L7 had ventured onto Australian soil for that tour at the top of its game. Formed originally in Los Angeles in the mid 1980s by Sparks and Suzi Gardner, L7 was a punk metal band with an artistic bent, an abnormality for the time. “We were hanging out in the art punk crowd in Los Angeles,” Sparks says. “We wanted to do a hard rock band, which was a total anomaly for that scene at the time. There was all this art punk new wave going on. This was 1985 and we wanted to do something sort of punk metal, grungey before it was called grunge. And that’s what we did.”
L7’s classic lineup was completed with the addition of bassist Jennifer Finch and drummer Demetra Plakas. By 1988 L7 had released its eponymous debut album. While Sparks says L7 was considered a “cool band in the punk underground”, it wasn’t until L7 was featured on SubPop’s monthly singles club in 1990 that the band’s star began to rise. The release of Nirvana’s Nevermind caused a seismic shift in the music industry and L7 found itself the subject of major industry attention. L7 had released its second album, Smell the Magic, on SubPop in 1990.
By the time it came to record L7’s third album, Bricks Are Heavy – which included the single Pretend That You’re Dead and the scathing Shit List, L7 had signed with the Warner Music-aligned Slash Records. “After we were with a major label nobody was telling us what to do, what kind of art work we should have, who we should hire as producer or anything like that. It was all under our control,” Sparks says.
Sparks can’t recall any overt sexism directed toward the all-female band: peers, including L7’s new Australian buddies the Cosmic Psychos, were agnostic to the band’s gender composition, and any institutionalised sexism would have been behind closed doors. “The independent label seemed to be cool, but when we got onto Warner Brothers, I’m sure there was some shitty stuff being said behind our backs,” Sparks says. “I know there was no bidding war over us – there were only a couple of people interested in signing us to a major label, unlike other artists who were peers at the time.”
L7 was certainly provocative. At Reading Festival in 1992 Sparks threw her used tampon into the crowd. On a UK television appearance in the same year Sparks dropped her pants. Another gig saw the band raffle a one-night stand with drummer Demetra Plakas. But it was changing popular tastes and the frustration of working within the constraints of the mainstream music industry that began to fracture L7’s internal bond. L7’s fourth studio album, Hungry for Stink, hadn’t impressed Warner Brothers, and L7 found itself back on an independent label. Bassist Jennifer Finch left in 1996 and L7 continued on, beaten but not defeated.
“We hadn’t lost enthusiasm, but we were getting beat down,” Sparks says. “We got dropped by Warner and we were determined to make another record even if it killed us. We were tapped out financially, the press wasn’t really paying attention to us anymore, grunge was bloated and out the door and we were out the door with it.”
L7 released its fifth and final album Slap Happy in 1999. “We were almost making that record as a ‘Fuck you’ to Warner Brothers – not lyrically, but for the sake of doing it, to prove something,” Sparks says. L7 eventually split up and the band members went their separate ways. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago when two events sowed the seeds of an L7 reunion. The first was the making of a documentary on the band, in which the members re-lived the excitement and emotion of the early 1990s; the second was Sparks’ post on L7’s Facebook page, testing the temperature for an L7 reunion.
The response was overwhelming. Within months, the classic L7 lineup had reconvened in LA. “It was really weird, a little bit uncomfortable, but also exciting. When we started playing it was a little rough, but it was good,” Sparks says. “Even though it was a little bit uncomfortable socially, as soon as we started joking around and got our vernacular back, we were cracking up a lot, a lot of laughing. So that eased the weirdness.”
Beyond the possibility of a single for next year’s Record Store Day, Sparks says L7 has no immediate plans to record new material. “There’s been a lightness of being, just having fun and not worrying about making a new record, promoting a record or paying for a record. There’s something liberating about just playing 20-year-old material. It’s a case of revisiting those songs, playing it better than we ever did and just rocking out.”
