The La's with Ben Gibbard

Everyone knows the hit track “There She Goes,” a song that sounds like it has always existed and emerged into the world fully formed by the hand of God. Liverpudlian band The La’s made that perfect song, and according to the many musicians it influenced, including Oasis’ Liam Gallagher or our guest, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, a nearly perfect album, and then basically never put anything out again. Join Yasi and Ben as they talk about one of the most interesting, mysterious, and secretly influential bands from the UK. EPISODE PLAYLIST: Listen to the songs we talk about HERE CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Ben Gibbard Producer: Liz Sánchez Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 2:06Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandsplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode, you guys, is about a true cult band. Like, I think we bandy that word around here, and as I like to say, it's my show, so whatever I think is a cult band is a cult band. But this is like, kind of, a real cult band, a one album wonder, The Laws.

• 2:35Yasi Salek?

  You guys, I'm joined today by Benjamin Q. Gibbard.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  I have a Q in my name now?

• 2:40Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't it feel right, though?

• 2:41Speaker 05

  I mean, I have a D. It's D. Benjamin D. Gibbard. No, just the D, just the initial. If you can believe that, I can show you on my driver's license.

• 2:48Yasi Salek?

  So like, D E E?

• 2:49Speaker 05

  Just D apostrophe.

• 2:51Yasi Salek?

  Your parents gave you the middle name of one letter with a period?

• 2:54Speaker 05

  My dad has the same thing. We believe it's to honor, if that's the right word, my grandfather and his brothers all had northern Michigan D names, like Dorton and Denzel, things like that. We think that's what the D's for.

• 3:09Yasi Salek?

  Aggressively, white people should.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, rather than have Dorton as your middle name, figure, let's just keep the initial on there.

• 3:15Yasi Salek?

  Dorton Gibbard.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  I guess now that's what it is, because I said it on your podcast. That's now what it is.

• 3:20Yasi Salek?

  Update the Wikipedia, babe. Dorton is here. Benjamin Dorton. Is this your favorite band? Or is this your second favorite band after Teenage Fanclub?

• 3:31Speaker 05

  I was just gonna say, we established on the first podcast that Teenage Fanclub is, in fact, my favorite band. It's hard to say that one of your favorite bands only has one album. That's kind of a difficult thing to justify. I will say that the eponymous record by The Laws is one of my top 10 records of all time. And I'd say that's probably in my top five.

• 3:53Yasi Salek?

  Don't you kind of think, though, it might be easier to say a band that only has one album is your favorite? Because what many bands end up doing is like, having three albums that are your favorite, and then making six that just slowly erode their own legacy?

• 4:07Speaker 05

  We can get into this maybe later when we're talking about the fact that they only have one album, but in order for a band or an artist to really kind of have a legacy, there needs to be peaks and valleys through a career.

• 4:19Yasi Salek?

  A story.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Right, there's the, you know, there's the first record, there's the records that become the fan and critic favorites, and then there's the lost in the wilderness period, and then hopefully there's a rebirth.

• 4:29Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  At a later point. And I think as a fan of, you know, my favorite bands tend to have these valleys.

• 4:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  That when you're in real time as a fan of the band, you're kind of like, man, I hope these guys turn it around at some point.

• 4:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. So, the fact that the Laws only have one album, maybe Lee Mavers has recorded others that we have not heard, although I doubt it, puts them in this very weird, rarefied air of artists or bands that made one perfect statement and then just walked away from recording music. And as a fan, it's infuriating, because, as I'm sure we'll get into, there are these bootleg recordings of some of these unreleased Lee Mavers songs that are absolutely brilliant. And, you know, I fear we'll never hear a proper studio version of them.

• 5:19Yasi Salek?

  Well, Lee Mavers says that you will in God's time. He didn't say that exactly, but that's, I feel what he means.

• 5:25Speaker 05

  Is it Mavers or Mavers? I've always been saying Mavers.

• 5:27Yasi Salek?

  I'm going off of what Noel Gallagher said in an interview.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:31Yasi Salek?

  Who can say?

• 5:33Speaker 05

  I'll go with Mavers.

• 5:34Yasi Salek?

  It feels more British.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

• 5:37Yasi Salek?

  Mavers feels more like, what was your middle name, Dorton?

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it feels more Dorton Mavers.

• 5:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay. We'll stick with Mavers, that does sound a little more British.

• 5:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  And as I'm understanding, you're starting to appropriate some British colloquialisms into your speech.

• 5:51Yasi Salek?

  I'm about to be full Madonna, babe. Like, it's getting there. The accent hasn't taken hold yet, because I'm actually notoriously bad at accents, but I will be dropping like, "I had a good kip yesterday," or like, you know.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Well, you know, give it time, you'll be insufferable some point soon from that, probably, right?

• 6:07Yasi Salek?

  Been. I think many people would say she got there a long time ago. We're gonna start not with Lee Anthony Mavers, but instead with Michael Clifford Badger. You and I read the same book. There's one, as far as I know, one single tome that was written about the Laws, and there wasn't an editor, as far as I can tell. Listen, respectfully, I'm so happy to have this book. It's a labor of love, and actually, I'll say it, the best ones for me are the usually the most poorly-written ones, because I get the most out of them, because they have all this, like, gem info buried in them. And this is one of them.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. Trying to decipher anything about the laws at this point feels a little bit like Citizen Kane.

• 6:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  We have to talk to everybody who was peripheral to this person and this experience to kind of start to cobble together a narrative that seems to make sense.

• 7:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, no, totally. M.W. McIlfield, we are grateful for you. Anyways, Michael Clifford Badger was born March 18th, 1962, as a Pisces. He is actually the one that technically started the laws. He said that Captain Beefheart was a catalyst for all of it. He's from Liverpool, from Highton, and he knew this band called Nukelon? They were punks, Highton punks, and Lee Mabbers was in this band, playing bass. This is around 1981. Lee Anthony Mabbers, born August 2nd, 1962, same age. He learned bass first. Did you find that interesting?

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. It seems like bass usually is the instrument you learn at. You just, you get put on bass after you try to be a guitar player.

• 7:47Yasi Salek?

  Is that what you learned first, bass guitar?

• 7:49Speaker 05

  Uh, well, I learned guitar first.

• 7:51Yasi Salek?

  Right. I feel like that's more normal.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, there are people who are incredible at bass, and that is their instrument.

• 7:55Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 7:55Speaker 05

  But I think in a lot of rock bands, there are three people who play guitar.

• 7:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 05

  And one is demoted to bass.

• 8:02Yasi Salek?

  Right. I got a few mixed stories, but I believe he got a guitar when he was younger, because he wanted it, because he saw the Beatles movies. Famous Liverpudians also. But then he never played it. And then he got into punk. And then he had this guitar that only had bass strings. And so he taught himself how to play basslines, like Stranglers-esque basslines. He really loved the Stranglers. Jacques Brunel was the bassist of the Stranglers.

• 8:35Yasi Salek?

  And then he got a proper bass when he was 18 and he was in town with a friend, babe. Walking around stoked about his bass and his friend ran into another friend, a mate, if you will, in the parlance of this area.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  Right, let's keep it in the parlance of the times.

• 8:49Yasi Salek?

  And that guy was like, "I'm in a band and we need a bass player." And he was like, "What the fudge? I just got a bass. Can you believe?" Anyway, they eventually break up. Mike's like, "Babe, nothing's happening in Liverpool. This place is so over. I'm going to London." And he goes to London and then he comes back home, I don't know, visits his parents, bumps into Lee at a place called The Everyman. I assume that's a pub. And he's like, "What? You've also been living in London?" I got no further information about Lee Mappers living in London. He never talked about it. No one else ever talked about it, but this was what was said by Mike. And then they were like, "Hey, I love Captain Beefheart." He's like, "Oh my God, I love Captain Beefheart." And they just like broed out about Captain Beefheart. What is your relationship with Captain Beefheart?

• 9:35Speaker 05

  My relationship with Captain Beefheart starts with my dad being a fan and ends there. I've yet to have a Captain Beefheart phase. It may or may not be coming at some point. I am 48 years old, so you would think at some point Captain Beefheart is gonna start to hit.

• 9:51Yasi Salek?

  Is it ever like strange for you when you have like a favorite artist or beloved, you know, band or whatever and you read about their influences? And they love this artist so much and you're like, "I have no connection. I can't connect with that artist, but I love the sort of like musical fruit of them."

• 10:10Speaker 05

  I think when a band like Teenage Fanclub is talking about being big fans of The Byrds and Big Star and Orange Juice and stuff like that, you can hear that music in Teenage Fanclub. There's nothing about Captain Beefheart that you can really hear in the lot.

• 10:23Yasi Salek?

  Maybe it's just like the spirit.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  And maybe in the attempted approaches to recording.

• 10:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like Trout Mask Replica, I've tried to listen to it. Goes right above my little brain, but that's not getting on the radio. You're not getting a hit song off that guy.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  Probably not.

• 10:39Yasi Salek?

  No, no.

• 10:48Yasi Salek?

  It brought them together. They bonded. Mike, or as Mavers, I believe, calls him Mick, but maybe that's just, again, another countryman thing. He dreamt the name The Laws. He had a kip, it's a nap, at a maid's house, it's a friend, in 1983. So he loved it. It's both, he says, from do re mi la, which is the scale of singing notes.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  Do re mi fa so la ti do.

• 11:16Yasi Salek?

  Right. But also, more importantly, it stands for lad in Liverpool. I think this is, like, not just Liverpool. I think I read that it's, like, different parts of Northern England, but very specifically, like, prominently in Liverpool, people use la as sort of like, they're saying lad, but it's also seems like it's like a punctuation at the end.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:36Yasi Salek?

  Like, "Oh, you wanna go la?" Mick, Mike, goes back to London and is like, "I'm gonna start a band with that Lee Mavers. I just know it." And he moves back to Liverpool. He's getting picked up by his parents at the train station. They're all still really young. I think they're like 21 or whatever. And as he's driving by with his parents, he sees Lee right there at the bus stop, and he was like, "It's a sign." I don't think this is a big area, but also, I will take the beautiful circumstance that made him feel that it was a coincidence.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  But don't you already remember when you were that young? You were just out all the time. You run into people all the time. Because we were, I'm assuming-

• 12:15Yasi Salek?

  Out, we were out in the streets.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  Out on the streets, in clubs, in bars. You run into people all the time. You just see people all the time.

• 12:22Yasi Salek?

  There was literally nothing else to do. What were you gonna do? Sit in your house?

• 12:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, just walk around.

• 12:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. You were just out. It's true. Mike Badger said, "I was attracted to Lee because he was just different, a different person to the normal people you'd meet." This is gonna prove to be both a blessing and a curse for Mike Badger. "He had a lot of character, and he also looked dead cool, which, when you're 22, means a lot. In my mind, I wanted to create something that was like rockabilly beefheart." He was probably the most talented person with music that I've ever met. He can just do it. It's that simple.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  It's this odd phenomenon, which just happens from time to time in rock history, where somebody joins a band.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  And then takes over the band.

• 13:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  Right? And in this case, it feel, I mean, I'm sure Mick Badger has feelings about this, maybe even to this day.

• 13:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Although I think there's been some indication that maybe around the time of the writing of this book, that maybe they had mended some fences or something.

• 13:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  But that Lee entered the band and ostensibly kicked Badger out of the band.

• 13:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  Which is a bold move.

• 13:24Yasi Salek?

  That did happen.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, a bold move.

• 13:26Yasi Salek?

  It was slower than than that, but yeah. I mean, Mick Badger looks like he's doing just fine. I Googled him. He's got a cool leather jacket. I believe he does art now. He's fine. Their early songs were Soho Wendy, I Did The Painting, Red Deer Stalk. Lee says that in this interview in the book that we mentioned, because the guy does get an elusive interview with Lee Mavers, he says that he had already actually written his own first song, which was Clean Profit by then. And he kind of felt that Badger was, did you get this too from what he was saying? That he said it kind of was discussed that he was like Morrissey? That was very interesting.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I found that to be odd. Yeah, not really, no.

• 14:10Yasi Salek?

  Not a fan. So they go into this little studio in town called The Attic. The Attic will be kind of an important player in the the many soap operas of studios that The Laws are gonna record in. The Attic, from what I can understand, was basically more or less kind of an attic. Like, it was like very rudimentary, bare bones space. They recorded a couple more songs there. They put these two songs on a compilation that Mick Badger's mate was doing called Elegance, Charm, and Deadly Danger.

• 14:50Yasi Salek?

  They drift apart. Lee comes back to the band. It's fucking 1986. This is taking forever. They have their first show. It's a year in. Badger says they knocked him dead. It was amazing. It was the best show on earth. No one's here to corroborate that. Now Lee starts to come in with songs he's been writing. Freedom Song, I O U, and Doldrum date back to March 1986. They play a show of bands that were on that compilation. In that showcase show. Three Future Laws were present. Barry Sutton and Peter Camel, who were playing in a band called Marshmallow Overcoat, and Paul Hemmings, who was simply an audience member. Like, we said earlier, 38 people have been in The Laws. So, anyone who's ever lived in Liverpool and like could play an instrument was probably

• 15:35Yasi Salek?

  at one point or the other a member of The Laws. This is something I didn't totally understand, but I guess it's not that important. Mick Badger joins this thing, right? This like government-sponsored musician teaching learning program. It's for unemployed musicians to play together and learn stuff, and it was paid for by the government, and I think they got maybe a little money out of it. Lee Mavers refused to do it. He did not believe in maybe the government, or government-sponsored things, or he said something to the effect of, "You can't teach music." But this is only important because that's where Mike Badger meets John Power, who, while we go through the 38 members of The Laws, would you agree that John Power is probably the most important member?

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 16:17Yasi Salek?

  Other than Lee Mavers?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  I saw The Laws in 2005, which we can get to later. And the fact that John Power was there was meaningful to me and also made it The Laws. I would have been excited to see these songs being played and sung by Lee, but the fact that John Power was there legitimized the lineup, so to speak.

