped some of the solos together to get that perfection, although the first take he did was brilliant.

From knowing Michael for so long and knowing a lot of the people who worked with him subsequently, he’s still the same. He’s still that perfectionist. He was respectful to the job we were doing. He didn’t go off on like, a lot of the stories I’ve heard, I was not party to being treated that way. When it came to putting in the guitar on a track or doing a solo or whatever, he was there and he was great. He was ready to go.

Do you recall how many takes it took for the “Rock Bottom” solo?

LL: I think we could’ve done it in one, but we’d keep doing it and doing it and doing it. For him, it probably got better, or it got closer to what he wanted, but when I first heard it, I thought, “That does it for me.” It hits me. I can only play the track until it feels good to me. Because we were on such a tight budget, you couldn’t do too many backing tracks. You couldn’t do too many. We’d go over it. “I thought that was good!” “No, I think you can do it better.” “That’s, the one! OK, now we’ll do the overdubs.” Then, we’d do the guitar. You got a bit more…”We’ll drop you in on bar 4, bar 10. Keep that bit.” and so on. He had the fill for the song through because he worked it all out in his head, so it was just an execution. He thought he could play better. I can understand that being a bass player. I have to stop myself.

Often, people ask me to put bass on a track for them, even now, these days. I don’t do many, but I do some. I think, “Oh my God. I could do that differently. I could do it better. I could do this. I could do that. Or maybe I’ll do 3. I’ll do 3 different version of it and let them choose.” That’s why I can understand why Michael was that way too. I did hear from a friend of mine that played keyboards with him that after every show they’d done, they would have to listen back to the set straight afterwards. That would’ve done my head in *laughs*, the critique.

That sounds like Michael! I interviewed him a few years ago now and he’s still very much that guy in terms of his musical approach.

LL: Yeah, which is good, but it does mean you could possibly go off the rails a little bit *laughs* when you’re looking for perfection. I always think, with every record I’ve done, I did it the best I could at the time. I don’t wanna go back. Sometimes, when they rerelease stuff like this, I have a quick listen and think, “That could’ve been great if we’d just done that. That could’ve been, not just a fun track, but a signature song.” You have to let it go. That’s the way it goes. I think a lot of musicians feel insecure about their own music too, which is why often they make it difficult to work with. My idea is to make everyone feel comfortable, get the best out of what they do, help them get to where they want to go, and hopefully make it sound good so that other people will like it. That’s where we took UFO: From being a sort of a weird psychedelic band to a heavy rock band. As the budgets got bigger, the sound got bigger *laughs*.

In closing, are there any projects you’re working on, whether they be Ten Years After related or otherwise, that we should keep an eye out for?

LL: With my band Hundred Seventy Split, the last record we released was called Movin’ On. We didn’t get to tour with it so much because my drummer died and as far as I can recall, probably everybody in the record company’s dead for the amount of promotion they did on it *laughs*. I thought it was a good record! We may go out. I think we are. I talked with my guitar player. We’ll probably do some festivals next year, go out and do that. I’m going to Prague next month to do a showcase record release on something I played on during COVID. I put the bass on. There’s a few people. I haven’t met them. Actually, I think I met the guitar player once when we were over there, so that’ll be interesting. We’ll see what happens there.

And I’m supposedly finishing writing a book, which I’ve been doing for years and years and years. Then, I stop doing it and someone pesters me to do it. I do a bit more and then, I don’t know. Now it’s, “You’ve got to finish it because you’re getting close to dying!” *laughs* So maybe I’ll do a co-write. That’ll take some of the pressure off. I’ve pretty much finished it. I just gotta top and tighten it. I’m writing, yeah. Not so much songwriting. I always have a song in my head, but I haven’t done any serious writing since I was a staff writer in Nashville at the time when people wrote songs and people sang songs.

Now, the way the business has gone, with the record company, everything is so tight, you sign someone that writes their own songs. If they don’t write their own songs, they co-write with somebody. You would only write a song if you were writing with an artist that had a record deal. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to get the record cut. There’s less than 50% of staff songwriters in Nashville now to when I was there. People come in and they make their own records. They go out and play small clubs and things like that. Occasionally, they break through, but mostly, it’s a real business now. Completely different. Whereas before, I’d go into an office and I’d write. It was 26 singles or 12 co-writes each, 5 days a week, 6 or 7 days a week in my office writing. I don’t do that so much now. I only write for a project basically. That’s it!

The deluxe edition of Ten Years After’s Ssssh is available now on Chrysalis Records. For more information on Leo Lyons, click here. For more information on Ten Years After, click here.