One-album wonders: The 1990s act Eric Clapton thought was “tremendous”
No one would have faulted Eric Clapton had he decided to stop listening to new music altogether after 1971. He had already conquered the music world once as a blues innovator, and the label of a musical god would have given anyone a bigger ego than could fill a stadium’s worth of people. Clapton still had his ear to the ground, and one of his last major musical epiphanies came hearing the sound of The La’s.
For Clapton, anything that wasn’t the blues seemed to be off the table half the time. Although he did spread his wealth across many pop legends’ albums both then and now, Clapton could still be found peddling away at his old Robert Johnson records and working on BB King and Muddy Waters licks whenever he got the chance.
As far as that music was concerned, The La’s came from a completely different world. Though they came from the same shores as The Beatles, Lee Mavers had a unique songwriting vision that no one else could really decipher. When working with John Power, the music seemed to fit somewhere between the indie scene from the late 1980s and the kind of earnest singer-songwriters of the 1960s.
While Mavers always had a strong sense of perfectionism whenever he recorded any of his songs, The La’s was never made to his liking. Thinking that if they played to the worst of their ability, they would be granted more money to work on the album, the label figured that they would release the record as is, which featured ramshackle classics like ‘Way Out’ and ‘There She Goes’.
Whereas Clapton had first sung the praises of people like Stevie Ray Vaughan in the past, he admitted that Mavers had his ear, telling Rolling Stone, “The only thing I’ve really liked is a guy called Lee Mavers, who sings with the La’s. He’s got a stance and a style that I think is tremendous. I saw them do a thing on TV with him and an acoustic guitar and the bass player with an acoustic bass. They did that song ‘There She Goes’, and it was so strong”.
There are some shades of those 1960s bands that Clapton rubbed elbows with back in the day in there as well. Despite having that thick Liverpool accent, Mavers also created a way with a melody that wouldn’t have felt out of place among the British invasion bands making waves in 1967 instead of 1987.
Though Mavers nor Clapton could have predicted it, the band’s debut was on the cusp of a new style of music. After the oncoming grunge scene came and went, the Britpop movement of the mid-1990s would be the unofficial children of Mavers’s style, with Noel Gallagher citing him as one of his core inspirations for writing songs.
Mavers wouldn’t get to see the fruits of his labour all that much, though. After spending years trying to get the right sound he was looking for, Power had had enough of waiting for his bandmate, leading to him leaving the fold altogether to create the Britpop band Cast. The La’s may not have gotten far, but one album was all they needed to put themselves in the conversation of the most influential bands of all time.
