FEATURE:
Lee Mavers at Sixty
Revisiting The La’s’ Eponymous 1990 Masterpiece
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EVEN though the band…
PHOTO CREDIT: Clare Muller/Redferns
were unhappy about the version of the album that was released in 1990, The La’s’ eponymous debut is highly influential and phenomenal. I am going to spend some time with the album because The La’s’ leader and songwriter, Lee Mavers, is sixty on 2nd August. A controversial, perfectionist figure, he is also responsible for writing songs on one of the best albums ever. A great tragedy is that the band only released one album. The La’s went into a hiatus in 1992. The group later reformed briefly in the mid-1990s, 2005 and 2011. However, no new recordings have been released. I have tried to find a copy of The La’s on vinyl for a reasonable price. Let’s hope that it gets reissued soon. Mavers’ songwriting is genius. Most people associate The La’s with the single, There She Goes. The second released from the album (on 31st October, 1988), it is the album’s most-famous song. I want to introduce a few features and a couple of reviews for the incredible The La’s. In October last year, Udiscovermusic.com revisited an album with some of Indie’s most memorable melodies:
“A classic debut album
Attracting attention from major labels, The La’s signed with Go! Discs during 1987. By this time, Badger had left, leaving Mavers in sole charge center-stage, but with a pool of fantastic songs to draw upon – most of which had already been demoed to his satisfaction in local four-track studios during the latter half of 1986.
Over the next couple of years, The La’s cemented their reputation as one of the UK’s best live bands. They also released a couple of appetite-whetting singles, with the infectious, folk-flavored “Way Out” followed by the sublime jangly-pop classicism of “There She Goes.” Though only minor hits, both releases hinted at the quality of Lee Mavers’ songcraft and offered glimpses of a classic debut album that would surely arrive imminently.
Behind the scenes, however, Mavers’ attitude to his art meant that capturing The La’s’ album proved elusive and time-consuming. His obsessive desire to improve upon the magic of his band’s earliest demos resulted in the group limping away from aborted sessions with renowned producers such as John Leckie, Bob Andrews, and Mike Hedges between 1987 and ’89. To the frustration of all concerned, the Hedges-helmed sessions had even garnered well over an album’s worth of material, apparently to everyone’s satisfaction – until Mavers decided otherwise.
“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”.
I am interested hugely in Mavers’ songwriting – as I am writing this to mark his sixtieth birthday -, but I am intrigued how the band came together and how their eponymous album came to be. Classic Pop also wrote about The La’s in 2021. They talked about the mythology of the album, the fact Lee Mavers was a perfectionist (who was quite hard to work with at times), and how, despite that, the band created a timeless album in 1990:
“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.
Mavers’ excruciating perfectionism was already causing widespread exasperation, though. Sessions with Smiths producer John Porter, John Leckie, Andrews and Mike Hedges all failed to meet the singer’s approval. Hedges alone claimed to have recorded 35 songs, the master tapes for which later went missing. At one point, Mavers even reportedly knocked on Pete Townshend’s door, hoping to persuade the legendary Who guitarist to take over.
Delicious urban myths surround Evertonian Mavers, with one tale having it that the songwriter vetoed a studio because the console wasn’t coated in the right “60s dust” – another, since debunked, claimed the perma-stoned songwriter carried round a bag of the genuine article that he’d harvested from vintage guitar amplifiers.
“At some point you have to say, ‘That’s it, I’m finished!’ and move on to something else,” says Hedges. “I’ve never been 100 per cent on anything I’ve ever done. I don’t think you ever can be, because how do you measure perfection?”
The band’s door continued to revolve, guitarist Peter “Cammy” Cammell joining the lineup that recorded what would prove to be the finished album in 1989. Steve Lillywhite, who’d produced The Pogues’ Fairytale Of New York and worked with U2, Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Chameleons, was entrusted with seeing the project over the line, a last roll of the dice from Go! Discs. The La’s entered London’s Eden Studios in December 1989, but things inevitably began to unravel.
“I knew the songs were absolute diamonds, but getting them on tape wasn’t so easy,” Lillywhite told MusicRadar. “We’d record six songs that were fantastic, but if there was one thing wrong on the seventh, [Mavers] would be convinced that everything else was terrible and we’d have to start everything all over again”.
Before coming to a couple of positive reviews, there is another feature that I want to source from. In 2020, PASTE discussed a contrast. The fact that the band hated their only album, and yet they released something that was loved, commercially successful and has influenced countless other groups. It would be interesting to think what The La’s would sound like had Mavers, John Power and the rest of the band got their way and released the album that they wanted:
“The album itself was just as important to the Britpop movement as records like The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society or My Generation. Their songs were rooted in the British Invasion’s tuneful pop, as well as that era’s burgeoning psychedelia and even its skiffle origins. Some of their music, especially b-sides and rarities, also evoke Jamaican, Indian and African music. Veering between dramatically straightforward and fascinatingly offbeat, Mavers’ songs were melodically intuitive and easy on the ears. Even in live performances, Mavers would introduce ticks of brilliance like vocalizing guitar solos, which sounded better than the actual guitar playing. “There She Goes” was the obvious pop hit that still shows up in movies and commercials (even though there’s a lyric about heroin), but other songs were haunting like a sad Irish pub tune (“Freedom Song”), utterly hypnotizing (“Looking Glass”) and almost punk-esque (“I Can’t Sleep”).