• 16:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's a great one for you to have seen.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  It was incredible. I mean, it was, we played at Summer Sonic, this festival in Japan in 2005, and the bill on our stage was Death Cab, us, Teenage Fan Club, and The Laws.

• 16:54Yasi Salek?

  Did you act weird? Be honest.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  I did, and that's where I met Norman for the first time. And I remember standing next to Norman. We're watching The Laws together, and I'm like, "This is a wild scenario here." I'm standing next to this guy who's in my favorite band, who I've been wanting to meet since I was 14.

• 17:11Yasi Salek?

  Shaking, your hands are shaking.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  And he's a lovely gentleman. We're having a conversation as if we're colleagues. And we're watching this band that disappeared off the face of the earth for 15 years, but now yet here they are in Tokyo. And when they went into "There She Goes," Norman turned to me and said like, "Great pop song. Crazy, it's about heroin." And I'd never heard

• 17:32Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you didn't know that?

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Until that point.

• 17:34Yasi Salek?

  That rumor.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  And my mind was blown. And then, as we will, I'm sure we'll get into later, the myth that the song was about heroin has been dispelled

• 17:42Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  numerous times. But at the time, I'd never heard that explanation for the lyric before. And it really just kind of, whoa, kind of matrixed me a bit.

• 17:51Yasi Salek?

  Really done well for yourself, Jordan, I must tell you.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  I've lived a charmed life.

• 17:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:55Yasi Salek?

  That's pretty good.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, pretty good.

• 17:56Yasi Salek?

  That's pretty good. Well, John Power is younger than them. Born September 14th, 1967, he's a Virgo. He was about five years younger than them. So they're 22, he's 17.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  And my understanding was that Lee taught him how to play bass.

• 18:10Yasi Salek?

  So I got two different stories. One was that he already could play bass, which is why he was in this unemployed musician's scheme in the first place.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  That tracks.

• 18:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But I do think, like, whether it's not, whether or not it's like, he like sat with him with his fingers or whatever, I think he like really mentored him. Like, he, he like mentored him in music. Like, maybe he could have played rudimentary bass or something, and then Lee sort of like took him under his wing and like molded him.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  And that makes more sense because in listening to not only the record, but all the live recordings and bootlegs, John Power is an unbelievable bass player.

• 18:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  And he does this thing that all the great bass players do, where it's that they sit just a little bit behind the drummer, a little bit behind the kick, and it just gives this very mild flam.

• 18:53Yasi Salek?

  A flam, you say?

• 18:55Speaker 05

  A flam, like, you know, against the kick and the bass. There's just a little bit of like a, it just sits a little bit back and just gives the music this great feel. It's, it's, it's what a lot of Motown is and soul music is based around. And the bass just sit back a little bit behind the drums.

• 19:08Yasi Salek?

  More importantly, he smoked pot, babe. And you know who else smoked pot? Lee Mavers. And he was like, hell yeah, bitch. I'm a pot-smoking buddy. Another big perk about John Power, besides his immense talent, was that he had a lot of friends still. Because I guess, like, Lee and Badger were like 22, had been out of school. Because like, in the UK at this time, like, you leave school at 16, unless you're gonna do advanced studies, which they weren't. So they'd been out of school for six years. They didn't have that, like, robust friend base that you have when you're still in high school. But he did. So their show started suddenly being flooded with all his friends. So they had this, like, energy around them that they didn't have before.

• 19:51Yasi Salek?

  According to Badger, though, he said there was no real music scene in Liverpool to speak of at that time. Now it's time to record more.

• 20:00Yasi Salek?

  This is like August, September of that, of 86. Now we have Badger, Mavers, and Power. And there's a drummer, but I don't remember who it is. They do Colin All in this, and Son of a Gun, and then some of the other ones they've already, they've already done. Here's what Mavers said. "It was clear from day one that I didn't have the language, the terminology of the studio. I was trying to capture a definite sound, but I didn't think I could say, 'I want a beggar's banquet acoustic sound,' or something like that. I didn't know what the guy knew or didn't know about bands, so I would have gotten a better sound had I known more." This is interesting for two reasons. Would you just not assume that a guy who is doing a studio knows what Beggar's Banquet sounds like? It's a very famous Rolling Stones album. Maybe it wasn't in 1986? I think it was.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Nobody wants to sound like the Rolling Stones in 1986.

• 20:47Yasi Salek?

  Right, right, right.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  People want to sound like the Rolling Stones now.

• 20:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, or in the 90s also, probably.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, you know, there were, there didn't seem to be a lot of 60s, early 70s revivalists in the mid 80s in the UK, I'm imagining. And also, a lot of studio owners, I'm sure, were now really pushing the new technology that, you know, that they now had access to. And they're like, "Well, yeah, no, we're not going to use those ribbon mics. We want to use this new, exciting digital reverb, or this new drum machine thing we have."

• 21:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. They're gigging, babe. They're playing shows. People are loving them. The Law's popular in Liverpool, maybe amongst only John Powers' friends. We'll never know, but they had crowds. Then, as you foreshadowed a little bit, come December of 1986, things started to get a little sour between Mike Badger and Lee Mavers. Here's what Badger said. "There were a lot of hangers-on. We'd now got a manager, Joey Davidson, who was a friend of Lee's from way back. Lee and I were just drifting apart amongst it all. Lee's a very intense person, very passionate. While we were setting up for a show, there was an altercation between me and Lee. He said something like, 'And as for you, you're going on Monday.'" This was a Friday. I thought, 'You what?' So I said, well, you're not gonna get that chance because I'm going now.

• 22:02Yasi Salek?

  I packed up my stuff and I went. It feels like he just dropped it really quickly.

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he was really offended. He claims that Lee came to see him after and that he, quote, "later learned it was hoped he would rejoin the band." I don't really know what that means. It doesn't sound like Lee came to see him and said, "Please rejoin the band," because that is not the same as later learning that it was hoped. But again, either way, he did not rejoin the band. Badger said, "The ending of it to me now seems as inevitable as the starting. I could see that my input was diminishing and Lee was certainly more forthright and assertive than me. I didn't have the will to fight to be in my own band." That's sad. Interestingly, he said in 2014, "The first laws were me and Mike Badger. He had some ideas, but it was more poetry and I had the music to back them. He was a driven force, much like myself, and together, some magic came out of that.

• 22:52Yasi Salek?

  When Badger walked away from the band, the magic died. You're only as good as the team you play in." That was really interesting.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you have to wonder if this was a late, later in life realization? Or is this just the reaction of an older person who's now in their late 40s, early 50s?

• 23:08Yasi Salek?

  He's like 48, I think, maybe around that age.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  So who is now looking back at his youth and recognizing the mistakes that we all tend to make.

• 23:18Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  I think also when you consider these guys are in their early 20s, they're men, it's the 80s and they're English. There's not a lot of feelings being discussed.

• 23:29Yasi Salek?

  No, we're not talking about feelings.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  We're not talking about feelings here. And so the precipitation of this split sounds about right for the time, the people involved. And would make sense that if Lee Mavers might be expressing some sort of regret about how things played out? Or that he's now romanticizing the early version of the band as being the pinnacle version of the band? Even though this would not be the lineup that would make the one and only album that they made.

• 24:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Badger left. Again, we don't know the circumstances, but we do know he left. And then the first thing Lee Mavers did was drop all of his songs from the Lost setlist, except for "Calling All." They really led you on a wild goose chase in that book where they start with the Badger interview. So you're like, damn, he wrote "Calling All" and Lee Mavers kept it? What a dick. And he's like, I even called the record label to like, get my writing credit. And then you get to the end with Lee Mavers, and again, we can't know what's true. We weren't there. But this is what Lee Mavers said about "Calling All." If you look at it in terms of who's done what, the lyrics were written by me over a year earlier. The guitar parts, well, that was my riff and my chords, my melody as well.

• 24:43Yasi Salek?

  It's just that when we jammed it, Badger just phrased a couple of guitar chords differently, played them slightly differently, and that triggered me off. It was just boom. I went into a corner and changed the rhythm playing a bit, and that was the final piece of the jigsaw for me. I knew I had the whole song then. Now, on that basis, someone's gonna get writing credit? What fraction of a percentage does he think he's entitled to for that song? I'm sorry, but no.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  Speaking from experience, though, I can say that it is often surprising to me the elements of a song that sometimes bandmates in the past or bandmates today-

• 25:16Yasi Salek?

  Have been like, that was me.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  It's not so much that it was them, but they consider it writing and not arranging.

• 25:24Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  So there are oftentimes where there'll be some kind of keyboard thing, guitar thing, bass thing, drum, like whatever, that's just present in the song.

• 25:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  And I'm hearing the song, and maybe some combination of us are hearing the song as, oh, well, that's just part of the arrangement. But the person who came up with that part is like, no, no, that's like a hook of the song. If you take that away, then we don't have a song. Or somebody writes a little intro to a song. Sometimes it's an arrangement choice, not necessarily considered writing. And then sometimes somebody gets really attached to it and is like, well, no, I wrote the intro. This is an exercise in writing, not arranging. So there is kind of a permeable membrane between those two things. And you just have to learn, as I've learned over the years, to be diplomatic about it. And if you feel very strongly about it, every once in a while, I'll put my foot down. But more times than not, if somebody wants a portion of the publishing for something-

• 26:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, isn't it not because you don't get paid for arranging?

• 26:20Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, but I think that we've done a very, really good job of having these discussions. Even in every iteration of the band, we've done a really good job of having the discussion around writing versus arranging. And normally, there's some sort of majority rule, or at least a majority consensus is reached in which we're like, okay, cool, maybe that bass part does constitute a riff of sorts, and that we were gonna, we're gonna call that writing, and we'll give you, you know, whatever percentage of, of the song. So, in my band and the way we do publishing, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go to the mat for that kind of stuff.

• 26:54Yasi Salek?

  I don't think that they even had a one second to do that, as you said.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  No way they talked about it. There's no way they talked about it, no.

• 27:01Yasi Salek?

  Also, like, calling all is not there, she goes, babe, it's like, it's not like you left a million dollars on the table here.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I can see with Badger how this would be absolutely a point of principle.

• 27:12Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  Because this was a band that he started.

• 27:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  Lee Mavers joined it.

• 27:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  They went on to sign a record deal. They have at least one hit song, I think we could call it, a classic.

• 27:25Yasi Salek?

  Major hit song.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  A major hit song that has, you know, probably, as far as the publishing goes, probably has made Lee Mavers a fairly decent amount of money.

• 27:33Yasi Salek?

  I don't think Lee Mavers has ever had to work again.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think probably the royalties on that song alone have probably been enough living a relatively modest life to kind of support him. And I would imagine if you are a person who used to be in that band, and you're seeing ex-bandmate able to kind of not so much coast to the rest of their life, but not have to worry about money in the same way that maybe he does, that there could be some later animosity kind of, that would start to develop.

• 27:58Yasi Salek?

  It sounds like the, the animosity, quote unquote, I don't want to like overstate, was like very early on. It sounds like when the album came out, he kind of like, was like, excuse, but then I don't think he ever said anything about it.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  I think also too, my final point on this publishing controversy is that the era we're living in now, everybody has a fairly structured demo or something of a song because we can all record things on our phones and computers and everything pretty easily. So, there is a way to literally timestamp the existence of a song from the first time it's recorded in a, in demo form to where it ends up on an album. And you can chart how the song has changed and who's added and who's subtracted from it.

• 28:36Yasi Salek?

  Could do a song exploder.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Exactly, but in this case. These are these like shit kickers from Liverpool who are probably just playing this thing on acoustic guitar. Surely no one has it, an actual demo of this. Right? So this, this is where it gets murky and people's memory of who wrote what starts to kind of get in the way.

• 28:54Yasi Salek?

  Just reminding the psyche of Lee Mavers for, you know, a week and a half or two weeks as I have done. I'm just gonna go ahead and say my opinion is that he's not money motivated and it just feels like he wouldn't make a big deal out of it, except that he is like so precious and like feels so strongly that like this music is like so important and that you can't besmirch its name by lying about it. Like, there's a funny interview later where he like calls Noel Gallagher Noel character and kind of like goes at him for all the lost songs that he feels that he stole from. And he's like, you need to be honest.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  I think if there's one thing we can absolutely say about Lee Mavers without knowing him personally is that he is principled to a fault.

• 29:43Yasi Salek?

  Well, it depends who you ask, but definitely principled further than most people in his position.

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• 30:37Yasi Salek?

  All right, Badger out for you guys keeping score at home. Enter Paul Hemmings. I don't know what his sign is, you guys, I'm sorry. It just says he was born May 1963. Could be a Taurus, could be a Gemini. John Power brought him in, but he was actually an old friend of Badger's, to add, to pile up on the insults to poor Badger. But Hemmings was like, "The laws are good, sorry mate, I'm going to be in this band." And now, there was like a bunch of pressure on Lee to come up with songs, because there had been two songwriters, now there's only one. And he was like, "No problem, babe. How about these? Way Out, Timeless Melody, Over, Knock Me Down. And I have a little ditty, it's called There She Goes."

• 31:14Speaker 05

  Insane. Insane songs.

• 31:16Yasi Salek?

  In Melody Maker, they ask him how he writes his songs later in 1990. And he says, "The phrasing, the rhythms just come to me. And then I trace over them, like with tracing paper, the words and melody. I usually take five minutes to write a song. It just happens. It's like a medium, his mind takes over. It's when he's not there, he gets all his information, right? I'm not talking about drugs or anything, but the subconscious is always way better than the conscious. There's star material, not like pop star shit. There's a light in all of us. You've just got to levitate to the right level."

• 31:46Speaker 05

  I love that as well. He said something else that I had made a note of to that end. And he said, "A song is never written by anyone, it's just caught in the net. I don't write all these songs, I just catch them. I can't believe no one's got them before me."

