Saturday Live

Back in January I started this series of posts featuring live gigs and sessions with a 1992 performance by Verve at Camden Town Hall, a band who conjured up an expansive psychedelic guitar experiment- four young, thin men from the wilds of Wigan with suede jackets, scuffed boots and long straggly hair, playing in the outer reaches. This is in the pre- The Verve days, just Verve. There's another long form clip on Youtube of the band a year later at London Astoria, recorded for late night music TV programme The Beat on a Monday night in October 1993. There are fours songs played from what was clearly a longer, full length gig- Star Sail, Slide Away, Virtual World and Blue. 

It is, and this isn't a word I like to use often, epic stuff, from the time of their first album, the psyche/ shoegaze/ indie masterpiece A Storm In Heaven. In the twenty minutes shown here the four men play from within a bubble of noise crated by Nick McCabe's guitar and pedals, an atmospheric and engulfing stormcloud of feedback, notes, distortion and melody. The drums, bass and Richard's vocals all come from within that, the four elements in some kind of perfect balance. 

After I posted Verve at Camden Town Hall I was gifted a bundle of early demos and recordings which included these two versions of Slide Away. The first was I think recorded in Wigan in 1990, very lo fi and with a peeling wail of feedback running through it as Simon Jones' bass rumbles away with that familiar undertow groove. 

Slide Away Demo #1

Slide Away Demo #2

The song eventually came out in September 1993, on 7" and 12" and CD single. The video has our intrepid starsailors lost in the wilderness a long way from home. 

Saturday Live

I thought this might be a good idea for a Saturday series, so I'll kick it off today and see how far it runs before I/ we all get bored of it. A month ago I posted a song by Verve, the early pre- The, Verve, four skinny wastrels from Winstanley college, Wigan who formed to playa  friend's house party and quickly became psychedelic adventures, built around a pummelling rhythm section, a rake thin, long haired, wide eyed, charismatic frontman and the skyscraping, shoegaze x Hendrix guitar playing of Nick McCabe. I posted the song Gravity Grave, an eight minute northern epic and a link to Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40s edit of the early B- side One Way To Go. In the comments Jesse recommended that for the full early Verve experience we should watch the fifty minute film of their gig at Camden Town Hall in October 1992 (actually it was 23rd October 1992, for those of you who are twenty three fans). 

It's professionally filmed, presumably for a regional music programme, nine songs long, starting with Slide Away and ending with Gravity Grave. The first few minutes alone are worth the price of entry, McCabe's silvery, distorted guitar lines cutting through the darkness and blue light. Ashcroft sings in that wasted, psychonaut way he had when they started, swimming like a mermaid when the band are playing the instrumental breaks (they're not really breaks, they're integral to the songs). The group ebb and flow, a slow burning energy, totally controlled but loose as you like, and then there's an explosion of guitar at five minute forty that could skin a cat. 

All In The Mind, their first single, follows, a song about getting in a car with an older woman who tells him, 'You were born to fly my son/ I say 'hey I already know'/ Because it's all inside'. Around Richard's words McCabe blows up buildings and sucks planets into black holes. To jump to the end, Verve are joined by a white shirted flautist and some stage divers. The flautist is as cool dancing, her hair flying around, as she is adding some atonal flute to Gravity Grave's sonics. Richard bounces, arms outstretched. Nick plays guitar like the Silver Surfer might sound, arriving ahead of Galactus in a blur of noise, feedback and chaos. I'm not sure they ever quite captured this on record but bless 'em, they tried. 

Slide Away

Monday's Long Songs

Back in the early 90s Verve appeared out of the wilds of Wigan, four skinny pale boys with straggly hair, suede jackets and desert boots, looking like the existed on a diet of cigarettes and LSD with the occasional bag of chips for nourishment. They were a swirling psychedelic monster, space rock that soared and swooped. Guitarist Nick McCabe didn't appear to be much interested in chord progressions and verse- chorus dynamics but in texture and tone, FX and reverb, runs of notes that were like pinpricks of light against the inky black heavens. The rhythm section thundered away, a bedrock that elevated the group's noise away from the shoegaze bands and towards the skies. As a calling card and statement of intent their debut single, 1991's All In The Mind and its B-sides One Way To Go and A Man Called Sun, is a hard to beat. This incarnation of the group got lost after the release of A Storm In Heaven in 1993 (although A Northern Soul has its moments too). They were forced to add The to their name. Inter- band relations and constant touring took their toll. Singer Richard Ashcroft, 'Mad Richard' in the press in the early 90s, began to be more interested in mid- paced, universal balladeering than stratospheric dream psyche. These things happen. 

