The recording process for "16 Lovers Lane" was different to previous releases. Between December 1987 and January 1988 McLennan and Forster began an intense songwriting process. They demoed all the songs in advance and then presented them to the producer and their bandmates, leaving less room for improvisation. McLennan stated "We really sat down for the first time in years and wrote together in the sense that anything new we'd come up with the night before we'd go through and rearrange and discard or put it into something else. Our normal method was to write separately and the spend two weeks together, familiarising ourselves with each other songs and suggesting things. So this way was a completely different process and it was due to trying to get back to what started the band - closeness."