Verve - Britpop's Great Lost Cause

Our look back at what happened to Richard Ashcroft and Nick McCabe's Verve begins with the recollections of those who lived through the band's golden year, 1997/98, in the wake of the not entirely unexpected break-up that nonetheless caused such a stir in the pages of the very same English magazines that, just a few years earlier, had dismissed the music of the band from Wigan, Lancashire, as "directionless".

The video for “Sonnet”, the fourth single from the enormously successful Urban Hymns, was still in heavy rotation on TV channels across Europe, Verve had been widely crowned band of the year, and it felt like this was merely the start of an unobstructed path that would carry the band straight into the history of British rock.

After all, in a prophetic - as superb as it was back then - statement from 1993, Richard Ashcroft, the band's much-debated frontman, declared: “History has a place for us too, it might take us three albums to get there, but in the end we'll be in the place that's rightfully ours”. It can't be said that Richard didn't have a clear idea from the very start of what his band would become...

Linked to numerous phenomena and sub-phenomena of English music of those years, Verve debuted with the single “All In The Mind” in March '92; the song merges the structures and solutions of the Stone Roses with the typically shoegazer noise of McCabe's guitar, an unacknowledged fan of My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain. The track won over the local press and Hut Recordings, who signed the band and paved the way for their debut album by releasing two more singles, “She's A Superstar” and “Gravity Grave”, which, like “All In The Mind”, topped the UK independent charts. The band, rounded out by bassist Simon Jones and drummer Peter Salisbury, immediately began drawing attention to themselves, partly due to the arrogant behaviour that already marked their earliest shows; Ashcroft and co. deliberately chose to play unannounced unplugged sets, skipped soundchecks, suddenly walked off stage never to return if something displeased them, or else trashed microphones and other equipment belonging to the promoters of the small festivals they'd been booked to play.

The good reviews earned by the three launch singles took Verve into the studio to record what would become their debut album, A Storm In Heaven. None of those three songs made the final cut, and as many as eight of the ten tracks were written "on the spot", under the influence of hallucinogens and alcohol - essential ingredients and themes throughout the band's entire career. The result is a record dominated by sulphurous, cavernous, psychedelic atmospheres, albeit anchored to typically pop structures, presenting itself as a single block to be swallowed and absorbed over time. To the basic instrumentation, the band add horns and percussion here and there, as on “The Sun, The Sea”, which, combined with Nick McCabe's superb guitar work, push the rhythm section into accelerations and digressions that the English press dismissed as totally out of focus. Jones's bass creates a mysterious undercurrent that amplifies the psychedelic streak in Ashcroft's lyrics: “Already There” and “Beautiful Mind” act as an anaesthetic early in the record, which, barring a few brief exceptions - see the single “Blue” - maintains this evocative atmosphere throughout, leaving us feeling trapped inside a dream that begins with the opening “Star Sail”. The album is interesting in its intentions, but still feels a touch unripe, and might have benefited from including at least a couple of the songs that preceded it

The band set off on an American tour supporting the Robinson brothers' Black Crowes, also playing a few Lollapalooza dates, during which Peter Salisbury was arrested for trashing a Kansas City hotel room in a drunken rage, and the following day Richard fainted just before Verve's set, dehydrated from the previous night's excess. The band was called back home, where dates had already been booked alongside the then-unknown Oasis, with whom they struck up a sort of non-aggression pact for the days that followed. Meanwhile, the band's name became The Verve, following complaints from an American jazz label of the same name. It was in America that a self-titled Ep was released, compiling tracks taken from single B-sides along with a few songs deemed significant from the debut album. A few months later another Ep, No Come Down, containing some b-sides already featured on earlier singles, a few alternate mixes and a live track, hit English shops, and was soon forgotten.

In November 1994, the band's four members regrouped at Loco Studios in Wales to record their second album with producer Owen Morris, a key figure on the English britpop scene and also the man behind Oasis's finest work - Oasis, who by then were riding high on the success of "Definitely Maybe" and had swapped places with the Verve as the supporting act.

The sessions in Wales produced A Northern Soul, an album that retains more than a few ties to A Storm In Heaven but pushes the band's territory further outward, inevitably flirting with the britpop sounds of the day without ever making them the record's foundation or raison d'être. A Northern Soul is steeped in the dense, muscular atmospheres of its predecessor, and at times indulges in one digression too many - several tracks stretch on and on without really arriving anywhere significant. But alongside the dazed psychedelic streak that Ashcroft and McCabe clearly weren't willing to abandon in favour of more fashionable songwriting, there's also a small cluster of melodic, relatively "standard" tracks for the era - notably the singles "On Your Own", a decent acoustic ballad let down by a bland, pointless ending, and above all the epic "History", arguably one of the best songs the band ever wrote, which echoes Morris's arrangement choices on that year's Oasis Christmas single, "Whatever". The album also gains weight from the surging rock of the two opening tracks, "A New Decade" and "This Is Music", plus the best old-style cut on offer, "Stormy Clouds". Yet once again the Verve seem not to have quite reached the core of their own abilities, likely worn down and exhausted by the excess-filled life they'd been living up to that point. Loaded with high expectations from both press and band, the album turns out to be a painful failure for Ashcroft, who publicly throws in the towel and slides into a dangerous nervous breakdown, while Nick McCabe, after a gig in Glasgow and amid internal friction within the group, walks away from the band, pulling out of the remaining shows and triggering the Verve's split, who can only watch helplessly as their dreams of glory collapse. In the credits of "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?", Noel Gallagher dedicates one of the new Oasis album's songs, "Cast No Shadow", to the misunderstood "genius of Richard Ashcroft", and while his record duels with Blur's "The Great Escape" on the UK charts that season, A Northern Soul sinks into obscurity in no time at all.

