For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!‘    — John Greenleaf Whittier

Welcome … to The La’s.

Formed in Liverpool, England in 1983, The La’s built up a following in the north by throwing a little Merseybeat twist into their down to earth, catchy, electro-acoustic rock songs, making music which stood well away from the glammed up, synth-heavy New Romantics and the huge, earnest anthems of bands like U2 and Simple Minds. Signed by Go! Discs in 1987, the band quickly released a couple of singles, including a little number called “There She Goes,” but neither song captured the attention of the public and the group got down to the business of recording their debut album. 

That business would take nearly three years.

There’s a fine line between perfection and madness, and lead singer/songwriter Lee Mavers played jump rope with that line during the seemingly endless recording sessions. Producers came and went, including John Porter (all the early Smiths), John Leckie (XTC, and started his career with The Beatles), and Mike Hedges (The Cure and Siouxsie & The Banshees). Hedges actually managed to get an entire album out of the band, an album which was subsequently scrapped because Mavers felt it didn’t capture the sound in his head, but also because he had a falling out with the drummer and wanted to rerecord those tracks with his brother behind the kit.

In 1989, the group again entered the studio, this time with Steve Lillywhite (all the classic U2) sitting in the producer’s chair and manning the mixing board. Again, the sessions dragged on, and again Mavers either didn’t know exactly what he wanted or knew too exactly but couldn’t reach it, and eventually the band simply gave up and left the studio. This, however, wasn’t going to work for the record label. 

Go! Discs had invested a lot of time and money on The La’s, on the best producers and studios, and they wanted an album. Just like The Beatles asked Phil Spector to salvage the Get Back sessions, Go! asked Lillywhite to cobble together all the unfinished tracks into something cohesive. Either he was a master cobbler, or the album truly was close to finished anyway, because what emerged is considered a classic British pop-rock album, a forerunner of the Britpop soon to take over the UK. 

Mavers, unsurprisingly, immediately disowned the album, despite the fact that critics adored it and a hit song emerged from the musical morass. He might have taken some cold comfort, however, that the hit song originated from two years prior, and not from the recently disowned sessions. Reissued in 1990, a remixed version of “There She Goes” just missed the UK Top 10 and entered worldwide consciousness when prominently featured in the movie So I Married An Axe Murderer, and later provided a massive hit for Sixpence None The Richer.

Mavers started working on a second album in the mid-90s. It remains unfinished.

So go again and again … and again … with The La’s.