Gravity Grave, released in October 1992 is eight minutes of the above, a delay affected bassline, big drums and a squeal of guitar, then more guitar and FX and Richard singing into the wind, 'My life is a boat/ Being blown by you/ With nothing ahead/ Just the deepest blue'. The song shifts a few times, breaking down into bass and drums, some harmonica and then builds again, Nick McCabe playing like a Winstanley version of Hendrix but mainly it's all about the moment, being alive inside the song as the groove goes on. 

Gravity Grave

In case you haven't noticed, over in Stockholm Jesse Fahnestock has been running an advent calendar of musical delights, his 10:40 recordings re- presented, clearing the decks ahead of a new album next year. On 3rd December, behind door number three, was a 10:40 edit of One Way To Go, that 1991 B-side dubbed out and extended, Richard's vocal going backwards and forwards, eventually meeting itself in the middle of the seven minute trip. You can get it here for free. 

The entire 10:40 advent calendar of releases is free, a festival of music with releases- edits, original tracks and remixes spanning dubbed out rock, laser beam festival electronics, wonky hip hop, chuggy Balearica and Tom Waits boneshaker blues. It is going on every day until the big day comes this weekend. Dig in and feed your head here. 

Streets Are All Quiet

Simon Tong joined The Verve as guitarist when Nick McCabe left and then stayed on when he came back (awkward! as the youngsters say). When in 2006 Damon Albarn put together a supposedly nameless band around himself, Paul Simonon (coaxed out of painting to pick up his bass again) and Afrobeat drumming legend Tony Allen, Tong came on board too. The Good, The Bad And The Queen was a very English sounding album (despite Tony Allen on drums)- Dickensian almost, songs summoning up London murk, dark, damp streets and noise coming out from behind half closed doors. This song, the album closer also called The Good, The Bad And The Queen, opens with pub style piano and closes with all of the players racing each other to get to six minutes plus ending. The album was produced by Dangermouse but doesn't really sound like it.

The Good, The Bad And The Queen

Living With Me's Like Keeping A Fool

I've decided to play join-the-dots this week. Monday was DJ Shadow. Yesterday was DJ Shadow as part of UNKLE with vocals from Richard Ashcroft. Today is Richard Ashcroft as singer of The Verve. Plus those strings at the end of UNKLE's Lonely Soul would segue very well into today's song.

History is from A Northern Soul, The Verve's second album. Their early singles were great records- huge, fluid, sunscraping psychedelia, with 'Mad' Richard claiming he would fly and believing it. By the time of A Northern Soul they'd cut down the sprawl to more a concise, more classicist, song oriented thing. I blame Oasis. History is a stand out song- a sweeping, desperately, achingly sad string section, an acoustic guitar and Richard bemoaning his lot, world weary, bummed out, alone and full of self pity. It's a song for wallowing in (but not for too long, it's not healthy).

History

Richard channeled metaphysical poet William Blake for the first verse. Blake's London goes...

I wander thro' each charter'd street, / Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Richard has it as...

I wander lonely streets / Behind where the old Thames does flow / And in every face I meet / Reminds me of what I have run from.

He layers it on- living is for other men, three is company, how he loved and how he failed, you and me we're history, nothing left to say, living with me is like keeping a fool. This longer album version finishes with 'I've got a skin full of dope' part, which- let's be honest- may be the crux of the problem. She may have left 'cos you were always stoned Richard.

The third album, Urban Hymns (Bittersweet Symphony excepted) is one-paced, radio rock, far less interesting and obviously far more successful.

I'll Take You Down The Only Road I've Ever Been Down- Remix

It all ended up a bit silly for The Verve didn't it? After their early days with their ten minute psychedelic guitar trips about men called Sun and 'Mad' Richard claiming that one day he'd learn to fly they found a new audience with the arrival of Britpop and the patronage of Oasis. 1995's A Northern Soul contained various career highpoints and I'm not sure their big seller (Urban Hymns) has held up that well. Too much mid-paced balladry, which they'd actually perfected in some style on the previous album with the song History. The comeback a couple of summers ago was entertainingly funny, with that huge indie anthem singalong at Glastonbury and then an album that led to an enormous collective shrug. Then they split up again. The less said about Richard Ashcroft's solo career the better, but he hasn't yet learned to fly.

The tipping point for them was Bittersweet Symphony in 1997, and then it's follow up, the dirgey The Drugs Don't Work. Bittersweet Symphony had an eye-catching video, ear-catching strings, and a lawyer-catching sample (which led to them having to give all songwriting credits to Jagger-Richards). I still have a softspot for this song, one of the few Britpop songs that's worth anything. The version here is Bittersweet Symphony remixed by UNKLE's James Lavelle, taken from The Drugs Don't Work cd single, a format I actually quite miss. Ashcroft later turned up on Lavelle's UNKLE album singing Lonely Soul, a genuinely psychedelic and soulful urban hymn. This remix is interesting enough if you haven't heard it before but it isn't going to replace the original.

Bitter Sweet Symphony James Lavelle Remix.wma