When all seems lost, Ashcroft recruits an old friend, Simon Tong, to replace the departed McCabe, and calls the rest of the band back to try again, this time with producer Youth at Metropolis Studios in London. With the rivalry over the band's leadership patched up, Nick McCabe returns to the fold once Richard has already written all the songs for the new record. The guitarist pushes for a fresh round of arrangements for Ashcroft's songs and for writing additional tracks to round out the album, with a new producer, Chris Potter, at another London studio, Olympic, where around twenty songs are recorded for what will become Urban Hymns, the Wigan band's masterpiece.

The album comes out in 1997, overshadowed by Oasis's "Be Here Now", Blur's self-titled record, and at a time when Prodigy and Radiohead were gathering the lion's share of critical and public acclaim. The video for "Bittersweet Symphony" wins over and disarms the MTV audience, who rush out to buy the Verve's album without quite realising what they were actually buying. The track in question, it should be said, contains an unrecognisable sample borrowed from an old Rolling Stones song, and the Stones, once they got wind of the theft, made sure not to give up 100% of the royalties from such a hit. Ashcroft gets his revenge with the rest of the album, which contains some of the finest songs the band ever recorded, among them the gorgeous ballad "The Drugs Don't Work" - later dug up and rendered toothless by Ben Harper - the wah-wah of "Weeping Willow", and the other hit single, "Lucky Man". But it's the record as a whole that wins you over, both in its acoustic moments and in the tracks that by now feel typically verve-esque, namely the psychedelic "Catching the Butterfly" and "Velvet Morning".

Ashcroft's prophecy comes true when the Verve are named band of the year, knocking their friends-turned-rivals Oasis off an obvious but undeserved top spot. Everything seems to be falling into place, until further friction between the band and Ashcroft leads to McCabe's second departure, right in the middle of the American tour.

After months of speculation, the band officially announces its split, while Ashcroft records the songs for what will become his first solo album, Alone With Everybody, backed by a new band - with the exception of drummer Peter Salisbury, who chooses to follow him into this new venture. Nothing more is heard of the Verve until November 2004, when a compilation is released, featuring fourteen of the band's most significant songs, including their first three rare singles and two outtakes from the Urban Hymns sessions, plus a DVD with all the band's official videos.

Ashcroft's solo career resumes with Virgin Records, building on the foundations of the Verve's last album's success, but without matching its effectiveness in the arrangements or, above all, in the songwriting, which here is more in need than ever of fresh ideas and a less flat, formulaic production. The orchestrations wrapped around some of the tracks, lifted straight from "History" and "Bittersweet Symphony", revisit a brand of symphonic pop in which the melodic excess quickly becomes nauseating on a second listen, not unlike some of the compositions on late-period R.E.M. records. A handful of songs are spared, though still repetitive and far from transcendent ("A Song For The Lovers", and especially "Money To Burn"), sparing Alone With Everybody from a total write-off.

In 2002 Ashcroft tries again with Human Conditions, a more ambitious work than its predecessor, once again echoing the orchestral pop arrangements of the Byrds and the Beach Boys, as well as certain Rolling Stones compositions, but which, thanks to more engaging melodies capable of standing the test of time, manages to convince and delight. It's mainly the singles "Check The Meaning", "Buy It In Bottles" and "Science Of Silence" that linger longest in the memory, along with the symphonic closer "Nature Is The Law", which also features Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, almost as if to lend legitimacy to the direction Ashcroft had taken. Nothing else of note happens after that, aside from Simon Tong joining Blur's live line-up in place of Graham Coxon for the "Think Tank" tour.

Ashcroft's third solo album, Keys To The World, comes out in 2005, but it's another misstep. Hung up on a notion of classicism that here, unfortunately, rhymes only with sterile irrelevance, Ashcroft fails to forge a strong enough identity to keep pace not just with the times, but with his own past.

Three years later, surprisingly, comes news of the Verve's reunion.

There was, then, a certain curiosity and even a fair amount of anticipation, especially among long-time fans, surrounding the new album, Forth, made by the band's original core (minus second guitarist Simon Tong, who had in any case only joined during the making of the third album) and partly already aired live at the band's many summer festival appearances around the world.