• 32:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he later says something basically like, "I can't believe any of you idiots didn't find There She Goes, it was right there, this chord progression." But I love that. I don't, I believe this to be true. And this is like the thing that we always come back to on BandSplain. We're like, "Some of these songs are just sent by God, a lot of them, you know? Like, there's no explanation for why like Noel Gallagher went off for 10 minutes while everyone ate Chinese food and was like, "Here's Supersonic." That's not, you know, that's not skill. That's divine. And me and Lee Mabbers agree on this. But he goes even further. He's like, I've never written a song in my life. I don't write songs. Like, I'm a channel, basically.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  I've certainly felt that way in my life at times. But I also think, I'm more of a student of the phrase, inspiration likes to find you hard at work. So if you are writing all the time, if you are constantly searching for a song, it'll eventually find you. And it'll feel as if it's been beamed down from somewhere else. The really good ones that tend to just kind of flow almost effortlessly, they fly in the face of the other dozens of songs that I've tried to write that will never see the light of day because they're not very good. But the ones that are truly transcendent tend to feel as if they seem to be written with virtually no effort, as if you are just receiving it from somewhere.

• 33:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I really feel like there's like a collective unconscious. And I feel like in the beginning of Vans Plan, I was like really overthinking everything I was gonna say. I was really nervous and I was like, I don't wanna say stupid stuff. And then at some point, I just started trying this like one little trick, which is just saying whatever the fuck came right into my brain from god knows where. And it was way better than anything I would have like sat and like thought and tried to be clever or whatever. And like, I don't know what that is, right? I don't know if it's, like I said, the collective unconscious. I don't know if it's the divine. I don't know if those are the same thing.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  It's practice. You've been practicing this.

• 33:57Yasi Salek?

  Sure. But the practice is the flow. The practice is not being good at talking. The practice is like letting the thoughts freely come out as they come instead of trying to second guess them. That makes sense. Okay. That guy, John Timson, Timo, that I mentioned earlier was playing drums. They're playing gigs, babe, okay? Now, they catch the attention of Pete DeFradis. I liked that in that book, they just say his name and don't explain who he is. So I had to go ahead and use my Google. He was the drummer of Becca and the Bunny Men. Respectfully to Becca and the Bunny Men. I'm sorry, I didn't know the drummer's name. But he became a big fan and he helped them get some studio time, which is how they get their first real demo or their first good demo.

• 34:41Yasi Salek?

  This is a little cloudy for me, but he in some way helps them. Start to get label interest. Okay, so a lot of people start coming to Liverpool from London. They're into this band, hot new band, The Laws. And then I guess one night they were playing at that Everyman Pub and Andy McDonald was there from Go Discs. And the band signed with Go Discs. Did you know that only Lee and John signed the record deal?

• 35:05Speaker 05

  I did not know that, but that sounds about right.

• 35:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Lee was like, I made sure John was signed into the contracts. He'd been there and I knew what his motives were. It was left that Paul and Timo would be signed up properly if they showed themselves to be committed. Okay, that's a little Machiavellian.

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:23Yasi Salek?

  They didn't show themselves to be committed, so maybe it was the right, it was the right move in the end. Go Discs moves them to London to like get them to rehearse and write songs and record, I guess. And they, they do some sessions. "This Will Become Way Out," which is their first single on the B-sides. But already from the start, Mavers was like, I don't like this, this sounds bad. So they moved them to a different studio in Coventry. Hemmings was like, we went to a studio in Coventry for a while and then that was all scrapped and we went somewhere else and that was scrapped too. It just became so disillusioning when everything you did was scrapped. Often as the sessions were starting, Lee was like, this sounds great. By the end, he was saying, this sounds shit, forget it. But then he admitted that actually the band agreed with him most of the time. So maybe it did sound bad in the beginning.

• 36:08Speaker 05

  Going off of a lot of the recordings that I've heard that are different, kind of fragments of the abandoned

• 36:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 05

  debut album. There are a couple moments that, when listening to them, I'm like, that's kind of an interesting approach to that. But what's interesting about the arrangements is that the arrangements don't really change. It feels like very early on, be it, I'm assuming Lee Mavers was coaching John Power with the

• 36:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he taught them all, yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  Okay, this is how the drums go, this is how the guitar goes. Because the arrangements stay almost identical regardless of who's in the band.

• 36:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 05

  But I find, and maybe we'll get into this a little bit later, I find that the Steve Lilly White version of the album, which is "The Album."

• 36:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  And this could be the fact that I've been listening to this for 30 years.

• 36:51Yasi Salek?

  You're a Lilly White truther.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  I am. None of the other versions of the album that I've spent time with Are anywhere close to sounding as good or having the energy, I think, than than the Lily White.

• 37:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. We know that pre Lily White, they worked, I think, first with John Porter. Did you read that too? Who was the Smiths producer. Then they go from him. There's a many producers that they go through. But the next meaningful one is the guy who produced like the first few Cure albums.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  The John Leckie?

• 37:21Yasi Salek?

  No, but John Leckie is also another one.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  Mike Hedges. They worked with Mike Hedges.

• 37:24Yasi Salek?

  Mike Hedges. Okay. Mike Hedges, I can understand because you can hear all the Mike Hedges sessions. Obviously, The Cure is a totally different type of band. They are leaning sort of into the 80s style of recording and the new technology and stuff, where I can see Mike Hedges versions are kind of doing that, too. It doesn't have that like exact warmth and jangliness that Lily White ends up doing.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  My read on the Hedges sessions are that everything is seemingly like two to four BPM slower. So it just has this, it has this kind of, it has this, it has this feel of being a little bit lower energy.

• 37:59Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  And to your point, the drums sound very crispy and very modern for the time.

• 38:06Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  They end A being between the Lily White version of the record, which Steve Lily White, at this point, is coming off of a decade, you know, that was basically anchored from working with XTC and U2 on War and these just unbelievable drum sounds that that he was getting. And he was, that was kind of one of the many things he was known for, these very natural kind of roomy drum sounds. So the Lily White record has all of all of those elements in it, albeit not in the bombastic kind of style of a U2 or XTC. But the Hedges version of the album, it feels kind of 80s-ified a bit.

• 38:44Yasi Salek?

  The one song that has every producer version on here is Doldrum. Who do you want to hear first from Doldrum? Mike Hedges?

• 38:51Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 38:59Yasi Salek?

  Now, let's hear John Porter.

• 39:09Yasi Salek?

  It's the Smiths, producers. It has that jangle, like even like that, like, whatever. I don't, you guys, you know, I'm not a Guitar Center girl. Okay. I don't know what the instruments are.

• 39:18Speaker 05

  The snare in the Hedges version, the snare is, is it's the Loz featuring the snare drum.

• 39:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  In that recording.

• 39:25Yasi Salek?

  I don't mind because I love the Smiths, but okay, fine. Those are those versions. And here is the John Lucky version.

• 39:38Yasi Salek?

  All right. They record that single Way Out. They get their first big press just ahead of it in the NME. The lead quote, which they don't attribute it to a band member, so I can't tell you who it was. But it says, "We can't really play, but we're having a go. And we love music. That's why we're having a go. Our songs are just dead catchy tunes that people can whistle."

• 39:56Speaker 05

  Not wrong, not wrong.

• 39:57Yasi Salek?

  That was probably Mavers. They ask, "How would you describe your music?" This is Mavers. "Shake, rattle and roll, ah." You know what we didn't talk about, and I just want to talk about it briefly. When we talk about their influences, because they, they've said Bob Dylan, Lennon, McCartney, Chuck Berry, we talked about Beefheart, there's a bit of The Who. Skiffle music is from Liverpool.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  I was just gonna say that.

• 40:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  The entire, I was, I was reading your mind. I was like, there was, in listening to, you know, this breadth of recordings we have from this band.

• 40:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  It was very clear to me, independent of us talking about this, that Skiffle was a huge influence.

• 40:34Yasi Salek?

  You can really hear it. And like, again, if you're not familiar with Skiffle music, it's not like I was saying they're bumping that. It's jangly pub folk of the time.

• 40:52Speaker 05

  Looking at the lineup of this band versus what was going on at the time.

• 40:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 05

  They were really an outlier to have a guy who was pretty much just playing acoustic guitar the whole time.

• 41:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 41:04Speaker 05

  And a lot of these songs on the album, they are more or less stompy, clappy acoustic songs.

• 41:10Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  Just considering the landscape at that time in the UK, there didn't seem to be a lane for this.

• 41:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  And what was really eye-opening to me, doing a pass around not only the live recordings from that time, but some of these radio sessions that they were just loading into a radio station before a gig and setting up with a snare drum and John Power must be playing a bass through some little amp and the other guys, whoever the other guitar players at the time is playing an acoustic guitar. And the recordings sound fucking phenomenal.

• 41:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 05

  And they sound like, they, they sound like the record and the arrangements are so tight, everybody has a place to be in the song. It's clear that these songs were put together in a fashion that using a bevy of effects to kind of create mood or atmosphere entirely unnecessary and, and hypothetical to Lee Mavver's goal of what he was trying to accomplish. And I think that's where the skiffle comparison comes in, is that everybody has a lane, no one's sitting in front of a Vernon Reed-style pedalboard, everybody's just plugged right in and just playing. And there are so many things that are striking about these songs and so many things I, I love and I keep coming back to about them.

• 42:34Speaker 05

  And one of them is that so many of these songs are just farmer chords. They're just open chords.

• 42:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  And oftentimes...

• 42:43Speaker 05

  That is boring, when somebody's just strumming an open chord. But there's just something about how the songs are constructed.

• 42:50Yasi Salek?

  Is it like the ordering of the chords that's like unique or something?

• 42:54Speaker 05

  So the voicings can be a little interesting. I mean, they're, you know, just very small variations on these really kind of standard chords. But it's a testament to his songwriting that the melodies are so strong. He's such an amazing singer. Everybody has a lane. And because it is such a simple band, that's just a very small drum kit, bass, acoustic guitar, and somebody playing electric guitar with virtually no effects. There's a lane for somebody just strumming an acoustic guitar to fill space in the arrangement. And but when I go to play these songs, I'm just, I'm astounded at just how simple they are. And one of the magical things about Lee Mavver's songwriting is that he's using these incredibly simple chord voicings.

• 43:37Speaker 05

  And he writes something like "There She Goes," and it just feels as if this song should have existed at some point.

• 43:44Yasi Salek?

  That's what he says. He's like, "I can't believe no one came up with this. It was just sitting there."

• 43:48Speaker 05

  And it's one of those songs where if you try, I mean, I, numerous occasions in my life have tried to write something like that. And I've not gotten anywhere near a tenth of the brilliance of that song. It's one of those songs where when somebody says, "That song is just so simple." You know, the lyric is so simple, it's not that complicated.

• 44:07Yasi Salek?

  I go, "You go write one then."

• 44:08Speaker 05

  Try to write it. And it's impossible. It's impossible. And to this day, I'm, I'm still amazed that the song does not get, I don't get tired of this song.

• 44:20Yasi Salek?

  Me neither. Honestly, I listened to it 600 times during this week, and I was like, "Damn, hits every time, man."

• 44:25Speaker 05

  And right when I think I've mined everything about the song that I love, that I've kind of, you know, looked under every rock of the song, I find something new in it. And that just seems that you shouldn't be able to do that with a song that's simple. But I find myself doing it with that song, you know, arguably more than any other song, and that's why it's my favorite song.

• 44:42Yasi Salek?

  Of all time?

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Of all time.

• 44:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you're quoted in the Wikipedia.

• 44:45Speaker 05

  Yes, I'm in the Wikipedia.

• 44:47Yasi Salek?

  You and Noel Gallagher, favorite song.

• 44:57Yasi Salek?

  Nobody cared, though, about this single, I have to tell you. I'm so sorry. Way Out, hit number 86 in the UK singles chart.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  An odd choice for a single.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  On the single is a song called Knock Me Down.

• 45:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  Which should have been the single.

• 45:24Yasi Salek?

  A classic switcheroo.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  And Way Out is a waltz. It's a 3-4 song. It's lovely. I love it. But it's an incredibly odd choice as the first look.

• 45:37Yasi Salek?

  To introduce yourself to the world. This was produced by Gavin Michelop.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  I do like that recording. It's a little bit slower. It's a little bit kind of more lo-fi than the Lily White version that ends on the record. But it's serviceable.

• 45:50Yasi Salek?

  I just think Way Out's not a, like, it's like a B-tier loss song.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  It's not one that I reach for.

• 45:58Yasi Salek?

  Well, guess what? Paul Hemmings is fucking over it, bitch. It's December. He said, "I just got to the point where I was sick of it and getting really fed up with it and really burnt out. I'm sure that Lee felt the same way about me. I just wasn't bothered. I kept thinking, how long can you keep doing this for? And also, I eventually saw the record deal." He doesn't say that he saw that he wasn't on it, but maybe that's part of it. "We were given so many thousand pounds, and if you're a young band, the first thing you do is go out and buy loads of equipment. In three months, the money was gone. And then after a great gig at the Marquee in London, we had loads of equipment stolen because nobody could be bothered to unpack the van, and it was left overnight, and it all got nicked." You guys, this is a crazy story, I must tell you, that I was once a tour manager one time in my life.

• 46:40Yasi Salek?

  Because that's the only amount of times you should ever be a tour manager unless it's your calling from God, and it was not mine. The last show of a six-week tour. In a band that I'm, I have to stress, we slept in one motel room per night, six people. It was that kind of like punk-ass tour. I got so drunk at this, like, I think it was a beauty bar in Las Vegas or something. And we were staying at a hotel that was like right across the street. Absolutely left the fucking van with all of the gear and all of the money in it parked in the alley behind the fucking beauty bar.

• 47:14Speaker 05

  And did it get stolen?

• 47:15Yasi Salek?

  No, I woke up at like 4:00 in the morning, like, "Oh!" And ran over, got it, drove it over to the parking of the hotel. And you know what? I was blessed with that. I will not be hired anytime in the future to be anyone's store manager. And that's the way we should. I like it and everyone else should like it. I'm not good at it. Okay. All this to say, Hemmings is like, bye. Lee said, people think that I'm some great dictator or something, but I'm not, not at all. All I want is to find people who believe the way I do, feel the way I do. All for one and one for all. Instead, it's been all for one and none for all. I don't want to be the first fiddle. I'd rather be four fiddles in a row. It's like a ship at sea. Everyone is vital. Engine stoker and officer. You can't have one without the other.

