FEATURE:
Timeless Melody
The La’s’ The La’s at Thirty-Five
__________
AN album that helped…
shape British guitar music in the 1990s and had a big influence on the likes of Noel Gallagher of Oasis, The La’s’ debut album, The La’s, turns thirty-five on 1stt October. The Liverpool band were fronted by Lee Mavers. He wrote the songs on The La’s. It is the only album from the band too. One of those rare occasions where an artist release only one album. And it turns out to be a classic. One of music’s big what-ifs. If The La’s had recorded a second studio album, what would that have sounded like? The album’s singles included Way Out and Timeless Melody. The biggest track from The La’s is There She Goes. That was released in 1988. Because to its 1960s-influenced sound, which nodded of the British Invasion era (whereas so many acts of that time favoured a more alternative sound), The La’s gained huge critical attention. The La's is widely considered to be a precursor to the Britpop phenomenon of the mid-1990s. I want to get to a few features about one of the most defining albums of the 1990s. I am starting out with Classic Pop feature of 2021. I am not including the entire thing:
“It’s a wonder the album came out at all. It was re-recorded at Mavers’ perfectionist behest numerous times, with successive producers trying and failing to realise his vision over three torturous years. By the end, the project had cost a reported £1 million and still wasn’t finished. It never could be. It was no trifling figure for independent label Go! Discs. Mavers said he hated what he heard, but the label had run out of patience and released it anyway. In turn, the band used the album’s promo interviews to tell fans not to buy it.
The La’s at least kept it together long enough to tour their tarnished magnum opus in 1991, but since then Mavers has been a largely reclusive figure, rumours of drug addiction persisting as he’s privately slaved over plans to re-record his precious album.
Sporadic reappearances with varying lineups have coincided with whispers of a vast cache of unreleased songs and breathless talk among fans of a second album. Mavers, though, remains transfixed with the notion of bringing this 1990 debut up to the standards that exist in his head.
Who could he be referring to when he sings on the album’s opening track Son Of A Gun of “a man who’s at loggerheads with his past all the time/ He’s alive and living in purgatory”?
In many ways, The La’s were an anomaly. To paraphrase another flawed genius, Brian Wilson, they just weren’t made for the times they existed in. Aloof from the bug-eyed baggy indie-dance of Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Primal Scream et al, and predicting the Merseybeat-pilfering Britpop wave that followed, they were also at odds with the hi-fi production style that characterised many 80s recordings.
Mavers and John Power preferred the naked honesty of largely acoustic guitars, drums and bass; simple pop classicism with its influences clear – the transportive West Coast jangle of The Byrds, hints of the lysergic mysticism of Arthur Lee’s Love, Pink Floyd and The Doors, and an overt appreciation of British Invasion heavyweights The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who.
The band were formed in 1983 by Liverpool songwriter Mike Badger, with Mavers joining a year later, the pair uniting over a love of Captain Beefheart. A full family tree would take up the remainder of this article, but the highlights are as follows: Bassist John Power and drummer John Timson arrived in 1986, the latter soon replaced by future Oasis member Chris Sharrock.
The band signed to Go! Discs in 1987, by which time Badger, too, had departed, leaving Mavers in charge.
Badger was replaced by guitarist Paul Hemmings, with Mavers’ brother Neil taking over from Sharrock on drums. Keeping up? With the core lineup settled, the band continued writing their debut album in a stable owned by the new guitarist’s mother.
“It was a wonderful time to be in the band,” remembers Hemmings, who went on to join The Lightning Seeds after lasting less than a year on the good ship Mavers, “because Lee had to write material and we had to finish it. There was no deliberating. Every single day there was me, John and Lee in the stables, working.”
Two singles on Go! Discs followed – the Stonesy waltz-time Way Out, produced by Gavin MacKillop, in November 1987, and the initial version of There She Goes, produced by Bob Andrews in October 1988, the latter reaching No.59 on the UK singles chart.
