Despite only releasing one complete studio album (which they promptly dis-owned) Liverpool group The La’s still loom large in British music.
Perhaps it’s due to their famous champions – Noel Gallagher once memorably claimed that Oasis intended to finish what The La’s started. Perhaps it’s their glistening single ‘There She Goes’ which remains a peerless, peerless classic.
Or perhaps it’s down to the sheer bloody minded mystery which lies behind Lee Mavers. The lead creative force in the group, the reclusive songwriter recently took a rejuvenated version of The La’s back out on the road.
MW Macefield tracked down the songwriter during research for his book ‘A Secret Liverpool: In Search of The La’s’. A new edition of the tome is due to be released this month by Helter Skelter, who have kindly granted ClashMusic use of the following extract.
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It’s a cold Friday in November as I speed through the Liverpool back streets in my small car. I have to wipe my windscreen periodically to stop it misting up, as countless shop fronts, cars and people’s faces speed past outside.
Lee Anthony Mavers, in the passenger seat, is talking incessantly. Skipping quickly from one topic of conversation to another: unemployment, the city of Liverpool and the breakdown of community in society, Thatcherism, Everton football club and guitar repairers. Jasper, in the back, banters backward and forward with Mavers – they’re old friends and it seems as though everything they talk about forms part of a long discussion they’ve been having forever. I’m trying to listen (and join in now and again) but I need to keep my eye on the road.
Mavers periodically directs me to go left or right, down ever-smaller backstreets. It’s amazing to me how he knows his way – we’re on the other side of the city from where he lives and we must have travelled five or six miles and taken at least two dozen sharp turns in quick succession before he finally tells me to pull up in a dead-end street apparently no different from hundreds we’ve passed. We get out and Mavers disappears over the road into the yard of one of the houses nearby. We follow. When we get into the small yard, he’s fumbling with a chunky padlock which secures a big green door: that’s when it hits me.
I turn back, go outside and look up at the house: I realise that I’ve been here before, been to this house before – the very same house.
But how have I got here? Well, let’s take a step back in time.
After I decide that I want to talk to Mavers – or, at least, to see if he wants to talk – I toy with ideas of how to get to speak to him. I don’t know where he lives exactly, but various sources offer to either take me or make an introduction, but I don’t get the impression that any of them are regularly in touch with him, and I don’t want to make a bad first impression. I also rule out finding where he lives and just turning up unannounced – I wouldn’t be best pleased if someone turned up on my doorstep, and I want to avoid coming across like some nutty neo-Mark Chapman.
In the end, as with so much that has happened to me while I’ve been doing this, it’s simple luck. I go to interview a source who, unbeknown to me, rings Mavers just after I’ve left him. He comes out to find me and catches me up. Before I know it, I’m being driven to Huyton for an audience with the man himself, who is apparently keen to meet me (at least, he didn’t say he didn’t want to meet me).
Not expecting to meet Mavers at such short notice, I’m not at all prepared with any detailed questions or anything, so I put all my hope in coming across as sincere and focused in what I’m trying to do. It’s not easy, though. I’ve never actually met anybody ‘famous’ before and, whichever way you look at it, he is famous, to a degree. Plus, he is someone I am increasingly starting to admire as a musician and songwriter and, dammit, artist.
I can’t help but have butterflies in my stomach.
I don’t know it at the time but, as we travel to Mavers’ house, I’m about to start realising how wrong some of the sources I’ve talked to have been, and how wrong I’ve been about some of the assumptions I’ve made. I get the first sense of this when we pull into the driveway of Mavers’ house. I can’t honestly say what I was expecting, but it wasn’t anything as, well, normal as what I actually find. It’s just a semi-detached house on a street. Maybe part of me was expecting big neon signs: ‘La’s Central’ or ‘The bloke who wrote “There She Goes” lives here!’ I don’t know. I decide that this is my first taste of the difference between rock’n’roll reality and real-world reality.
We pull up and get out of the car. My heart is racing. I toy with the idea of doing a runner there and then. Two thoughts run through my mind. The first is a comment someone once made about Marianne Faithfull: ‘She’s the caretaker of her own legend.’ I remember thinking about that for a long time and eventually deciding that it was more criticism than compliment. Ever since it’s bothered me that maybe I’ll find the same true of Mavers. The other thing I keep recalling is the old adage that you should never meet your heroes because you’ll always come away disappointed. How can any person ever really live up to your expectations of them? We never stop to recognise how unrealistic admiration and adoration can be. I don’t want to be disappointed by Mavers. Anyone else: fine. But I badly don’t want to be disappointed after meeting him.
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‘A Secret Liverpool: In Search of The La’s’ will be available in bookshops from late February.