• 48:00Yasi Salek?

  But all I know how to do is navigate. It's all I've ever known. I can see form. That's all it is. Music is all I've ever wanted. A lot of sentiments packed into that statement.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  I know people who feel that way. But at the end of the day, they still want to be in charge.

• 48:16Yasi Salek?

  Well, he said he only knows how to navigate. So it's a ship and we're all important, but I'm driving it. Fair enough, man. Someone's got to drive.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  Somebody's got to be in charge.

• 48:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. All right. It's 88. Hemmings is out, if you're keeping track at home. The laws are in London. He's briefly replaced by Peter Camel, but he doesn't last very long. In June, he leaves. And then he's replaced by John Byrne, AKA Boo. That's Mavers's childhood friend. Boo was his nickname as a child. He is the one that plays that opening guitar on There She Goes, the version that we know. I thought it was interesting that this guy Boo said that Mavers really wanted that opening guitar to be four bars? And Boo was like, no, people like need to get into the song. We need to do two. And Lee listened. Do you think that was a good choice?

• 49:08Speaker 05

  I think the longer intro is clutch.

• 49:11Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you prefer it?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  I love the longer intro. Yeah. Because my understanding is that Lily White did not record There She Goes. He mixed it though. So in his mix, the guitar is a little bit.

• 49:23Speaker 05

  Seasick at first, it feels a little bit kind of, it's not very present. And then through whatever studio trickery, it starts to kind of take a little more focus. After the first four bars where it's just the guitar, the little bit of percussion comes in. The song starts to kind of, it starts to cook a bit.

• 49:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 05

  And then comes in with a bop, bop, bop, doo.

• 49:42Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  And we're in the song.

• 49:43Yasi Salek?

  You like the bop.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  And I think, I love it. I think, I think it's, I think having a longer intro. And again, this might just be the bias of listening to the longer intro my entire life, but I do believe that it is, it sets up the song better.

• 49:56Yasi Salek?

  Basically Boo said there was six or seven finished versions of There She Goes from this session. Because Mavers wasn't happy. He wanted to try every type of guitar they had. Byrne slash Boo actually left the band before the single even came out, the There She Goes single. Cause he had gotten really into classical music. He was a really apparently talented musician. And he found playing pop music boring now. Literally, he went to college to study classical music playing and he is replaced by Barry Seddon. So, but he did, he gave us a great gift, the guitar intro of There She Goes. Was this the first lost song you ever heard?

• 50:34Speaker 05

  It was.

• 50:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 05

  And I believe I heard it on 120 Minutes. I'm 14, 15 years old when I first heard the song. And on MTV in the eighties and in the nineties, there was an alternative video show called 120 Minutes. That ran from 12 midnight to 2 a.m. on Sundays. And so I would tape that and then watch it the next day.

• 51:00Yasi Salek?

  Cause you were too sleepy.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  Well, I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't allowed to be up at midnight watching TV. I was 14 after all. And then there was this odd thing that MTV was doing for a while where they in 91, you know, pre Nirvana, pre kind of alternative explosion. Where they cut the hour into four segments and they had, they programmed it by genre.

• 51:23Yasi Salek?

  I don't really remember that.

• 51:24Speaker 05

  I don't know how long they did this for, but I have a, I have a recollection of this where the alternative period of the day would be from 45 on the hour to top of the hour. And that video was in constant rotation in summer of 91. So I saw it all the time. It wasn't like anything else that I was hearing at that point in my life that wasn't. Directly out of my dad's record collection. And I think that was one of the many reasons that I gravitated towards this record so much is that it connected a through line from 60s British pop music to something that was contemporary.

• 52:02Yasi Salek?

  Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's interesting because, as you obviously know, "There She Goes" was released twice as a single. The first time, which is not when it was on 120 Minutes, was 1988. The production credit on this is Bob Andrews. There's just so many producers.

• 52:20Speaker 05

  Yes, and the Bob Andrews version was remixed by Lily White for the album.

• 52:24Yasi Salek?

  Right, got it. Which is the single that comes out, which made the video that you saw. So, this insanely does not also hit for some reason. I think it was just too early, like 88 is a little early for this song to hit. But, so it hits 59 on the singles chart, right around when like Stone Roses "Elephant Stone" came out. It's a really interesting time because I think you could make the argument that this is the first Britpop song.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  You could make that argument, yeah.

• 52:53Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, let's talk about writing "There She Goes." They asked him in that 2014 interview, "Okay, well, how did, you know, what happened?" And he said, "Half the time, the words write themselves, just like the melodies do. You see them. Like, when I came across 'There She Goes,' it's such a musical equation, I wonder how any other idiot never spotted it." He was like, "Ben Gibbard, you idiot, how did you never see 'There She Goes'?" Then the guy was like, "Do you write melodies to communicate a feeling within yourself?" And he said, "No, it's communicated through me, and it comes out in music. I think if it's turning me on, it must be turning someone else on. I'm not trying to make a living out of it, although I have. I didn't condone that record," he's talking about the lost record, "that went out, "but it's bought me a house and allowed me to bring up my family."

• 53:35Yasi Salek?

  The heroin thing was sort of propelled. In 95, The Guardian asked John Power if that was referring to heroin, and he said, "I don't know. Truth is, I don't want to know. Drugs and madness go hand in hand. People who you've known all your life, they're steady, then they're not, but you can't ponder because it kills you, love." So you really didn't exactly dispute it. Later it came out that Lee Mavris had done heroin, but it was like two years after this song was written. So it wasn't, it couldn't have been about that. Or maybe it was imagining it was about that. I don't know. He never talks about what the songs are about, so we can't know.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I remember an age with less information.

• 54:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Growing up in the 90s where the mythology and hearsay was kind of all you had to go off of. I seem to recall hearing that one of the reasons they had not made a follow-up album, not knowing any of the things we know now, of course.

• 54:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  Was because Lee Mavris had become a heroin addict, which I am not trying to put that rumor out there. I think that it's been more or less dispelled. Unless you have information to the contrary.

• 54:45Yasi Salek?

  I have some information, not, it's interesting, not specifically that it's heroin, but there is, there is a quote, and we'll get to it, from one of the 38 people who have spent time in the laws, who's basically talks, this is like 95 era. So when you would have been like, why is there no album? And he kind of is like, it was a real druggie time, which is probably what John Power was talking about also in 95, but not, not that it predated this song.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  He could also be just locked in his practice space, smoking weed all day.

• 55:15Yasi Salek?

  This guy kind of says they were all on like a lot of drugs, and I don't think it's talking about weed. But again, I don't want to, I'll just read the quote and you guys decide for yourself. That being said, Liverpool, I think, was a pretty heavy heroin area, like in the 80s. So even if he wasn't doing it, it's totally possible that he was observing it.

• 55:32Speaker 05

  It's port city.

• 55:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you know, so it doesn't matter what it's about to him. It matters what it's about to us. For me, it's the, um, not that you ask, but my experience with this song is actually through the 1993 film, So I Married an Axe Murderer. That's how I first heard this song. They have both versions in that song because they have the real version and then they contracted the Boo Radleys to do the cover.

• 55:56Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 55:56Yasi Salek?

  One of the many covers. Fantastic film, top five film, you guys should all see it. And- This movie really kills in those scenarios in film and TV. It's also, opens, very near and dear to my heart, the very first episode of Gilmore Girls.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  Does it really?

• 56:13Yasi Salek?

  Yes. October of 2000. That's right. Liam Mavers cashing those checks. They do a little tour, babe, to promote the single. They have Cami and Neil Mavers, Lee's little brother, as their roadies on this little tour. So they're kind of around the band. They go to the Pink Museum studio to record. Pink Museum studio is probably most famous as the place where Supersonic was recorded. Anyways, they're put in there two to three months. At this point, Go Discs is still generally supportive. They've not, uh, turned their, uh, back to...

• 56:50Speaker 05

  They've not turned off the spigot in which pound notes fall out of it.

• 56:53Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's very interesting because I read also that Lee had written into his contract they had creative control. I don't know if that's true or not, but maybe that's why they kind of let him do this for so long? Because maybe it was contractual, you know? The band did not like the sound at Pink Museum studio. Now, Andy McDonald and Go Discs are a wee bit upset. They're like, okay, it's time for a Hail Mary. You guys, I got you an original recording desk from Abbey Road. You like the Beatles? What do you think? And they're like, okay. And they take this original recording desk from Abbey Road to Andy McDonald's parents' house in Devon. This is where Mike Hedges comes in. According to Barry Sutton, who is in the band,

• 57:38Yasi Salek?

  he's the guitar player, "These were great sessions, smooth, amazing. They get beautiful version of Timeless Melody. It's set to be a single. Everything is fucking going great. The label sends promo copies of Timeless Melody from this session to the Music Weeklys. It is awarded single of the week by Melody Maker. But in the 11th hour, it does not go to production." Because Mavers is like, no, it's bad. It is written here, I'll read you the write-up from Melody Maker of the white label that never got published. "Timeless melody with its battered acoustic guitars and seamless harmonies confirms that There She Goes was no one-off. It boasts a supremely tight production and implores the listener to open your mind. Hailing pop's magical uplifting qualities, it virtually celebrates its own existence.

• 58:23Yasi Salek?

  Setting standards for the 90s, they may be, but isn't the title a little presumptuous?" And John Powers said, "But we know it's timeless. We wouldn't have called it that otherwise."

• 58:33Speaker 05

  He was right.

• 58:43Yasi Salek?

  You think it's timeless. You famously have covered this song with Pearl Jam.

• 58:47Speaker 05

  I have.

• 58:48Yasi Salek?

  My most listened to artist of 2024.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  It was a shock to find out that they had been covering that for a while.

• 59:05Yasi Salek?

  Before you. You were like, "This is my band."

• 59:07Speaker 05

  We were on tour then in 2004, and that was one of the songs that they pull out from time to time. It's kind of like a fan favorite. And I don't think I got an answer as to like how this song hoved into their field of vision.

• 59:20Yasi Salek?

  It does feel like Eddie Vedder was kind of like a real student of music, so.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  I mean, it wouldn't be difficult to know this song. This isn't some super obscure song.

• 59:30Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 59:30Speaker 05

  And I don't mean to sell the Pearl Jam guys short as far as their musical knowledge. They're very knowledgeable dudes. They're awesome guys. But it is also just not a song that you would, until that point where I knew they were playing it, I would have assumed that they would know and/or even like.

• 59:47Yasi Salek?

  I'm actually surprised it's not more famous because in my opinion, it's like just 10% less iconic than There She Goes. Like, it's so good.

• 59:54Speaker 05

  It's incredible. It's an unbelievable song.

• 59:57Yasi Salek?

  Here's a little tea and goss. Mavver says that maybe... Kind of insinuates in the book that maybe he shut this shit down because Chris Sherrick, who's playing drums in the band now, and John Power, they're in the midst of recording and they go on holiday. And Lee said, "I bumped into a mate of John's and he said that John and Chris had just gone off on holiday, paid for by the record company, and I just got really unhappy because I felt I was the only one really trying with the music. So when I went for the playback while they were away, I listened to it and it sounded crap. So I said, no."

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  I came across this anecdote as well.

• 1:00:35Yasi Salek?

  It's a little cunty. A little bitchy little moment.

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  I was on a major label for 20 years. I never took a vacation on the record company's dime, and I don't think anybody else ever did either. That's a really, I don't believe that story for one second. What record label is doling out money to the members of the band to go on a vacation?

• 1:00:59Yasi Salek?

  Well, I believe that he thought it.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  Yes, he thought it, but I don't think this is, what I'm saying is there's no way this is a true story.

• 1:01:05Yasi Salek?

  I think they probably were like, "We're tired. We're gonna go to fucking, you know, Abitha." Sure, Abitha, yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's where they all go.

• 1:01:12Yasi Salek?

  Do some ecstasy and listen to the Happy Mondays. And Lee was like, "No." And he was like, "I'm burning it to the fucking ground."

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  I mean, that's insane, right?

• 1:01:24Yasi Salek?

  He said, "I felt like, you know, I had to take control. I had to assert myself." You know how artists are.

• 1:01:30Speaker 05

  That is a choice. That is a choice.

• 1:01:33Yasi Salek?

  This was, in fact, the final straw for GoDisc. We're like, "Okay, no more money then. Sorry, Heart." And Chris Sherrick, who had a family, was like, "Okay, well, I have to, there's, I need the money because I have a family." John Power stayed. He's a real one, TBH. Around this time also Barry Sutton starts to feel a little pushed out. He said, "I'd started to get some stick about my playing after being in the band a couple of months. It just became harder and harder, especially when session after session was scrapped. Lee's very intense about music and things started to get strained between us. If I hadn't have been pushed, there's no way I would have left. No way, because I loved the music so much. But after I was out, it was a relief because the pressure was off. Just knowing Lee is a lesson in integrity and I'm trying to continue in the same way."

• 1:02:18Yasi Salek?

  It's a nice way for him to look back at it. I don't really understand why, at this point, why wouldn't Lee Mavers just play all the parts himself?

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  Well, I think it comes back to that quote that you referenced earlier, which is-

• 1:02:31Yasi Salek?

  All for one and one for all.

• 1:02:32Speaker 05

  He wants to be in a band. I have a dear friend of mine, who of course remain nameless, also very much wants to be in a band.

• 1:02:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  And he isn't. He is in one of these bands that has had like, again, 37 members and him.

• 1:02:46Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  Right? And he will kind of get this group of people together in an iteration of the band, and I will talk to him and ask him, "How's it going?" And he'll say, "Oh, it's the best. I'm finally in a band. We're finally doing it. You know, love touring, we play great together. I can't wait to make a record with these guys. It's gonna be awesome." Then they go into the studio to make the record, and then he is kind of like, "Ah, but is that how you're playing the guitar part?" And then the guitar player will leave, and maybe he'll kind of slink over to the guitar-

• 1:03:15Yasi Salek?

