• PUBLICATION - Q Magazine
• ORIGIN - UK
• DATE OF PUBLICATION - Q 154, July 1999
• SUBJECT - Recording The La's album
• TITLE - The Difficult birth of The La's Album.
• AUTHOR - John Reed
• CONTENT - Input from all ex-producers & ex-La's..
• PHOTO - No credit given.

Barry Sutton ( The La's guitarist )
In the eleven months I was in the band, we recorded the album three times to various stages of completion. The first one was on eight-track in The Attic, which was maybe fifty per cent finished,  that was kind of self-produced.

Paul Hemmings ( The La’s guitarist )
Andy McDonald From Go! Discs heard a demo tape and things went mental. Every record company said they’d fly up to watch us. One night, we played the Everyman, and it was absolutely packed. We signed to Go! Discs.

We moved down to London to do some recording - seven of us living in a big house in Ravenscourt Park  but that lasted all of three months. You couldn’t make any noise because of the neighbours. A lot of good songs were written around then, though.

Lee Mavers ( The La’s vocalist )
We thought it would be better to be in London so we could move quick but, after about two months, we all did each other’s heads in and went back home. The record business had nothing to offer us except sitting in that house, where we couldn’t even pick up a guitar because the neighbours complained. There were police around all the time.

Paul Hemmings
My mum and dad had an old Victorian house in Liverpool with an outbuilding, old stables, where we’d rehearse. Lee came across one morning with that fantastic riff for There She Goes and the rest fell into place. We also did some stuff in the Bunnymen’s eight-track demo studio in Liverpool, because Pete De Freitas (now deceased Bunnymen drummer), God bless him, helped us out.

John Leckie ( producer )
I went up to see them in Liverpool, during March 1988. They kept playing me the old four-track demos they’d done themselves, and saying that this was how they wanted the album to sound. But they’d just finished working with John Porter (Smith ‘s producer) in Matrix Studios in London. I got the Porter tape From Andy at Go! Discs and we went into Chipping Norton studios because Lee had this obsession with the ‘60s, and that studio had a mixing desk of the right vintage.

One example of his ‘60s thing was that he wanted to use the old AKG D190 mics -  just about the cheapest you can get. In terms of range, they had no top and no bottom, but that’s what he did the demos on, so that’s what he wanted.

Barry Sutton
Lee was working on twenty-four-track with people like John Leckie. The key thing was he played these amazing demos of songs like Doledrum and Son Of A Gun and said, that’s what I want it to sound like. To this day, they haven’t been bettered - he says that himself.

Q Magazine - The magazine says.. Left to right - Mavers, Sharrock, Hemmings, Power.
But it is in fact.. Left to right - Mavers, Sharrock, Sutton, Power..

John Leckie
When I started working with them, it was Lee, John Power and a Salsa-type drummer called Terry, but then Lee decided he’d play drums himself. He could do a brilliant Keith Moon impersonation, arms flailing everywhere, but it sounded awful.

Lee was also inclined to talk in a kind of Scouse psychobabble. He’d spend half an hour describing the way he’d want the guitar to sound, things like wanting to capture the sound of the tree it was made From. Or he’d decide he didn’t like a particular cable because it was yellow. John Power was a bit like that too, but when he did it, there was an element of humour. Lee seemed serious.

We worked like this through a bunch of songs, then finally he says, I’ve got this other one, which turned out to be There She Goes, and it was brilliant.

In the studio, they would drink beer and smoke dope, but I never saw any evidence of hard drugs, or even of harder spirits. If Lee was doing heroin, which people have said he was, it didn’t seem to affect his ability to work.

The most frustrating thing was, at the end of each session, when everything was switched off, Lee and John would pick up guitars in the kitchen and sing together and it was utterly fabulous. In the end I was sacked because, apparently, I was no good.

Paul Hemmings
We did tours of England while we were in and out of studios. It got ridiculous trying to record anything. I do sympathise with Lee, because when you catch a moment and then separate all the tracks and try it again in the studio, it sounds too clean and clinical. That went on and on. I got fed up and thought, Something’s not quite right. I want my life back. And there were definitely dark clouds looming. Did Lee get irate? Yeah. He’d like a song at first and then he wouldn’t.

Barry Sutton
The version we did in the Pink Museum in Liverpool, lasted two and a half months. An Australian guy called Jeremy Allom worked with us. Then an in-house Canadian guy took over. I had an acetate of Timeless Melody from the Pink sessions. The playing was good, the recording quality wasn’t great.

Mike Hedges ( producer )
I was brought in for a couple of weeks when I was supposed to be going on holiday. I’d been collecting vintage equipment and the desk we used was early EMI Abbey Road, which Lee appreciated. It would have been used on The Beatles’ albums - and John Lennon’s.

We did most of the recording on my mobile down in Devon. It was obvious that some of the demos the band had already done - things like Looking Glass - should really just have been left exactly as they were. During a ten-day period we recorded sixteen songs and then mixed them in a couple of days, banged out the mixes and delivered it.

One brilliant we had, they were sitting in the dining room of this house in Devon, playing songs. They went through about thirty-five unreleased tunes and they were amazing, absolutely stunning.

When we had more or less finished it, Lee seemed completely happy with it. Then Power and Sharrock went on holiday with their girlfriends to Hawaii. After that, Lee's attitude seemed to change. I was told later that Lee was none too pleased that he didn't go with them. And when they came back, it was all a bit sour and he decided he didn’t like the album at all and wanted to redo it.

Paul Hemmings
The session with Mike Hedges is reckoned to be the best, when Lee allegedly tried to destroy the tapes. John Power stuck with it through thick and thin, and hats off to him.

John Power
I was a bit suspicious because Lee wanted to record in the kitchen. And then it was, Nah, that sounds wrong - and don’t dust the guitars. He thought the guitars sounded better with dust on.

Mike Hedges
During the last few days of overdubs, he started saying, This or that isn’ tgood enough. He was protesting too much when he knew things were good. He’d say, That bass is out oF tune. Everyone else would say, No, it’s not. Oh, he’d say, I meant the guitar...

Lee Mavers
I don’t know why we didn’t get our sound. Seven times in and out of different studios at £1,000 a day. I don’t know why the producer wasn’t capturing our sound.

Mike Hedges
I still regard Lee as a genius. I had heard it said that he had heroin problems but, if so, he seemed to handle it. But I don’t think heroin was what caused him to reject the album. It was more to do with his artistic temperament. I think he’d set himself these impossibly high standards with the demos they’d originally done, and he wanted it to be absolutely perfect.

Consequently, Chris left the band, and John was furious because he thought it sounded really good.
 

John Leckie Sacked halfway through.

Steve Lillywhite Finished the job. Finally.

Paul Hemmings
Chris Sharrock had to leave, because the record company stopped the money for a while and he had a mortgage to pay, and his kid. When Chris left, Lee got his brother Neil and Cammy (Peter James Cammell) in as a unit and I got ousted. Cammy is one of the most talented guitarists I’ve come across.

Lee Mavers
We walked out on it while we were doing it. We hated it because we weren’t getting our sound across, so we turned our back on it. So the record company did it themselves. They got it together from a load of backing tracks, mixed it themselves and put it out. There was no choice as to what single we wanted or anything...

John Leckie
I’ve nothing but admiration for Andy McDonald at Go! Discs, because he stuck with it right through to the end, and if he hadn’t brought in Steve Lillywhite to finish it off, there might never have been a La’s album.

Special thanks to John Reed of Record Collector.