GRAND SLAM
Thirty-odd years after former Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott’s new band got on to the runway but never really got off the ground, a new line-up returns with a new album, and they’re flying.
There are many lost futures in the ever-twisting history of rock’n’roll, and Grand Slam is perhaps one of the most tantalizing. After the sudden and shocking dissolution of Thin Lizzy in 1983, Lizzy frontman and hero to us all Phil Lynott rebounded with a new band full of friends old and new, including then-current Lizzy members Brian Downey and John Sykes, and Magnum keyboard player Mark Stanway. Grand Slam was a fresh start after a decidedly rough patch for Lynott, who was deep in a drug haze that he desperately wanted to climb out of. Sykes famously left to join the revamped, hair-tousling version of Whitesnake, and an old acquaintance of Phil’s, Stampede guitarist Laurence Archer, was brought in.
The band wrote new songs and played familiar venues, but nothing much ever came of it. A few live tapes made the rounds in the tape-trading circuits, a demo or two, but that was it. There was no album. Phil did a couple of solo things and then, in 1986, he passed away. And that was that. Until it wasn’t.
In 2016, a reinstituted Grand Slam played the Sweden Rock festival. Emboldened by the positive response, Archer decided to form a new, stable line-up, both to ensure the band’s legacy and to pave the way for a brave new future. Both are on display in their debut album, Hit The Ground, which comprises five revitalised ’84-era Grand Slam songs and five brand-new tracks. Old and new mesh perfectly, and in a rare best-case scenario the album manages to sound classic and contemporary at the same time.
As we speak, his band are in an undisclosed film studio, working on their new music video. It involves lion cages and people jumping out of planes. “We’re going large on this one,” he says with a laugh.
“I met Phil when I was in the band Wild Horses,” Archer recalls. “We had the same management. A few years later I was in a band called Stampede, and he asked me to come down to the studio to do some stuff with him. He actually asked me to be in Lizzy, but I was too into the stuff I was doing at the time. It seems a little ridiculous now, but at the time it seemed like Lizzy was waning a little, so I stuck with what I was doing. But yeah, we knew each other for some time before Grand Slam.”
NWOBHM almost-weres Stampede were signed to Polydor Records, but managed to release just one EP, in 1982, before mismanagement cut them off at the ankles.
“They didn’t have any A&R men in the company at the time,” Archer sighs, “so we were just waiting around for something to happen. I had the option to jump ship, so when Phil called me I did.”
Archer got to work on writing songs with Lynott. They assumed, given the Lizzy frontman’s stature in the industry, that a record deal would be easy enough to procure. But this was not the case.
“Unfortunately, in the UK there was a lot of press about Phil’s drug use,” says Acher. “They were running drug-related doublepage spreads in the newspapers about Phil’s drug use all the time. So the record labels were really concerned because of all this coverage in the mainstream press. We just couldn’t get a deal made.”
Worse still, Archer found that all these negative press reports weren’t exactly inaccurate. In 1984 Lynott was essentially a phantom of his former self.
“I went to the States and had started recording some stuff with Huey Lewis,” explains Archer. “I did it under the premise that Phil was gonna come out and sing on it. But he couldn’t get to America because his visa had run out, and he wasn’t going to be getting another one because of the drug stuff. In the end he was able to find an old Irish passport and was somehow able to get through.
“The tracks sounded great, but when Phil got there… he just wasn’t in a good state. He was coughing a lot. He wasn’t really well, and he just wasn’t performing very well at all. When I listened back, I realised that we just couldn’t release it as is. I didn’t bow out on Phil, but I did tell management that I didn’t think it was a good idea to release anything with Phil in this state. It just wouldn’t have come out well.”
Heartbroken over the whole affair, Archer went on to record a solo album and then, eventually, left the music business for a few years. Meanwhile, several of Grand Slam’s songs, including 19 and Military Man, were re-recorded and released as Lynott solo efforts, without any input from Archer. “I was still a kid at the time, and very naïve about the industry,” says Archer. One of his songs, Dedication, was even passed off as a ‘lost’ Lizzy track on their 1991 ‘best of’ compilation. I actually wrote Dedication for Stampede, and they used it as this lost 1976-era Thin Lizzy track for the music video,” he says incredulously. “I had no idea. A friend of mine called me up and said: ‘Your song is on the radio.’ I said: ‘What song?’ So I turned on the radio, and it’s Dedication. They lifted the vocals from a session Phil and I did of it. It was the only time he ever sang that song. They disguised it as an old Thin Lizzy demo.”