  Billy Corgan.

• 1:03:16Speaker 05

  Do it. It's Billy Corgan, yeah. And he wants his cake, and he wants to eat it too. He wants to have the all-for-one, one-for-all kind of mentality of a band.

• 1:03:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  But he cannot shake his need to be in full control of things all the time. So I think, knowing a person like this, I'm going to assume that Lee Mavers is similar in the sense that he wants to be in a band, but at the end of the day, he has a very specific sound he's hearing in his head. And while he might think he's hearing it at first with this group of people, very soon afterwards, he starts to see the chinks in the armor, and people start getting pushed out, and like, people get brought in.

• 1:03:59Yasi Salek?

  Okay, November, enemy interview. They call them the New Beatles. They're lovely. Things are going great.

• 1:04:05Speaker 05

  Which is, you know, which is not, in no way a high bar to meet, at all.

• 1:04:09Yasi Salek?

  You think in 1988, it's, there are a lot of bands being called the New Beatles?

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  I don't know, but I think being from Liverpool is the obvious-

• 1:04:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Speaker 05

  Uh, is the obvious connection, and-

• 1:04:22Yasi Salek?

  They don't, honestly don't talk much about the Beatles. Like, Oasis talk 10 million times more about the Beatles than The Laws ever did. Like, they think they've mentioned the Beatles like, two times. Like, they're not sort of like, worshiping at the altar of the Beatles.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  There is very little in The Laws that reminds me of the Beatles.

• 1:04:40Yasi Salek?

  For me, it's just that it sounds old-timey.

• 1:04:43Speaker 05

  Right, but kind of back to an earlier point you were making about this skiffle influence.

• 1:04:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  It feels, I'm not saying there's nothing similar about the two, but not so much that I would ever think that Lee Mavers was.

• 1:04:57Yasi Salek?

  Obsessed with the Beatles. Obsessed with Beatles, yeah. Yeah, I don't think he was either. Here's what Lee Mavers said. "It all comes back to God for me, whatever it is. Not this fellow in the sky. Nature, change, whatever. For the first time in ages, I lay in bed and contemplated life. I couldn't help it. It was four o'clock and all that, and I was scared. Modern studios and us just don't mix. They put a noise reduction on it. It takes away the hiss, but it takes away the vibe too, and all you're left with is bare bones." He doesn't like the noise reduction.

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  Apparently not.

• 1:05:27Yasi Salek?

  He later also said something that the Abbey Road desk didn't have dust on it.

• 1:05:31Speaker 05

  The quote that I picked up in that book, which I found hilarious.

• 1:05:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  Was something that John Powers said about.

• 1:05:38Yasi Salek?

  About Lee.

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  Lee Mavers, in that at some, the story goes that they were in the studio working on some recording, God knows which one it was, and that someone in the studio, and maybe even John Powers himself, had gone to brush some dust off of an acoustic guitar.

• 1:05:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:54Speaker 05

  And Lee Mavers got on this person and said, "What do you think you're doing? Don't dust the guitar. It'll sound different."

• 1:06:03Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  It sounds better with dust on it.

• 1:06:04Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  Which, I think it is figuratively true.

• 1:06:09Yasi Salek?

  Like metaphorically.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  Metaphorically true. It is metaphorically true in the sense that one could say that a guitar, if I said a guitar sounds better with dust on it, what I'm saying is, an older guitar that has lived in the world a long time, for many.

• 1:06:25Yasi Salek?

  It's had a life.

• 1:06:25Speaker 05

  Structural reasons, adhesives that are now illegal.

• 1:06:30Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:06:31Speaker 05

  To make guitars out of, and so on and so forth, will make this, you know, 1920's Martin, sound better than a guitar you bought in the store.

• 1:06:41Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  Or perceptibly better than the guitar that you bought in the store yesterday, brand new. But literally, there is no truth to this.

• 1:06:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  The amount of dust on a guitar is not affecting the sound of the guitar. These are these anecdotes that I love about Lee Mavers, is you're not quite sure if he's... Being a philosopher or a crazy person?

• 1:07:03Yasi Salek?

  I just don't think there's any such thing as objective reality. And I feel like his reality is different than than everyone else's.

• 1:07:10Speaker 05

  That very well may be. But I love that quote because it was just like, you could see someone who was who did not have a similar philosophical sophistication, hearing somebody say that.

• 1:07:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Speaker 05

  And being like, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:07:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but you couldn't do that with Liam Mavers, who runs the band.

• 1:07:27Speaker 05

  No, you'd have to just kind of go along with it.

• 1:07:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  And be, I'm sorry for dusting that guitar. Yeah.

• 1:07:31Yasi Salek?

  Sweeping the dust back on the.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

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• 1:08:23Yasi Salek?

  Now, things kind of fall off, right? Because they don't have any more money from the label. People have left. It's really just John Power and Liam Mavers at this point. In some point in 89, Lee alone starts jamming with Cami and Neil. Cami, Peter Camel, who was the roadie at this point, who had briefly been in the Laws before, and his brother Neil. And Neil plays drums, Cami plays guitar. And he's like, why don't you be in the band? So now the band is, and this is sort of like the iconic lineup, right, of the Laws?

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  This is the lineup that you see in the videos and on TV and stuff like that.

• 1:09:00Yasi Salek?

  Which is.

• 1:09:00Speaker 05

  From when the album is out.

• 1:09:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Yasi Salek?

  Liam Mavers, Peter Camel, Neil Mavers, John Power.

• 1:09:06Speaker 05

  Neil Mavvers, one of my favorite drummers. An unbelievable drummer. He's using this kind of Keith Moon animal style.

• 1:09:16Yasi Salek?

  Animal like from The Muppets?

• 1:09:18Speaker 05

  The Muppets, yeah, just kind of, just kind of like, yeah, I'm referencing animal.

• 1:09:20Yasi Salek?

  I just wanted to make sure I was understanding properly.

• 1:09:22Speaker 05

  He, he's able to get to all these kind of percussive elements that are kind of attached to the drum kit in a way that would be not, not impossible or even difficult to do with a more traditional style. But it just looks fucking cool.

• 1:09:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 05

  He looks so fucking cool playing the drums and he just has great time. He, you know, has this kind of cool mod haircut.

• 1:09:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, we haven't even mentioned. The laws also look really cool. I mean.

• 1:09:44Speaker 05

  They look so cool, yeah.

• 1:09:46Yasi Salek?

  John Power has the curly mop. Lee Mavvers looked really cool. He was like kind of the, the, one of, you know, the mod, messy kind of haircut that you'll later see on The Oasis Brothers.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  Super handsome.

• 1:09:56Yasi Salek?

  Very handsome, beautiful eyes. They're wearing kind of baggy clothes and at some point, I don't know if I wrote it down, but Lee Mavvers has a dig at the Stone Roses because they keep getting compared and he's like, hmm, we were already dressed like this when they were wearing like leather pants and eyeliner. Which they did wear leather pants and eyeliner. Also, this is a totally aside, just small tidbit, but you know, I live for the tidbits. Barry Sutton, who we talked about, who was in the band and left. He actually joins a band called Smaller, who is the band of Diggsy. Peter Diggsy Drew, who is immortalized in Diggsy's Dinner, the Oasis song. Because he is the cousin of those brothers from The Real People who ran that studio. Liverpool is small. They get a big write-up in The Face Magazine, January 1989.

• 1:10:40Yasi Salek?

  I bring up all the press, A, because there's great quotes in it, but B, to show that they're like a known quantity.

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  It is happening now.

• 1:10:46Yasi Salek?

  It is happening.

• 1:10:47Speaker 05

  It is happening for them, yeah.

• 1:10:48Yasi Salek?

  As much as Lee Mavvers is like trying to sabotage, tying himself to the train tracks, like putting dynamite in places, like people are still catching on and loving it. They ask him about the jangling guitar sound of There She Goes and he says, can't you hear the church bells? That's what that sound means to me. I grew up listening to that sound and it fascinates me and it never fails to move me. It has fuck all to do with the birds or any of this indie shit. Lee Mavvers is based, babe. This is what I'm getting at. This is a spiritual man.

• 1:11:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:11:19Yasi Salek?

  I love that quote. Can't you hear the church bells? So they do this show at the London Town and Country Club and it's taped and part of it is later put on TV. And it's kind of what you were maybe saying earlier about the studio stuff. It's wild to me because obviously I watch a lot of videos of live bands. They never sound exactly the way that they sound on the record. This, "There She Goes," sounds exactly how it sounds on the record.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  Every recording of Lee Mavris singing sounds album quality. I don't know if this guy has perfect pitch. I don't know what it is, but you also have to understand that this is not a situation like we have now where

• 1:12:03Yasi Salek?

  These in-ear monitors.

• 1:12:04Speaker 05

  In-ear monitors where you can have it sound like the album. He's sitting in front of

• 1:12:09Yasi Salek?

  He's onstage.

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  Blown-out wedges in a club. And every live recording I have heard of this band, he sounds amazing. And one of the many reasons he's one of my favorite singers of all time is that not only is his consistency, with his pitch, but also his cadence and the way he kind of sits just a little bit behind the beat is something that I've been trying to do myself as long as I've been a singer. But he just has this natural, his time, his cadence and his time, his natural cadence and time is just remarkable. And it's nuancey, needly shit that maybe only people that do what I do care about or can kind of pick out in here.

• 1:12:54Speaker 05

  But people who play that many shows don't sound that good, that consistently.

• 1:13:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  And every one of those live recordings, be it in a radio station with some acoustic guitars, or I sent you one of those, I think, from this 103 performance, that they just loaded some stuff into the radio station before they got to go to a real gig. They sound amazing. Or this live show that we've both seen, where it's like a half-hour live show or whatever, and everything just sounds perfect. It's truly astounding to hear a band sound so much like they do on a record. That's not normal.

• 1:13:41Yasi Salek?

  He also just has such a unique voice. I mean, I'm a layperson, so I can't pick out what you're saying, but he has this raspiness to his voice that's so unique and that slight trace of the Scouse accent, which even in singing you can kind of hear, like it's like a pronunciation thing, just makes it really enjoyable to listen to him singing.

• 1:14:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, and he doesn't, he doesn't have a lot of flair on the notes. There's no acrobatics, there's very little vibrato if any, but to your point, he does have this little raspiness on the end of the notes. Like if you listen to the album version of Doldrum and he's like, "Oh no, don't go down to Doldrum."

• 1:14:18Yasi Salek?

  It reminds me a little of Liam Gallagher.

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Yasi Salek?

  Like a lot of people say Liam Gallagher sings like Ian Brown, but like Ian Brown, respectfully, like really was not a good singer at all. Liam Gallagher is kind of a good singer in his own.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  Great singer.

• 1:14:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like one of the great rock singers of all time.

• 1:14:33Speaker 05

  100%.

• 1:14:33Yasi Salek?

  And he has that sort of uniqueness and raspiness that I also associate with Liam Mavers, and I thought, and they were big in, I mean, I don't know about Liam, but definitely Noel was a huge The Lawz fan.

• 1:14:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've never put that together, but they do sound oddly similar.

• 1:14:46Yasi Salek?

  There's an attitudinal thing to it, I think.

• 1:14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:14:48Yasi Salek?

  It's December of 1989. We haven't made the album yet, I just want to point out, but we're about to. This new lineup, for once again, Liam Mavers, John Power, Peter Camel, Neil Mavers. They go into Eden Studios with Stephen Lillywhite, who as you pointed out, produced XTC and U2.

• 1:15:07Speaker 05

  The Pogues.

• 1:15:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he's a big-

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  He's been on a heater for the entire decade.

• 1:15:10Yasi Salek?

  He's, he's kind of one of the biggest producers of our lifetime, I feel like.

• 1:15:14Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  Genius.

• 1:15:16Yasi Salek?

  For me, obviously, meaningful for the David Matthews of it all, the Lillywhite sessions, famously also scrapped. But they do three months here at Eden Studios and that yields what eventually becomes The Lawz album. Neil Mavers said, "I think, no, I'm sure, that was the only recording session we ever did," because we'd spent a long time rehearsing the sound, getting it right, and then it was like all of a sudden we had to go do the record. And it was made clear this was going to be the last chance for the band. Whatever happened, this was going to be the album, so it better be good. Now, after three months, they're like, nope. This sucks. They did, from what I can understand, I don't know about all of them, but Lee Mavers and Steve Lillywhite did not get along. Lee said, did you read this, where one of the last straws was that he found a dossier that the GoDys had made?

• 1:15:59Yasi Salek?

  It's like a, GoDys had made a dossier of like, how to deal with Lee Mavers for producers. Like, he's gonna ask for this, say no to this, try to not give, like, and he like, lost it. And he was like, I'm out.

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  I'm not aware of that ever having been done. I'm sure it has.

• 1:16:14Yasi Salek?

  Who has this, you guys? Where is it? Find it for us.

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  Maybe somebody made one on me.

• 1:16:19Yasi Salek?

  How to deal with Ben Gibbard. How to deal with, oh my god, what was your, Dunston?

• 1:16:24Speaker 05

  Dorton.

• 1:16:24Yasi Salek?

  Dorton.

• 1:16:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Yasi Salek?

  It's actually just, it's just actually called How to Deal with Dorton, so that you don't know it's about you. Yeah. They, your publicist passes it around before you go on to interviews, that's the version of it. So they leave, three months, they record what they're gonna record, and they're like, we're done, fuck you. And the record label's like, I don't care, this is an album, so. They, Lillywhite basically mixes it, right? Without any of their input. Andy McDonald says that he did invite Lee to come be part of the Mexican editing process, and Lee basically was like, you can't polish a turd. So I'm not doing that. I know, psychotic. It sounds amazing.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  It's incredible.

• 1:17:00Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure Lillywhite had a lot to do with the ultimate sound, like we've talked about, like, he has to get some credit, you know?