The La’s was an album that almost didn’t get made. Lee Mavers especially precise when it came to its sound. You can probably see why the band did not release a second album. There was debate and argument over the production. Steve Lilywhite’s production was used. If it were down to Lee Mavers, the recording would have taken longer and things might have been very different:
Go! Discs had had enough and weren’t going to pay for any further sessions. They released Lillywhite’s version of The La’s in October 1990, leaving Mavers disgusted with what he felt was a set of unfinished recordings, using his guide vocals. He told Q: “We walked out on it while we were doing it. We hated it because we weren’t getting our sound across, so we turned our back on it. [Go! Discs] got it together from a load of backing tapes and mixed it up themselves and put it out.”
Mavers immediately distanced himself from the release, describing the album in NME as “like a snake with a broken back” and “the worst, a pile of shit”. The La’s may not be the faultless masterwork Mavers had envisaged and it didn’t trouble the charts, peaking at No.30 in the UK and No.196 in the US, but it was a gross overreaction from its creator.
In The Rough Guide To Rock, Chris Tighe summed up the public mood: “If this was the quality of the demos, the intended final tracks would have been wonderful.”
The La’s is an astonishing album, classic songcraft from arguably the fourth greatest Liverpudlian writer ever to pick up a guitar. In Colin Larkin’s All-Time Top 1000 Albums, he writes,
“It is hard to see why they were dissatisfied. The La’s is a graceful, sweeping and rather grand pop record, utterly charming and filled with a meek beauty.”
The album’s greatest legacy may prove to be the timeless love song it provided in the shape of There She Goes, re-released three weeks after the LP. This time, it reached No.13 in the UK, and remains one of the most evocative, universal guitar-pop songs ever crafted.
Rolling Stone dubbed it the “founding piece of Britpop” and NME placed it 45th in a rundown of the 50 greatest indie anthems of all time. On Spotify, it’s closing in fast on 100 million listens. Robbie Williams and Sixpence None The Richer are among the countless musicians to have a fruitless stab at improving on Mavers’ two versions”.
More modern bands like Arctic Monkeys and Fontaines D.C. have cited The La’s as an influence. On 1st October, 2020, Stereogum published a thirtieth anniversary feature for The La’s. They argue that, despite Lee Mavers’s insistence that the band’s sole album is flawed, this 1990 masterpiece is flawless. An album that will continue to inspire artists throughout the music world:
“To say that the band failed to capitalize on the adoration that followed the release of The La’s is an understatement, but it ignores the specialness of a great one-and-done career and the weird circumstances that fueled it. How could a follow-up live up to the high expectations of fans or low expectations of its creator? Mavers obsessed for years afterward, supposedly threatening — and trying — to re-record this same batch of songs until they met his mystical aspirations. He wrote more songs, too, but finished versions never saw the light of day. Rather than deal with the record company that he felt had abused his trust, Mavers ran out the clock on his deal, releasing nothing and only occasionally peeking his head out over the past three decades to play a show or two.
Noel Gallagher, in an interview about his favorite albums of all time with The Quietus, said, “When I see him I say, ‘Hey Lee, when are you going to release your second album?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll do it when I’ve finished the first one …’ He’s still trying to nail his first set of songs right after 27 years. So I’ve come to the conclusion he’s either shit-scared of ruining his legacy or he’s just a lazy cunt.”
It leaves only The La’s to be picked over, and fans have examined it with a Beatles-like microscope, though obviously on a much smaller scale. Various multi-disc collections have appeared over the years that include takes from the aborted album sessions and a few non-album tracks that are as essential as those that made the cut. Mavers himself supposedly favors the version of the album produced by Mike Hedges, which is widely available but was supposedly scrapped — and this may be apocryphal — because Mavers was mad that his bandmates went on vacation without him shortly after the recording. It’s worth a listen, but time has rendered it a curiosity more than anything. The La’s, as released in October of 1990, has earned its place in the canon; everything else feels like bonus material, out of context and less important”.
