INTERVIEW WITH
LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT

Sean (LAM): In the early 1990s when London After Midnight started performing live, suitable venues in Los Angeles were difficult to find. If you were not a hair metal band or familiar to the venues, you’d find many obstacles to a decent venue allowing you on their stage. LAM started performing mainly at Helter Skelter, at the time LA’s only remaining gothic club. Helter was a bare bones club with no stage lighting, no sound system, and no stage. The massive building was built in 1925 as a car showroom. It was basically an empty decaying shell with 50 foot ceilings occupying a Hollywood city block near the corner of Sunset and Vine, and not suitable for concerts. Not only was the building falling apart but there was often gun violence, assaults, and robberies outside the doors. You sort of risked your well-being at the club. (The building was torn down in 1995 and a large home improvement store was built in its place).

A temporary two foot tall platform acting as a stage was brought in for concerts. I would bring clip-on work lights so the audience could see the band (the budget only allowed renting one specialized light and a smoke machine, which usually cost more than the band was paid at the time). The sound system hired by the club wasn’t very good. In an effort to bypass this particular problem, and show that I could actually sing beneath all the noise of a full band, I created Malleus Maleficarum. It was a side project that featured stripped-down, minimal, recomposed, and acoustic versions of LAM songs. Music that was quieter and better handled by the venue’s cheap sound system. MM was basically just me and one other person playing acoustic guitar, and performed at Helter Skelter on December 28, 1990 and possibly once in 1991. I sang, played keyboards and triggered drum machines, played acoustic guitar and other instruments.

In September of 1997 a short tour of Europe was to be recorded. I revived the song arrangements used in Malleus Maleficarum as the basis for the tour. Despite assurances to the contrary, the person in charge of the recording, who worked for the German record label distributing LAM at the time, didn’t understand the requirements. This resulted in the live recordings being of lesser quality than desired. Some of those live recordings appear on the 1998 “Oddities” album.

Since forming my own record label in 2019, Darkride Records, and being that LAM’s physical albums distributed by other labels are now out of print, I decided to remix the music from the original master tapes before re-releasing it. I did this with the 2019 Darkride Records release of “Selected Scenes from the End of the World: 9119”. I want LAM’s legacy to be one of good music and I fear that can be clouded by inferior mixes that have appeared on prior releases. In the past I had been very limited by inadequate budgets and gear, which adversely impacted production, recording, and mixing. I want fans to hear all the audio elements that are missing from the original mixes and restore the songs to how they were meant to sound.

“Oddities Too”, or “O2”, started out as a 10 song sequel to the 1998 “Oddities” album, featuring unreleased, re-imagined,  and new material. But it has transformed into a double album including everything from “Oddities”.