• 1:17:08Speaker 05

  I mean, I am a massive Steve Lillywhite fan.

• 1:17:12Yasi Salek?

  I can see that.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  I love him. I would love to work with him someday. He is unbelievable.

• 1:17:17Yasi Salek?

  Lillywhite, if you're, I know you're listening. I know you're a big fan of Stan.

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  I was just listening to War yesterday. U2's War, which is my favorite U2 record. And just, you know, the drum sounds blow my mind. He is one of the greatest producers of all time. So I, I'm coming into this with an unbelievable bias for Steve Lillywhite. But only Lee Mavers knows why he hates this record. And I have a lot of theories on it, all of which are probably wrong. But. Oftentimes, when someone I know who's made an album is complaining about the record, there's something that at least other musicians can hear is wrong with a record. Very rarely is it something so esoteric and so cosmic

• 1:17:59Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  that is making it sound bad. Because this record was recorded on tape. It's not as if this record was

• 1:18:06Yasi Salek?

  Digital.

• 1:18:07Speaker 05

  recorded in 2011 and the vocals were tuned and the drums were lined up and everything was... This was, this is the sound of these guys. We know from all these live recordings that this is what these guys sound like. And I think, I wonder at times if this is the album version of taping yourself talking and then asking like, "Is that what I sound like? Is that what my voice sounds like?"

• 1:18:31Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  Because when we were making our third record, the photo album, we, we were, we did a lot of touring on We Have The Facts and then an EP called The Forbidden Love that came out six months later. We did a lot of touring at that point. And we started playing some songs that would be on the photo album live, like three or four of these songs. We were there in the set every night. And what happened was each one of us started to develop an idea of what this song was, these songs were going to sound like when they were recorded. Because we were playing them in clubs and we're hearing, you know, the sound of the guitars and the drums, everything bouncing off the walls. And you have, you have a great show and, you know, the version of that song just feels like an effortless, beautiful, perfect version of the song.

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  And then after all of that touring, playing these songs hundreds of times, we go into the studio and we have a month to make this album. And I found myself really, at the time, really disappointed with how those songs, some of those songs ended up turning out on the record.

• 1:19:31Yasi Salek?

  It didn't sound the way it sounded in your head.

• 1:19:33Speaker 05

  They didn't sound the way they did up here. They didn't sound like they did in my head. At the time, I was, what, 24? I didn't really have the experience nor the...

• 1:19:44Speaker 05

  Articulation to express why I felt that way. I just had developed an idea of how I thought these songs should sound. I didn't have the ability to make them sound that way. I didn't have the language to explain to Chris Waller, who was producing the record, what I wanted them to sound like. And then also, Chris had a vision for these songs. He knew how he wanted them to sound. He was producing the record. And we came to loggerheads a couple of times about how some of these songs were being, were ending up on the record. And in preparation for this podcast, I was remembering that feeling and wondering if Lee Mavris was having a similar experience in that there's a famous Bob Dylan quote where he says, you know, "The best versions of my songs were never recorded."

• 1:20:27Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:20:28Speaker 05

  It was just one night in Philly or whatever that I played Like a Rolling Stone and it was the best version ever and we'll never know what that was. And I think that when you play these songs ad nauseam and you're tweaking them and you're rehearsing them and you're touring them, eventually it becomes almost impossible to actually capture these songs in a fashion that will represent how they sound in your head and how they've, you've started to feel how they should sound. And I have to think that is because these songs sat around for so fucking long before they were recorded, years they were playing these songs. I have to think that by the time they were, there was a definitive version of these songs,

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

  there was nothing that Steve Lillywhite or any other producer could have done that would have fulfilled the sound that Lee Mavris was hearing in his head about how these songs should be presented.

• 1:21:20Yasi Salek?

  No, I mean, Lee Mavris hates every recorded version before that. Like, I think it's almost like, like, like galaxy brain above that where it's like, if you believe that the music that you are making is channeled from God and that's what it sounds like to you, how can you ever capture that sound, right? Like, if that's really the experience that he's having, how can you, on an earthly plane, capture what is a celestial sound?

• 1:21:53Speaker 05

  That is a very sympathetic way of saying, making another point which I felt about these recordings, which is there are some times I've experienced a difficulty in letting go. And as soon as I release it into the world, it is available for judgment.

• 1:22:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Speaker 05

  And I've heard a lot of people, creative people in many different disciplines, say, oh, God, I just finished this book. And now it's out in the world and I put all this time into it. Now people are just going to read it and judge it. It's like, welcome to every day of my life. But that's part of the fearlessness you have to have as an artist. And the longer you hold on to songs, the longer you hold on to this record and it's not right yet. It can't come out. I haven't, we haven't got the drum sound right. It starts to read as fear for me. And I know that because I felt that myself. And I have to think another kind of part of this mosaic of Lee Mavvers as a human being, of which we are only speculating, to be very clear, is that there is a, I'm sure there is a cosmic part of this,

• 1:22:49Speaker 05

  as you were kind of alluding to, but I think there's also a fear of how the final version of this will be perceived when it's in the world.

• 1:22:57Yasi Salek?

  I don't think he cares.

• 1:22:59Speaker 05

  I think he cares too much.

• 1:23:00Yasi Salek?

  No, but I'll, here, I'll make my claim because this album comes out, we should talk about the album first, but just to get ahead for one second, it is really well reviewed. So fear or not fear, that fear would have been unfounded because people loved this and he still hates it. And he has journalists and critics and musicians telling him to his face, this is the best album I've ever heard. And he's like, no, it's not your stupid.

• 1:23:21Speaker 05

  But fear is not rational.

• 1:23:23Yasi Salek?

  Sure, but, but what I'm saying is like, he's not afraid of that outcome because that outcome doesn't matter. Like, he seems to be held to a standard that's only his own. You know what I mean? Does that make sense? Like, he just really seems unbothered by the perception of others. Like, he, he seems, and this is again, we're both speculating, so we're not going to say who's right or wrong because this is just, we're interpreting someone else's feelings that we can never do. But like, it seems that he is trying to honor this thing so much that he feels he's letting that down. I must honor this holy thing that I've channeled and I'm not honoring it because it's not right.

• 1:23:59Speaker 05

  Well, and then, I'm sorry, I didn't jump in, but in, you know, in regards to a clip that you sent me a couple of days ago, in the interview with Steve Lillywhite about making this record, he mentioned on NPR that at some point in the aughts, Johnny Marr had gone into the studio with Lee Mavvers to try to kind of break him out of his. Uh, hermitry or whatever.

• 1:24:18Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  And that.

• 1:24:20Yasi Salek?

  He had the same experience.

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  And that Johnny Marr had said that he was more, Lee Mavers was more interested in re-recording these songs from the first record than he was recording any of the other songs he'd written in the last 15 years.

• 1:24:33Yasi Salek?

  Even though he has written a lot of new songs.

• 1:24:37Speaker 05

  And we've heard some of them and they're fucking great.

• 1:24:39Yasi Salek?

  But yeah, but he's still, he's kind of circling this, this one thing, trying to get it right. I want to point out, there is one version, one recorded song that Lee Mavers likes and thinks is representative. And it is one of the B-sides of Timeless Melody, a song called "Over."

• 1:25:08Yasi Salek?

  He said, they asked him about like the Sound River and he was like, "That is the sound. That was the first time we ever played it. The very, very, very first time." Mon's comatose John from the corner, John is over him. Lee says, "It was recorded on a tape recorder in a barn. That's the way we like to do it, La. Just a tape recorder. It gets the tough element and that validates it. Yeah, it's a million times better than that cheesy shit on the album." So if you want to hear an example of what it means for Lee Mavers of a good Laws recording, it's that one.

• 1:25:42Speaker 05

  I believe he might also be a fan of the Gary Crowley recordings that are on the deluxe version of the record, which sound like they were recorded in a missile silo.

• 1:25:52Yasi Salek?

  That's what he likes.

• 1:25:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's the, he, Lee Mavers is apparently 20 feet away from the recorder and John Power is singing backup vocals in, right into it. It's, they're very, very rough recordings.

• 1:26:13Yasi Salek?

  He also hates the "I" cover art.

• 1:26:16Speaker 05

  That's not a great cover.

• 1:26:17Yasi Salek?

  It's not the best cover I've ever seen in my life. Just so you know, the working title of the album was "Do" or "Do, Pay Me So Far, La." A play on "Do, Re, Mi, Fa", but "Do, Pay Me So Far, La."

• 1:26:32Yasi Salek?

  Well, that was cool. I thought that would have been a better title, honestly, than self-titled.

• 1:26:36Speaker 05

  I don't have a feeling on it either way.

• 1:26:37Yasi Salek?

  They put out "Timeless Melody" as a single first.

• 1:26:49Yasi Salek?

  The album comes out, it hits number 30 in the UK charts, is certified silver, pretty good. The re-release "There She Goes" single also did really well. It hit 13 on the UK singles chart and they performed on Top of the Pops, which must have really chapped Lee's ass, I must say, because that's famously lip syncing, which he hates.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Yasi Salek?

  All right, let's go through the songs. Starts out with "Son of a Gun." Do you think that Lee Mavers had a say in the sequencing?

• 1:27:16Speaker 05

  I don't know. I haven't been able to find anything.

• 1:27:18Yasi Salek?

  I didn't either. I was just curious.

• 1:27:20Speaker 05

  I do think the album is really well sequenced.

• 1:27:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 05

  Then again, I've been listening to it for 30 years, so.

• 1:27:25Yasi Salek?

  You couldn't imagine it any other way.

• 1:27:26Speaker 05

  Any other way. But it's.

• 1:27:28Yasi Salek?

  It's a strong opening.

• 1:27:29Speaker 05

  Great opener.

• 1:27:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Speaker 05

  We were in, we're out, two minutes.

• 1:27:33Yasi Salek?

  Shorty. "I Can't Sleep," you already spoke, you waxed quite a bit about that song. You really love it.

• 1:27:38Speaker 05

  Love it.

• 1:27:38Yasi Salek?

  What is it about it that you love the most?

• 1:27:40Speaker 05

  Everything begins and ends with the melodies on the songs, but there aren't a lot of real rock moments on this record. There's one later in the album, but this song has just so much energy and the melody is so awesome and I love the production of the drums. There's these just great little moments where it's like, "And there's a big black..." There's like a floor tom hit with this like, like, "Spray a reverb."

• 1:28:13Speaker 05

  The drum beat is kind of broken up in this really interesting kind of way that's, it's, he's playing a backbeat, but it's not a traditional backbeat, but the song still drives, like it has a traditional backbeat. I've loved this song for so long, but I'd never exactly thought about why I loved it so much.

• 1:28:27Yasi Salek?

  Liberty ship is a slighter weak spot for me on this album. How do you feel?

• 1:28:32Speaker 05

  It's not in my top half of the album favorite songs.

• 1:28:34Yasi Salek?

  It's not bad, but it's, you know, a skipple.

• 1:28:45Yasi Salek?

  I'll say it. I think "Doldrum" might be my favorite song on here.

• 1:28:49Speaker 05

  Really? Of the whole album?

• 1:28:50Yasi Salek?

  Well, I mean, you can't choose "There She Goes." On the listenings in these past weeks, this is the one that keeps getting stuck in my head. This is a very skiffly moment, but also just has this like, energy to it that I like, really enjoy. Maybe also reading about the writing of it kind of made me like it more. So obviously, it's a misspelling of "doldrum" with the word "dole" on it. And Lee had said in that interview in 2014 that, "We were on an interrailing holiday in 1983. Six weeks, pair of jeans, t-shirt and a haversack, passport, sleeping bag, and dole in your pocket, kipping on the trains and the beaches. Spain, Italy. We bumped into these minks and one of them said, 'What's wrong with him? Oh, he's in the doldrums.'" He was pissed off.

• 1:29:35Yasi Salek?

  "It means when a ship is at sea and there's no wind and it can't go anywhere." So I just locked it in my head. I found myself loving these songs that are, I feel at the heart of them. It's like, a dreaming of escaping your circumstances, you know? And for whatever reason, this song feels like that to me. I just really like it.

• 1:30:01Yasi Salek?

  I like "Feeling" a lot, too, which is the next song.

• 1:30:04Speaker 05

  "Feeling" is top three, four on this record, too, yeah. And just, it's, it's, there are so many things that are wonderful about Lee Mavris's songwriting, but he, I think one thing we really haven't touched on is just the economy of his songwriting. And there is not a note, a superfluous note in this entire, particularly in this song. And this thing's under two minutes long, but it gets through verses and choruses and a middle eight, and it just has this repeat factor. It's so fucking catchy. But it is truly, I mean, there's, there's just, there is an economy to almost everything on this record, with the exception of "Looking Glass," which is kind of a sprawling tune, but it is just so catchy, so wonderful.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  And again, leaps and bounds, in my opinion, the best version of "Feeling" is on the record.

• 1:30:54Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:30:55Speaker 05

  As opposed to the seven or eight other versions that are floating around, either on the deluxe version or bootlegs.

• 1:31:09Yasi Salek?

  I feel like this is a song about like his relationship with songwriting and God and stuff. I get the feeling I'm responding to a call. I am receiving to give you this meaning.

• 1:31:18Speaker 05

  That tracks.

• 1:31:19Yasi Salek?

  Thank God for that feeling.

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  Once we get past feeling, there's a little of a dip in the album.

• 1:31:32Yasi Salek?

  But you love Looking Glass.

• 1:31:33Speaker 05

  I love Looking Glass, but there's-

• 1:31:35Yasi Salek?

  Freedom Song is not a good song, I'm sorry.

• 1:31:37Speaker 05

  Not into that one.

• 1:31:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, respectfully.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  Not my favorite. There is a little bit of a soggy kind of back end on the record until we get to Looking Glass, but we end so strongly with Looking Glass. And the record is so short that it has a repeat.

• 1:31:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think we talk about this a lot. Like, all records have break pumping moments that are like, lend themselves to the feel, like the tempo of the record, and that sometimes means some songs have to be less good.

