LA’S - Bbc in Session

It often happens that a song becomes more popular and better known than the artist who originally had the merit of writing and performing it. This may well be the case with "There She Goes", which owes much of its fame to the moderately successful cover version recorded some time later by the American band Sixpence Non The Richer. Yet behind that sudden ray of warm, welcoming light cast from Liverpool — arriving at a point when, following the departure of the Smiths, nothing seemed possible anymore in England — stood the La's, and above all their undisputed leader Lee Mavers, one of the most sensitive and sharp-penned songwriters English music has ever produced, probably since the days of Ray Davies. Just one self-titled album, released in 1990 after endless production troubles and constant second-guessing, never fully acknowledged by its author with his obsessive, incurable perfectionism. Then came the inevitable split and an impenetrable silence, broken only sporadically by the odd gig, mere inches away from the explosion of Britpop. Only bassist John Power would manage to make the most of the renewed cultural climate, reaping some of what had been sown and picking up a few modest satisfactions with the mod-revival of his band Cast (who in turn sank into oblivion).

Now arriving to remind us of what we have lost (perhaps forever) is a collection of performances recorded by the La's for the BBC across the entire downward arc of their meteoric career. It spans from 1987 to 1990, seventeen tracks in total spread across four different sessions, running through a body of songs that still never fail to astonish and unsettle. While listening to this record on one hand gives the sensation of leafing through a dusty folder of nineteenth-century prints and daguerreotypes, now faded and out of fashion, on the other hand one is left deeply stunned by the modernity of the taste and the ideas at work, as well as by the ability to turn fleeting glimpses of the brightest Sixties into an almost unstoppable poetic and compositional machine.

But the great thing is that there is so much more to discover and bring back to the surface among the grooves of this sort of impossible posthumous anthology of a band that only ever existed within the confines of a single album: there's the loose, swaying gait of "Doledrum", with one foot in the Kinks and the other in the Small Faces, the frantic, biting Swinging London shuffle of "Come In Come Out", or again the relentless, urban merry-go-round of "Son Of A Gun". All of it unfolding under the pleased, watchful gaze of the Beatles and the Byrds, opulent and benevolent deities who follow and bless from on high the exploits of brave Mavers and his crew as they sail the unstable seas of the most chameleonic, visionary pop in search of the ultimate song. Which might just be "There She Goes", a twenty-four carat diamond here recast in a sharper, more lacerating form, with Mavers' voice delivering its geometric stabs of veiled despair while the chiming guitars intertwine in an endless peal of bells.

According to Noel Gallagher, the rebirth of English pop began to take its run-up right here. In "Feelin'" one seems to hear again the snapping flair of the Animals or of the most inspired Fogerty, while in "Timeless Melody" and "Calling All" the still-intact myth of Love and Big Star rises again from the crumpled mists of memory, and Mavers really does seem to have succeeded in trapping and taming the elusive aura of the Sixties inside a small glass bell jar.

Also worth remembering is the dry, unadorned nursery rhyme with a faintly Barrett-like aftertaste, "Freedom Song", and the crumbling mantra of "Over", notable above all for the suffocating chant of its guitars, caught in a psychedelic wind saturated with Eastern spices and Beatles-esque torpor from the Sergeant Pepper era and thereabouts.

An album that comes especially recommended to anyone who has never had the good fortune to cross the threshold of the sumptuous museum built note by note by Mavers, with the punctilious gesture of an Egyptologist, in honour of the immortal melodies of the Sixties. A museum that will of course also delight longtime admirers and regular visitors.

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04/02/2007