In 2002, a collection of Grand Slam demos, The Studio Sessions, was released. Poorly recorded and shabbily presented, it did nothing to honour the band’s legacy. Archer had already lived a lifetime in rock’n’roll by then, having spent a few years in UFO and forming various other bands along the way before leaving music behind for a decade. But the demo release stuck in his craw.
“The newspapers were running double-page spreads about Phil’s drug use… We just couldn’t get a deal.” Laurence Archer
“I was never happy with it,” he says. “I always thought when I had the time and the money I would go back and record these songs properly. And I wanted to carry on. I wanted to write new Grand Slam songs. I wanted it to be a real band.”
His first opportunity came in 2016 when Grand Slam were asked to appear at the Sweden Rock festival. This version included original keyboard player Stanway, but bears little resemblance to the band it would become.
“We did a couple of warm-up gigs and then we did the festival, but it was really just a project band,” he explains. “In fact we didn’t even really play very many Grand Slam songs. So it was different.”
At that point, Archer’s retirement from music was clearly over. He had recently played with a revamped Stampede, and with Juicy Lucy, and even with members of his era of UFO called, sensibly enough, ex-UFO.
“It wasn’t too much of a shock playing music again,” he says. "It’s not like I was coming out of a deep, dark hole. I saw the opportunity to finally do Grand Slam the right way.”
A year later, he had solidified a new line-up of Grand Slam, including former Praying Mantis drummer Benjy Reid, former Quireboys bassist Dave Boyce, and vocalist Mike Dyer who had previously played with Archer in a band called Rhode Island Red.
“I first got the call from Laurence on Christmas 2017,” Dyer recalls. “He said: ‘We have some unfinished business.’ I figured he had lost the plot, maybe. I think he had heard my voice, but not seen me for awhile, because at that point I was twentyone stone. And my little boy said: “Dad, you’ve gotta go do this, but you’ve got to lose weight because you look like an Easter egg [laughs]. So basically I’ve spent the past four hundred days going to the gym, getting in shape, because the set warrants that, the pace of it. It’s so bloody powerful.”
Dyer is best known at this point for theatre, not rock’n’roll, but Archer was sure he was the man for the job.
“He was in Phantom Of The Opera, all kinds of things,” says Archer. “He had really developed his voice. And I didn’t want a Paul Rodgers or a Bruce Dickinson for this. I mean, Phil didn’t sing like that. Phil had his own thing. He had a great voice, great phrasing, and it was very melodic. That’s what I was looking for. I thought Mike was the right man for the job.”
“When I did theatre, people would go: ’This guy thinks he’s some kind of rock’n’roll madman,’” Dyer says, laughing. “And honestly, it’s true. I’m a born rocker.”
Just as well, as Dyer is, after all, replacing perhaps the greatest frontman there’s ever been in rock’n’roll.
“My first run-in with Thin Lizzy was when I went backstage at their show at Liverpool Empire as a chubby fourteen-year-old kid to get Phil to sign my copy of Black Rose,” Dyer remembers. “They were all really kind to me. But yeah, I have lost a lot of sleep just thinking about how to fill this role. When Laurence first asked me to do it, I said: ‘I can’t do this. I can’t fill his shoes.’ Then my little boy said: ‘Dad, you’ve got loads of shoes, you’ve got loads of boots. You can just wear your own’ [laughs]. I thought about it, and I thought, you know, he’s right.”
“I didn’t wanna have a band that lasted for nine months or one tour then it was over,” Archer explains. “I wanted it to be a proper band. I said from the start I wanted a four-way split, where everybody has equal input. And I’m very happy with it. I think the band looks great, I think the band sounds great, and I think the new songs are great. This is four guys that are really dedicated to being in a band called Grand Slam. I’m bringing in the heritage with the old songs, but we’ve also got new songs. In fact we’re halfway through writing the second album right now.” In the meantime, Grand Slam plan on touring far and wide. “I feel deep in my heart that Phil would be proud of this band,” says Dyer. And on the strength of Hit The Ground, he most surely would be.
Hit The Ground is out now via Marshall Records.
“I actually wrote
Dedication for Stampede, and they used it as this ‘lost’ 1976-era Thin Lizzy track for the music video. I had no idea.”
Laurence Archer