The La’s might not have been crucial influences to bands like Suede or Pulp, but their spirit and pop structures certainly resemble songs from groups like Oasis, Supergrass, The Coral and Ocean Colour Scene. And their reach goes beyond Britpop—you can even hear Mavers’ textured, snarling vocals and their classic guitar lines in the catalogue of experimental rock artist Amen Dunes.
Although album sessions from previous producers have since come to light, the band never released another original album and eventually split. Years later, notable musicians and producers like Johnny Marr tried to convince Mavers to work on new material with them, but Mavers was still hellbent on re-recording his 1990 album before moving on to something new. Though according to Matthew Macefield’s book In Search of the La’s, Mavers does apparently have new songs laying around, including one called “Raindance,” which he played for Macefield, who described it as “one of the best I have ever heard.” Marr also told Q about the existence of other Mavers originals, “Coco Daddy” and “On The Rebound,” but neither have seen the light of day. No matter how many additional collaborators or longtime fans think they can crack the code, no one can decide whether the elusive Mavers returns besides the man himself. However, The La’s did reform for several shows over the years, including a 2005 set at Glastonbury, and Mavers has occasionally come out from under his rock to perform solo, most notably a surprise gig under the name Lee Rude & The Velcro Underpants”.
A flawless album that, over thirty years since its release, is influencing new bands and being played around the world, I wonder what Lee Mavers thinks of it now. He turns sixty on 2nd August, so I wanted to celebrate The La’s and his phenomenal gift for melody and hugely nuanced and compelling music. The reviews for The La’s are tremendously positive. It made a big impression on the media and music fans alike in 1990. In their 1991 review, this is what Entertainment Weekly wrote about an album that is now considered a classic:
“If you asked average Americans what kind of rock music they like best in all this world, nine-tenths of them would reply without hesitation, ”The Beatles.” Why that very same audience has subsequently rejected the overtures of every band that has successfully aped the Beatles since 1970 remains a total mystery. Big Star, the dBs, the Shoes: all Beatlesque beyond belief, all unknown beyond a tiny smattering of true believers. Honestly, it seems as if the world would rather listen to rap, disco, opera, punk — anything, so long as it’s not mere pop music full of pretty melodies, clean rock guitars, and Liverpudlian accents. That’s why the La’s, a Liverpool band whose sound closely mimics all the best bits of the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Who (check out ”There She Goes” for an earful of the most exquisite pop you’re likely to hear this side of ”Penny Lane”) haven’t got a chance. A+”.
I will end with AllMusic’s take on the genius The La’s. Although There She Goes is the best-known track, there are many other songs on the album that reach the same heights. I think that we will be discussing this rare and complicated one-off for decades more. It is such a pity that we will never get a follow-up:
“Some albums exist outside of time or place, gently floating on their own style and sensibility. Of those, the La's lone album may be the most beguiling, a record that consciously calls upon the hooks and harmonies of 1964 without seeming fussily retro, a trick that anticipated the cheerful classicism of the Brit-pop '90s. But where their sons Oasis and Blur were all too eager to carry the torch of the past, Lee Mavers and the La's exist outside of time, suggesting the '60s in their simple, tuneful, acoustic-driven arrangements but seeming modern in their open, spacy approach, sometimes as ethereal as anything coming out of the 4AD stable but brought down to earth by their lean, no-nonsense attack, almost as sinewy as any unaffected British Invasion band. But where so many guitar pop bands seem inhibited by tradition, the La's were liberated by it, using basic elements to construct their own identity, one that's propulsive and tuneful, or sweetly seductive, as it is on the band's best-known song, "There She Goes." That song is indicative of the La's material in its melodic pull; the rest of the album has a bit more muscle, whether the group is bashing out a modern-day Merseybeat on "Liberty Ship" and bouncing two-step "Doledrum," or alluding to Morrissey's elliptical phrasing on "Timeless Melody." This force gives the La's some distinction, separating them from nostalgic revivalists even as their dedication to unadorned acoustic arrangements separates them from their contemporaries, but it's this wildly willful sensibility -- so respectful of the past it can't imagine not following its own path -- that turns The La's into its own unique entity, indebted to the past and pointing toward the future, yet not belonging to either”.
I hope that a lot of people mark Lee Mavers’ sixtieth birthday on 2nd August. It is the perfect excuse – if one were needed! – to play The La’s’ eponymous (and sole) album. Let’s hope that a new vinyl pressing does occur in the future, as it would introduce the album to a whole new generation. Whilst it was revolutionary and instantly popular back in 1990, The La’s sounds…
SO fresh today.