• 1:32:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I remember when Death Cab was looking to sign to a major label, we were doing the rounds of all the major companies, and we met with this guy who, of course, will remain nameless, you know, big industry player. And it was from the moment we started talking with this guy, like, we're not signing with this guy.

• 1:32:22Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:32:23Speaker 05

  But he did say something that was, he said, he said a number of things that were obviously very astute, and one of them was that, you know, this is 2003 or '04, he was like, yeah, records are too long now. The great thing about vinyl was that you only had a set amount of time, really 35, 40 minutes on a record. And this was, you know, in the-

• 1:32:42Yasi Salek?

  CDs were 86 minutes.

• 1:32:44Speaker 05

  They were 86 minutes, and people were thinking that they were giving their fans value by just jamming those things full of 70 minutes worth of music. And I think that this record obviously is a throwback to an earlier time, even in 1990, where there were no CDs, and, you know, that there was just, you know, this record clocks in, what, 30 some minutes?

• 1:33:03Yasi Salek?

  There were CDs in 1990?

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  I'm sorry, I meant, throwing back to an era that didn't have CDs, yeah.

• 1:33:09Yasi Salek?

  35, 14?

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  35, right. You're in, you're out.

• 1:33:11Yasi Salek?

  It's really short, actually.

• 1:33:12Speaker 05

  It's a really short record. But it's a testament to-

• 1:33:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, he writes really short songs, so unless you're gonna like put five extra more songs on there, which he didn't have.

• 1:33:22Speaker 05

  Well, I think he did, but he didn't. I mean, there are stories, Steve Lillywhite tells a story about playing this song called Fishing Net, which is bootlegged on YouTube, and I think I sent it to you a couple days ago.

• 1:33:34Yasi Salek?

  It's really good.

• 1:33:35Speaker 05

  And I've been listening to it- For whatever reason, I had not heard it until relatively recently, where it hadn't hit. And it just is fucking incredible. And the story is that he's playing that in the studio, just kind of to himself. And Lily White is like, what is that? He's like, oh, that's a song for the next record, La. He was holding back songs.

• 1:34:05Yasi Salek?

  Looking Glass, it was written on drugs, I think. I'll tell you why I think that, in that 2014 book. Can you remember writing Looking Glass? I'd written the chorus at Christmas in my bedroom. I'd come out of the hospital because I had a cyst on my ass. I have one of them polo mint things that you've got to sit on, a sponge. You know, in England, polo mint.

• 1:34:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's like a lifesaver. So he was sitting on a little doughnut because he had a surgery on a cyst on his ass. And I came out with, I've seen everybody, and so the story goes. Six months later, it was my birthday, me and my mate Cammie and black pyramid trips. I don't know what that is, acid, maybe? Do you know, are you familiar?

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  Hmm, I'm not, but that's how it would be.

• 1:34:44Yasi Salek?

  Famously a drug person. We just went off onto our own things in this room and all these words flew at me. The verse is, tell me where I'm going, tell me where I'm bound. This was a real touch by, I wonder if that's why it's called Looking Glass. Alice in Wonderland. Looking Glass, yeah.

• 1:35:09Yasi Salek?

  You read the poem out loud in your 10th grade English class?

• 1:35:12Speaker 05

  I did, yeah.

• 1:35:12Yasi Salek?

  Do you remember it?

• 1:35:13Speaker 05

  In my English class, we had to read a poem. We had to memorize and recite a poem.

• 1:35:18Yasi Salek?

  Do you remember it? Do you want to do it right now?

• 1:35:19Speaker 05

  I don't remember all the words right now.

• 1:35:21Yasi Salek?

  Do you remember the beginning?

• 1:35:22Speaker 05

  Tell me where I'm going, tell me why I'm bound, turn the pages over, turn the world around, open up the broken doors where all loss could be found. He goes on with that. But, you know, there was, I mean, I was more impressed with a kid who just made up, he just freestyled a poem off the top of his head. And you could see that our English teacher being like, I know what you're doing right now, but I'm going to allow it.

• 1:35:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 05

  Because you're just making this up off the top of your head. I think that she also probably knew that I was, this was not Yeats or whatever.

• 1:35:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 05

  At 15, I found those words to be very... Poetic and thought I could read them in a poetry class.

• 1:35:59Yasi Salek?

  Did you do that because of this album?

• 1:36:02Speaker 05

  Well, I love the record, yeah.

• 1:36:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Speaker 05

  And I didn't know anybody that knew it, really. So I was certain that my teacher would not know it. And I think I said it was a, I probably said Mavers, but I said, this is a poem by Lee Mavers. Never heard of him. I mean, I went to high school in Bremerton. I don't think, I don't think we were dealing with the top brass as far as educators go.

• 1:36:21Yasi Salek?

  All right, fair enough. It's rude to your English teacher, but they were doing their best. It got mostly good reviews. I'm sorry, it did get one bad review. Sounds gave it two stars. John Harris, big music journalist then. He said, "The law's 60s worshiping 45's way out, and the seminal There She Goes provided a tantalizing taste of apparently impressive talent. Great things were justifiably predicted. Fans, however, were kept on tender hooks for two years by a band whose quest for long-playing perfection looked nothing short of lunatic." And then he said it screams anticlimax. Also goes into the naked thieving of 25-year-old styles and says, "The problem comes with their failure to appropriate the most central tenet of timeless 60s pop catchiness.

• 1:37:03Yasi Salek?

  Only There She Goes managed to rattle around in the mind of the best pop traditions." I don't agree. I think like, you don't agree. It's, two things are interesting. One, I think that this is like a classic thing where like, music journalists tend to take things personally and like, it's like, the attitude as perceived of Lee Mavers sabotaging all this and being precious, it's not, it's not a thing that music journalists like, right?

• 1:37:30Speaker 05

  No, and then there's also, you know, there are also some music journalists whose attitude can best be summed up as, eh.

• 1:37:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly. Or everyone loved There She Goes. It's just really interesting because the exact thing is written in Oasis reviews later, but they're praised for it. Like, look at this. Noel Gallagher, 25-year-old styles, stealing from everywhere. Isn't it wonderful?

• 1:37:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Yasi Salek?

  So it just, it only took five years. Or the Stone Roses, honestly. Now comes Lee Mavers's quick press tour where he just shits on the album in every interview. Do you want to know the story of that LP? We walked out on it. Then they mixed it and released it. It's the worst thing I've ever heard, bar nothing. I can detach myself from it and it's unmusical. It's out of tune. And the worst thing about it is the singing because they took the backing tracks from the first two weeks we were in the studio and used the guide vocals. It's flat, out of tune, out of time. I wouldn't have minded what they've done if it sounded good. It's a melody maker. Do you find it to be out of tune?

• 1:38:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:38:23Yasi Salek?

  Enemy. I hate it. It's the worst. A pile of shit. There's not one good thing I can find to say about it. I want to see a synced version of... There's a lot more that he says about this. But he says, "Listen, I wouldn't be a Laws fan, not from what I've heard. Not if I'd only heard those records. I just wouldn't be interested. But I'd die for those demos, man." They quote Andy McDonald in this and he goes, "After three and a half years, it was time to try to bring those songs to life. Otherwise, the Laws would still be in their rehearsal room in Liverpool every day." So just a slight bit of shade. Then they ask Liam Avers, "What do you think? Like, wasn't the label so patient? Doesn't Liam Avers feel kind of bad that he's like talking so much shit?" And he goes, "No. Of course, he's loyal to the songs. They're boss songs. He should stick by them.

• 1:39:06Yasi Salek?

  Those songs could make a load of money and there's a load of sweat and blood in them. I can't just walk away from them. Besides, I'm contractually obliged." At the end of this article, he's like, "I haven't been happy for three years. I'd probably be better off on the dole financially and spiritually." He's just not happy.

• 1:39:21Speaker 05

  Not still.

• 1:39:21Yasi Salek?

  Did not go the way...

• 1:39:22Speaker 05

  Not happy.

• 1:39:23Yasi Salek?

  What happens is they tour, UK, Europe. They do a US tour. They play Letterman. You can see it on YouTube.

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  A weird performance because at the time, my understanding was that the live band, the Paul Shaffer Band was like, union obligated to play on all the recordings. So you have...

• 1:39:40Yasi Salek?

  True, Liam Avers loved that, too.

• 1:39:41Speaker 05

  Their whole band playing on this tune. And any of those performances from that period, anybody going on Letterman was just awkward.

• 1:39:56Speaker 05

  This record comes out in this nether region between hair metal and Nevermind.

• 1:40:02Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  And as soon as Nevermind comes out, and you know, in that one weekend or that one month, it was like 10 Bad Motor Finger.

• 1:40:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Speaker 05

  Gish, I think, you know, all these records, I'm probably misremembering this, but you know, 91 was this just, we've talked about it, this landmark year.

• 1:40:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:22Speaker 05

  In music. And this record doesn't have a home. It lives between these two worlds.

• 1:40:29Yasi Salek?

  Certainly not in America.

• 1:40:30Speaker 05

  Not in America. It doesn't have a home. It's, you know, anything that is melodic and guitar oriented has grit to it.

• 1:40:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  And this record, with the exception of one or two songs, is not a gritty album.

• 1:40:43Yasi Salek?

  It also doesn't fit in in the UK because like, they come into the world of Madchester, really.

• 1:40:48Speaker 05

  Right. This is Happy Mondays.

• 1:40:49Yasi Salek?

  Because they're a little bit late.

• 1:40:50Speaker 05

  This is Happy Mondays territory.

• 1:40:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Like, by 91, Happy Mondays on the way, and The Stone Roses have disappeared to also take seven years to make their next album, although they do eventually make the next album, as opposed to The Laws, who never did. But it's like, back to the Britpop point. It's like, you have to wonder what would have happened if this had come out four years later or something. Like, would they have been part of the canon of Blur and Oasis, you know?

• 1:41:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's very possible.

• 1:41:15Yasi Salek?

  And we wouldn't have Oasis, though, if there wasn't The Laws, right? They were so directly influenced. Also, it wouldn't have mattered, because Lee Mavers would have hated it, no matter what. He didn't give a shit what Oasis was doing. He didn't give a shit what the Happy Mondays were doing. He didn't give a shit what Nirvana was doing.

• 1:41:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Yasi Salek?

  He didn't see The Laws as part of anything.

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  I think a pretty good comp for The Laws, of what The Laws could have been, so to speak, with better timing, would have been Supergrass.

• 1:41:38Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:41:39Speaker 05

  I mean, they're different, but they had a similar 60s aesthetic and kind of lo-fi aesthetic, and with fucking incredible songs.

• 1:41:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But they were more down to clown, so.

• 1:41:49Speaker 05

  They were, and actually make more than one record.

• 1:41:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Speaker 05

  But I feel that, you know, There are all these moments where you can, in certainly the last 30 years of music, where you can see a band or an artist that showed up two years too early, or three years too early, and then struggled, and then three years later, that sound is becoming contemporary or popular. Not necessarily that they pioneered it, but they just kind of showed up to the party a little too early.

• 1:42:15Yasi Salek?

  Mavvers' struggle was not financial, though. It was spiritual. And I don't think it would have mattered when this album came out.

• 1:42:21Speaker 05

  I agree.

• 1:42:21Yasi Salek?

  It wouldn't have mattered if it sold a million copies.

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  I agree with you on that.

• 1:42:25Yasi Salek?

  He would still be like, this is shit. I hate it.

• 1:42:27Speaker 05

  I agree, but I mean more so a lane for people, as you said, if this record would have come out a couple of years later, it could have been swept up in what became the Britpop kind of craze in the 90s.

• 1:42:40Yasi Salek?

  There's some interviews where he's like, oh, the next album? Totally. We're gonna produce it ourselves. You're not gonna produce an album. In December of 91, after all this touring and stuff, John Power leaves the band. He's just tired of playing the same songs since 1986. Lee Mavvers said, if he believed, why did he quit? If you believe in something, you don't suddenly not believe, do you? Religious. I don't think in the end he liked being what he felt was second fiddle. It wasn't a case of that. It never was, but I know that's how he saw it. Probably he was just a creative guy who had musical ideas of his own, and The Lawz were clearly not moving forward, and he wanted to make his own music.

• 1:43:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, I mean, there's nothing controversial to me or needs to be, needs more unpacking about why somebody would leave this band at this period.

• 1:43:31Yasi Salek?

  Literally could, no explanation needed. So he switches to guitar, starts his band Cast, which early on featured people from The Lawz, Barry Sutton, Cami. Cast does really well. Speaking of bands that came out right at the right time, Cast's first album is, I think, at the time was like the highest selling debut album on Polydor. They did really well. Meanwhile, The Lawz replaced him with this guy called, literally named James Joyce. So he said, it was the same few songs again and again, the repetition. He was working on the newer songs all the time, but he wouldn't let the band do that. We'd say, come on, let's do something different, some new stuff. Let's have the new songs. And Lee would say, no. He'd look at you and say, you lot aren't ready. You're not ready for the new songs. And it would be back to Son of a Gun or whatever.

• 1:44:15Yasi Salek?

  The thing was, though, the new songs were so great. You wanted to stay in the band. You wanted to get to them. They really were that good. And so for a while, Lee's strict approach worked, if only because his songs are so brilliant.

• 1:44:27Speaker 05

  That checks out. I mean, some of the songs that we've kind of discussed, whether it was Rain Dance or Fishing Net or...

• 1:44:34Yasi Salek?

  The ones from the Crescent tape, there's some really good ones on there.

• 1:44:36Speaker 05

  Incredible. But it also feels, in listening to some of those bootlegs and recordings in preparation for this, almost every one of those songs has one verse that's repeated three times.

• 1:44:47Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:44:48Speaker 05

  So it felt like, wild speculation, that these songs were not necessarily ready to be recorded because they weren't done.

• 1:44:56Yasi Salek?

  It sounds like he wouldn't have spent the time to finish them because he was still really preoccupied with... Like, clearly he's...

