The La's

The La's – There She Goes

by OndaRock Staff

“Juke-Box” is a step back from the album format, a return to the building blocks of pop: songs. Riffs, choruses, words and images: the images of the videos themselves, or the ones that music evokes and uses to seduce the listener.

The purpose of this column is precisely to enter into this game of seduction, always crucial and always taken for granted. To uncover its stories and protagonists, but above all its mechanisms, rules and exceptions. Guided by a simple question: how does a song work?

The La’s – There She Goes

from the album “The La’s” (Go! Discs, 1990)

band_las “There she goes”, literally “there she is”, is one of the classics of British indie-pop. The alternation between a bittersweet serenity and intense emotional surges makes it one of the genre's manifestos, helped by its flawless execution and by a production that brings out the crisp, ringing sound of the interplay between an acoustic guitar and tightly wound yet luminous, airy jingle-jangle electric arpeggios.

A simple, immediate song, then, but one that, thanks to an excellent interplay between lyrics and music and a handful of small but effective touches, became one of the anthems of that transitional era in British pop in the early Nineties.

A crystalline arpeggio on the guitar's top two strings traces a circular figure that winds back on itself at the end of every cycle; as soon as it closes, the body of the song takes shape. Yet another song about a girl? The verse's lyrics, carried by their major-chord melody and serene mood, seem to confirm as much, introducing, as in a classic ballad, the image of a girl:

There she goes

There she goes again

Racing through my brain

That last line, sung in a delicate falsetto, gives way to the morbid intensity of the refrain, where the shift to a minor chord and to a hoarse, lifeless vocal delivery flips the mood entirely, laying bare a sense of powerlessness in just two lines.

And I just can’t contain

This feeling that remains

The feeling seems to carry only a negative connotation. An intense but unrequited love? What follows in the lyrics seems to reveal the mystery:

There she blows

There she blows again

Pulsing through my veins

The she of the title is therefore a drug, heroin to be precise: "There She Goes" is thus a drug ballad that chooses to disguise itself as another pop-music cliché, the tortured love song (very much in vogue in the early Nineties, with the rise of shoegaze and its intangible, idealized female figures). Despite the heaviness of the theme, though, the La's seem to dance from chord to chord with an ease that plenty of bands would envy - and no wonder, given such a powerful, lean rhythm section! - but there's something more: listening closely, you get the impression that the music grows more agitated in step with the darker moments of the lyrics, as if the band could dose out the amount of melancholy in each passage, depending on where they want to place the emphasis. The secret lies entirely in the interplay of pauses and breaths in the lead guitar: buoyant and skittish in the first part - vaguer and more ambiguous - hammering on the beat over three notes in the final chorus, right after a bridge of pure desperation. The result is a penultimate chorus that is nothing short of oppressive and anxious, finally in line with the theme of addiction.

But it's only a moment, since the main riff (we can say it, one of the greatest of all time) kicks back in and launches into another, more airy chorus, leading us by the hand into the sunlit atmosphere of the ending, with the drums underlining the repetition of every passage.

The La's would never again manage such an effective blend of moods and classy touches: despite the good commercial success of their self-titled album, they never recorded another song as catchy and memorable as the masterpiece "There She Goes", which indeed remains their undisputed classic.

(01/06/2010)

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05/02/2026

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by OndaRock Staff, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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Listen to "There She Goes" (1990 version)

From the album "The La's" (Go! Discs)
Release: October 1990 (first version: 1988)

Author: L.A. Mavers
Producer: Bob Andrews
Mixing: Steve Lillywhite
Length: 2'42''