I am ending with a feature from last year from Udiscovermusic.com. The La’s is an album that mixes the jangle of The Byrds, Punk attitude and gritty Merseyside. It is an intoxicating and skilful blend that set The La’s apart from other albums released in 1990. Small wonder that is resonated with artists coming through at the time. I think that we are discovering new layers and gems when listening to The La’s’ only album:
“The songs were absolute diamonds”
This ongoing uncertainty also affected the band’s personnel, with a string of lead guitarists and drummers (the latter including future Oasis sticksman Chris Sharrock) joining and then departing. The La’s’ line-up finally steadied in 1989, with Mavers and Power joined by guitarist Peter “Cammy” Camell and Mavers’ brother Neil on drums when they convened with Steve Lillywhite for the final attempt to record their album.
Lillywhite – whose production credits also include U2, The Pogues, and Siouxsie And The Banshees – teamed up with The La’s at London’s Eden Studios in late 1989. Looking back at these lengthy sessions which finally resulted in The La’s’ album, he now has mixed feelings.
“I knew the songs were absolute diamonds, but getting them on tape wasn’t so easy,” he told MusicRadar in 2011. “We’d record six songs that were fantastic, but if there was one thing wrong on the seventh song, [Lee] would be convinced that everything else was terrible and we’d have to start everything all over again.
“But that said,” he continued, “I would put Lee right up there with any of the singer-songwriters I’ve ever worked with. He’s an amazing talent, and the album we made is sort of timeless.”
Totally unique
Listening to The La’s now, one can only agree. Finally cracking the UK Top 20 on reissue, the band’s shimmering signature hit, “There She Goes,” is largely singled out as the album’s high point, but really it’s just one of the record’s many glistening pop gems. The La’s kicks off with an almighty hat trick courtesy of the wistful “Son Of A Gun,” the pile-driving rocker “I Can’t Sleep” and the aptly-titled “Timeless Melody,” and simply never looks back. Indeed, those with any lingering doubts in relation to Lee Mavers’ talent need just one listen to the audacious, Bertolt Brecht-esque “Freedom Song” or the record’s epic, psychedelic torch song, “Looking Glass,” to hear what really might have been.
Perplexingly, though, The La’s’ frontman was his own most hostile critic when the album was finally released, even famously describing it as “like a snake with a broken back” in a 1990 NME interview. Mavers’ negative reaction seems all the more mystifying as most critics heard nothing but genius when weighing up the album’s contents.
In a contemporary review, The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau wrote, “Once in a blue moon, somebody with the gift comes along, and [La’s] frontman Lee Mavers is that somebody,” while confirmed fan Noel Gallagher told The Quietus in 2011, “Even though [The La’s] is a standard form of guitar rhythm’n’blues, it’s totally unique – nobody has done it as good as him since.”
How do you measure perfection?
Yet, while the critics raved and the band embarked on an extensive tour that took The La’s into the UK Top 30, the group’s time in the spotlight was tragically brief. Seemingly obsessed with re-recording the album rather than prepare a follow-up, Mavers split the band in 1992. While there have since been sporadic reunion gigs, and Mavers’ notoriously loyal fans still live in hope, the chances of The La’s’ reclusive frontman ever returning from his self-imposed exile now seem slim.
“His standards were so high that you’re never going to reach them,” producer Mike Hedges said when The La’s received its deluxe CD reissue in 2008. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s it, I’m finished!’ and move on to something else. I’ve never been 100 percent on anything I’ve ever done. I don’t think you ever can be, because how do you measure perfection?”.
On 1st October, it will be thirty-five years since the release of The La’s. A seismic album that changed the face of British music in the 1990s, it is also the start and end of this very brief story. A group who put everything into this one album, they burned too bright to go any further. However, the legacy of their sole album is clear. Lee Mavers’s incredible songwriting will live forever. The La’s, thirty-five years later, remains…
ABSOLUTELY perfect.