"Love Is Noise", the first single released from the album, had raised more than a few legitimate doubts, owing to an overly glossy, saccharine arrangement and an ostentatious pop attitude that briefly sparked fears the band might be drifting inexorably into mainstream territory, uncomfortably close to Keane and Coldplay. The track, however, tends to remain an isolated case within the record, which diverges sharply from its dominant stylistic direction. Confirmation of this comes right from the opening track, "Sit And Wonder": a highly complex, intricately structured composition that recalls the thick, visionary quality of the band's very earliest work. The track stands out for the free, fluid touch of a rejuvenated McCabe, skilled at shaping an unbroken stream of lysergic hallucinations over a powerful rhythmic bed.

From here the album splits into two directions: on one side, romantic ballads with a more melodic bent, and on the other, longer tracks open to psychedelic excursions and extended passages with a loosely improvised feel. Needless to say, the best moments are found among the latter, where the band's compositional imagination can run freer. "Numbness" is a cold, introspective blues, scratched by a jagged guitar line reminiscent of certain moments by Spacemen 3. "Noise Epic", meanwhile, takes the shape of a sprawling, never-ending jam (over eight minutes long) somewhere along the Television/Can/Sonic Youth axis, alternating hypnotic, circling spirals of psychedelia with genuinely thrilling noise-krautedelic outbursts. "Columbo" wraps itself in a thick, elusive haze of rarefied dream-pop with Canterbury-tinged shades. "Judas" sits on the same wavelength, embellished with orchestral touches and faint soul/gospel leanings.

Sadly, the same can't be said of the more straightforward, pop-leaning tracks: "I See Houses" and "Rather Be" call back to old pages from Ashcroft's solo career, but even as the overall quality dips noticeably - chipping away at the cohesion and tightness of the record as a whole - "Appalachian Springs" and "Valium Skies" manage to stay afloat, thanks to solid, well-controlled songwriting.

A credible and fully justified (re-)starting point for a band that, building on these very songs, will now have to prove it has reached the kind of maturity it has so often lacked throughout its history - a maturity whose absence has, on more than one occasion, even threatened the band's own survival.

Following the merely passable Natural Rebel in 2018, Richard Ashcroft decided to pick up some of the most significant songs born from his noble pen and rework them in acoustic form on Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1 (2021).

The result is convincing. Some classic tracks like "Lucky Man", "Sonnet" and "Wheeping Willow" keep their everlasting beauty intact without adding anything new. It's a different story for songs such as "The Drugs Don't Work", "Break The Night With Colour" and "Songs From The Lovers", which, stripped of their usual clothing, let their already perfect melodies fly free.

2025 is a triumphant summer for Richard Ashcroft, who has starred in the opening act slots of old friends Oasis's triumphant reunion tour. So it makes sense that he'd seize the moment to release new music again, a good seven years on from "Natural Rebel", a stretch broken only in 2021 by "Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1", which, however, consisted of reworkings of already-released (and very well-known) material. His solo discography has always suffered from a certain unevenness in quality, with great songs alternating with utterly forgettable ones. But Ashcroft is now genuinely living a second youth, softened by the calm of a man who feels fulfilled both professionally (he's certainly under no obligation to churn out new hits to be adored by his fans) and romantically (he never tires of dedicating romantic ballads to his wife Kate Radley, former keyboardist of Spiritualized, to whom the title of this record is probably also dedicated).

Every second of Lovin' You, released in October 2025, carries the scent of Richard's history: traces of Verve are everywhere, woven into the folds of every song, even those furthest from the English band's classic repertoire. It's not just the voice: there's a sense of continuity that also emerges from the musical aspects and arrangement choices, which make clear just how central his songwriting was to the compositional process of Verve. That closeness can be heard both when the atmosphere settles into a poetically acoustic mood ("Find Another Reason", "Fly To The Sun"), perhaps drawing on the endless sweetness of melodies set amid slide, tremolo and steel guitar (the exquisitely refined "Out Of These Blues", "Oh L'amour", "Live With Hope"), and when the rhythm ripples outward, taking on more conventionally rock elements, as in the surging "Heavy News".

But the album also opens up forcefully – hardly a novelty for the singer-songwriter from Wigan – toward more alternative territory, where electronics take centre stage. That's the case with "Lover" (built on a looped sample of Joan Armatrading's "Love And Affection", who thanked him for the nod and praised the final result), "I'm A Rebel" (co-written with French producer Mirwais, on which Ashcroft adopts a falsetto with a strong disco music flavour) and "Lovin' You": three of the most danceable ideas Richard has ever written. The album's dual nature is underscored by the presence of no fewer than three producers involved across the recording sessions: alongside Mirwais, Emre Ramazanoglu contributed to the more electro-oriented tracks, while Chris Potter worked on those more traditionally tied to the artist's usual path.

Contributions by Francesco Giordani ("Forth"), Cristiano Orlando ("Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1"), Claudio Lancia ("Lovin' You")

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