• 1:45:02Speaker 05

  Trying to get the first ones right.

• 1:45:03Yasi Salek?

  He's channeling still, right? So it's like he can't stop himself from writing new songs if they're coming to him, but he's not going to spend the time to finalize them, is what it seems like. Also, again, drugs are drugging right now. James Joyce says, "Drugs were a big problem by then. I was only just 20 when I joined the band. Being young and foolish, I didn't realize it was right in front of me that they were all into it." He doesn't say what drugs. He said, "It got to the stage where it was just the drugs and then whatever else you could manage to fit around that, which wasn't much." Pure speculation, he's not talking about pot, is all I'm saying.

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  You're probably right.

• 1:45:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Lee had this tape of music at that time, and it was just, I think, four bars of music, four chords being played and looped and repeated over and over for the whole side of the cassette. Lee would just sit and listen and listen to that for days. It drove you mad. The vibes are bad, babe. In 1992, the vibes are bad. So the band kind of stops touring and rehearsing at this point. They're not... maybe some random jams, couple of shows. 1993, we said, there's like a renewed interest in There She Goes, thanks to the Boo Radley's cover. In 94, they reunite and do like a random sporadic series of performances through 94 and 95. They open for Oasis, who obviously loves them and is doing really well by 94 and 95. Paul Weller. I guess like this was bad. Did you read this?

• 1:46:18Yasi Salek?

  Like, I read in The Guardian that when, when he appeared onstage in 95, he was pretty incoherent. And like, there was one show where this, the guy who owned the place at Adelphi said, "I love Lee, but he had loads of problems. He wasn't used to playing live. He was very pissed if he wasn't on the smack." It was a bit sad. I think he played There She Goes three times without realizing he had done it.

• 1:46:37Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:46:38Yasi Salek?

  Then in 95, I don't know why Enemy does this whole interview with him, but they're asking again about like, "Are you gonna have a new album?" Whatever. He gets pretty incoherent here where he's talking about like, Lazarus, Lazarus. He directed Light, and then the light comes from the water. It's keeping you alive, Law. And the pool is where we have to pee. The Liverpool, the Mississippi, the Mercy Sippy. In history, all the maddest scientists were the best ones, and they all stayed close to the water. I don't know what he's on about. Then the first Cast album comes out, like we talked about in July. And the first song, did you read that in the book? I didn't really realize this seemed kind of directed at Lee.

• 1:47:11Speaker 05

  I did read this. This is, this is good information, yeah.

• 1:47:14Yasi Salek?

  The song is called "All Right," and the lyrics are, "I guess I'm all right. Guess I'm all right. I guess I'm doing fine. Guess I'm doing fine. Do you think I miss you? Do you think I care? Do you think I'd lay down and die? You never even tried."

• 1:47:36Yasi Salek?

  And then, Third Eye. Cast is the last word in the last song of The Law's album.

• 1:47:43Speaker 05

  It's, if, if, if intentional, pretty brilliant.

• 1:47:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I don't know if it is, but.

• 1:47:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Yasi Salek?

  Cast is a pretty common word, but.

• 1:47:58Speaker 05

  And this was the 90s, where you just gave your band.

• 1:48:00Yasi Salek?

  Just like a word.

• 1:48:01Speaker 05

  One word.

• 1:48:01Yasi Salek?

  Totally. It was, that was fine. John Power does some interviews, obviously, because Cast is doing really well. And he's. Not exactly positive about the laws at this point, which makes sense. He's sort of just left, but he said Cass is completely different. This is much more of a group. And even though people like you and other writers keep going on about the laws, I don't think most of the people who listen to us are actually that aware of them having any sort of influence. I mean, that was the past and they were only important to a little group of scallies. Cass meant a lot more.

• 1:48:28Speaker 05

  Damn.

• 1:48:29Yasi Salek?

  Shots fired, babe. Shots fired. Go Discs collapses and they pass Mavers' contract on to John Kennedy of Polygram, who did try to get him to make another album and he would not do it. He would play him the music, but he would not record it. Apparently there's a song called "The Human Race" and he says it's the best thing he's ever written, better than "There She Goes." We'll never, I guess we'll never hear it. Dennis' contract with Thought Works expires in 1998 and he says, "I was waiting for it for ages. It's great. There's 1 million pounds in debt or whatever and now it's been terminated." And this is where he talks about his "There She Goes" royalties. He's like, "Yeah, it's mostly 4,000 pounds every three months, but last Friday I got 15,000 pounds. Most of it is from 'There She Goes.'"

• 1:49:13Yasi Salek?

  Robbie Williams covers it. We don't have to get too into it, but there is that story of him finding this young Liver Pudlian band, The Crescent, that we were talking about. And he starts rehearsing with them and he's like really excited, right? And he wants them to be his backing band and it just goes nowhere.

• 1:49:28Speaker 05

  And I believe it was one of, one of the members of The Crescent interviewed in this book said something along the lines of, he had had a conversation with somebody that had been in the laws while this was all occurring, while Lee and The Crescent were collaborating. And that this person had said, "Well, one day it's just gonna be over. One day he's just not gonna show up. He's just gonna check out."

• 1:49:48Yasi Salek?

  We've been here, babe. We've, we've heard this story before.

• 1:49:50Speaker 05

  And that's ostensibly what happened with, with The Crescent.

• 1:49:54Yasi Salek?

  But you guys should listen to that tape. "Rain Dimes," to me, is particularly beautiful.

• 1:50:07Yasi Salek?

  I don't want to get too into it, but then in July of that year, he gives a particularly scathing interview about Cast where he really just shits on them. John never learned anything from the laws. He's not talented. He never was. 99 is one Sixpence on the Richer cover. Big deal.

• 1:50:31Yasi Salek?

  Hits 32 in the Billboard Hot 100. Inescapable, that version. It was in a movie.

• 1:50:36Speaker 05

  I know in the early days of Twitter, I got in a strange-

• 1:50:40Yasi Salek?

  An argument with somebody about There She Goes?

• 1:50:42Speaker 05

  I did, yeah. And it was one of those, I think I made some snarky comment about their cover and how I wonder if they knew the song was about heroin, because at the time I thought it was about heroin.

• 1:50:54Yasi Salek?

  Wow.

• 1:50:54Speaker 05

  So this is like, there are levels of-

• 1:50:56Yasi Salek?

  You were being bitchy and wrong on the internet, much like most of the people.

• 1:51:01Speaker 05

  Which is one of the many reasons I extricated myself from the format.

• 1:51:04Yasi Salek?

  Sure. No more X.com for you.

• 1:51:06Speaker 05

  And in a kind of brilliant and hilarious example of context collapse, the lovely people from Sixpence on the Richer tweeted at me and said like, "Well, of course we knew that. We just loved the song." And I was like, "I'm a fucking dickhead."

• 1:51:18Yasi Salek?

  Then you felt really bad. They're Christian.

• 1:51:20Speaker 05

  I felt like a dickhead. Yes, they are.

• 1:51:21Yasi Salek?

  They're Christian. They love God, Ben.

• 1:51:22Speaker 05

  I know they do. And this was, but this was in those early, this was in the early days of Twitter where nobody really had a sense of that this was going everywhere. And I'm telling the story because I need everyone to know that I was a dipshit on Twitter, like a lot of people.

• 1:51:37Yasi Salek?

  We can probably find it if you want.

• 1:51:39Speaker 05

  Probably can. Let's not, though.

• 1:51:40Yasi Salek?

  They have a reunion in 2004. I don't know how it came about, but they manned fences. And then this is, the next year is when you see them live at Summersonic, where you play it on the same bill. And it was amazing. It wasn't Cami and Neil, though, right? It was, it says, from this, it says it was this guy Jay Lewis and Nick Minniski playing on drums.

• 1:52:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, if I recall correctly, there was a guy like playing a stand-up kit or something like that. It was kind of a different thing. But there was nothing about that performance to me that felt off. And I was just feel so lucky that I got a chance to see it.

• 1:52:14Yasi Salek?

  It gets a little messy here. Liam Alvarez starts playing with Pete Doherty in 2008. Do you remember this?

• 1:52:21Speaker 05

  I read about this, but that

• 1:52:24Yasi Salek?

  It's giving, we're not sober. But I don't want to speculate. The drummer from Baby Shambles said that actually, they were going to be the backing band on the next Laws record. But that did not, that's not real. That didn't happen. In 2011, I believe, is the last time that he was known to have performed in public in Manchester, under the name Lee Rude and the Velcro Underpants.

• 1:52:54Yasi Salek?

  Here's the last thing that I read that feels like a good wrap up. He said, "I look at the last 10 years or so," I think this is 2001, "and people's values, and I see a great hand at play. The universe, what is life? All the early creation stories begin with, at first, there was a sound, and that's dead right. Look into a grain of wood, and it's all one line, in a big twisting circle where everything changes. But as things take a turn for the worst, so they will turn back in the end. It's like football. I look at that, and I see life in a form. That's fair play, even though referees can be biased. But if you stick the ball in the net three or four times, then no one can deny what you've done, because everyone can see. That's all I want to do, stick the ball in the net again and again. And then people will have to fall in line. There's no other way."

• 1:53:39Yasi Salek?

  And then he also says, in the next interview, this is from the book, M.W. McAlfield, "I just want to put the Laws and music into a little box and leave it there. If something happens in the future, then it happens."

• 1:53:50Speaker 05

  At the end of the day, with the Laws, I have real conflicting emotions.

• 1:53:55Yasi Salek?

  You want more music.

• 1:53:56Speaker 05

  I do, and I have to continue to be grateful for the one record that we have.

• 1:54:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:06Speaker 05

  So I appreciate and I'm so grateful that this collection of songs exists in the world and has been such an important musical kind of entity in my life. I'm also mad.

• 1:54:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:18Speaker 05

  And frustrated.

• 1:54:19Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:54:20Speaker 05

  That this immensely talented person, in my kind of darker moments of thinking about it, I just wanted to shake this guy and be like, "Get the fuck over it and put some fucking songs out." And I know he won't.

• 1:54:34Yasi Salek?

  Unlike us, he doesn't need the validation of the outside world.

• 1:54:37Speaker 05

  He does not. And, you know, it's like, as I'm saying this, I recognize that

• 1:54:44Speaker 05

  Lee Mavris can do whatever Lee Mavris wants to do. And he seems to have, at least in the little we know about him.

• 1:54:50Yasi Salek?

  As of 2014, he was absolutely still writing music and rehearsing it and sometimes popping up in pubs, I believe, and playing it in like his little neighborhood in Liverpool and raising four children and living a pretty happy life off that.

• 1:55:02Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:55:03Yasi Salek?

  There she goes.

• 1:55:04Speaker 05

  Exactly. And, you know, it is his life to live and, you know, I have to continue to tell myself that. But there is this voice that creeps up that I'm greedy. I want more.

• 1:55:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Speaker 05

  I'm a huge fan and my frustration with Lee Mavris not releasing music, the most important thing is that Lee Mavris as a human being is healthy and happy and content and doing exactly what he wants to do. And if that's what he's doing right now, then I have no claim over any new music that may or may not be coming out by Lee Mavris under the name The Laws or whatever. But there is this very irrational sense of frustration and anger that sometimes creeps up where I just cannot believe that someone this talented would deny the world even just one more album. And I continue to wait for that as all fans of The Laws do. But as I said, with the very important and larger caveat that I'm just so grateful that

• 1:56:00Speaker 05

  these songs do exist in the world, that this first record does exist. And it is clear that his relationship to music is very different than mine.

• 1:56:09Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:56:09Speaker 05

  So I really, really hope that at some point, somebody gets through to this guy or he finds some way to justify releasing some of these songs that we've just heard little snippets of over the years. Because I do believe that there are assuredly at least a couple more brilliant records in this guy.

• 1:56:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:33Speaker 05

  And they probably, there may be already sitting on reels of tape somewhere in his garage.

• 1:56:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:37Speaker 05

  And it pains me to think that we'll never hear them.

• 1:56:41Yasi Salek?

  Well, I hope we do too, but I also like, I stand Lee Mavris. I love that there are still people in the world who just literally don't care about the societal constraints or the idea of success or money or literally anything. He's literally just like, I'd prefer not to.

• 1:57:03Speaker 05

  Man, what I wouldn't give to just find myself in an elevator with this guy and just go, hey, man, whatever you need.

• 1:57:10Speaker 05

  To get this to happen, what can I do?

• 1:57:12Yasi Salek?

  What if he's like, I'll make a deal with the devil with you. You have to put out another postal service album.

• 1:57:17Speaker 05

  I'll do it.

• 1:57:17Yasi Salek?

  You do it.

• 1:57:17Speaker 05

  I would do it 100%.

• 1:57:19Yasi Salek?

  All right, you guys, postal service army.

• 1:57:20Speaker 05

  Record for one postal service.

• 1:57:21Yasi Salek?

  They're gonna show up in Liverpool.

• 1:57:23Speaker 05

  I'll call Jimmy right now. We'll start working on it.

• 1:57:26Yasi Salek?

  Ben, this has been such a joy and a pleasure. I really, I love how strong you feel about this album and this band. Thanks for coming on and talking about the one hit, one album wonder, The Laws, with me.

• 1:57:40Speaker 05

  Well, thank you for having me. I'm always here to talk about this stuff. I love it.

• 1:57:44Yasi Salek?

  Come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain. Goodbye.

• 1:57:56Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was Ben Giber. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Delvac and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Kleiman, and graciously recorded by Carlos De La Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer Emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Michael Hardman, Casey Simonson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Myerson, Jessica Hopper, and The Driver. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 1:58:40Yasi Salek?

  That's like, if I was your producer, I'd be like, here's the story for the next album. Ben got really into distance running, and then all of a sudden, he was communing with God on these distance runs, the top of hills, and all the songs came to him, fully formed.

• 1:58:53Speaker 05

  All right, so you just gave it away on this podcast.

• 1:58:56Yasi Salek?

  Sorry, we'll cut it. We'll cut it so you can keep it for...

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