If Eric Clapton had chosen to completely give up listening to new music after 1971, nobody could have blamed him. As a blues innovator, he had already taken the music world by storm, and being called a musical deity would have made anyone’s ego larger than a stadium. Even with his ears pressed to the ground, Clapton’s final great musical insight occurred upon hearing The La’s.
Anything that wasn’t the blues, in Clapton’s opinion, seemed to be off the table about half the time. Even though he distributed his wealth through numerous recordings by pop icons at the time, Clapton remained active in the market. He sold his vintage Robert Johnson records and practiced BB King and Muddy Waters licks whenever he had the opportunity.
The La’s had a whole distinct soundscape when it came to that music. Even though they shared the same country as The Beatles, Lee Mavers had a distinct style of songwriting that nobody else could truly understand. When working with John Power, the music seems to fall halfway between the late 1980s indie scene. It also evokes the sincere singer-songwriter of the 1960s.
The La’s were never made to Mavers’s satisfaction, although he was always quite meticulous when recording any of his compositions. The label assumed they would release the record exactly as it was, with ramshackle masterpieces like “Way Out” and “There She Goes.” They believed that playing as poorly as possible would result in receiving more money to work on the album.
Clapton told Rolling Stone that the only musician he liked was Lee Mavers, the singer for The La’s. This acknowledgment came even though he had previously praised artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan. His style and stance are amazing, in my opinion. I witnessed them perform on television using him and an acoustic guitar and the bassist using an acoustic bass. They performed “There She Goes,” and it was a really powerful song.
There are also hints of those bands from the 1960s that Eric Clapton formerly had a close relationship with. Mavers crafted a melody reminiscent of the British invasion bands from 1967, a departure from the sound of 1987. Even without his thick Liverpool accent, it wouldn’t have felt out of place amidst the earlier era’s music scene.
The band’s debut was on the verge of a new musical movement, even if neither Mavers nor Clapton could have foreseen it. The unofficial offspring of Mavers’s style would be the Britpop movement of the mid-1990s. Noel Gallagher acknowledged him as one of his main songwriting inspirations after the oncoming grunge wave came and passed.
However, Mavers wouldn’t get to witness much of the results of his labor. Power left the group entirely to form the Britpop group Cast. He spent years attempting to get the exact sound he was after and became weary of waiting for his partner. The La’s may not have achieved much, but all it took was one record to establish themselves as one of the greatest bands of all time.
