THE VERVE

Before Urban Hymns briefly made them the biggest band in Britain, The Verve summoned some of the most rapturous rock music of the ’90s, fuelled by a prodigious diet of booze, drugs, Rosicrucianism, home-delivered lasagne and lashings of self-belief. Luckily, they lived to tell the tale. “We wanted that rock’n’roll life,” hears Sam Richards. “It was all that mattered.”

Wigan peerless: The Verve in Brussels, Belgium, February 19, 1994

Photo by GIE KNAEPS

IN late 1991, producer John Leckie was in limbo, waiting for The Stone Roses to get their act together. “I was out most nights in Camden, which was really buzzy back then,” he recalls. “You could literally go from place to place and see three or four bands. So I went to the Falcon, I don’t know who I was meant to see, and got there early.” On the low stage were a gang of wide-eyed longhairs from Wigan playing only their second ever London show. Leckie was already an industry veteran who’d witnessed first-hand the flowerings of psych, prog, punk and everything after, but the nascent Verve proceeded to blow him away.

“They were phenomenal. It was cosmic, it was Sun Ra, it was Pink Floyd. Instead of playing ten songs, they’d play two or three – it was symphonic, with guitars. They’d go all quiet, drop right down to silence and then burst out. They looked great. Richard was all over the place like a ballet dancer, he was on the floor and then touching the ceiling. I’d never seen anything like it before, it was amazing. Luckily, I’ve always been in a position where people have asked me to produce records for them. But for once I was begging the record company: ‘Please let me do this.’”

In their first glorious iteration, The Verve (originally just Verve) were a musical force of nature, sweeping all before them with an intensity and instinctive creativity unmatched by their early ’90s peers. Tim Burgess, who’d later recruit guitarist Nick McCabe and drummer Pete Salisbury to tour with The Charlatans, marvels at how The Verve improvised their way out of a technical black hole at Glastonbury 1995. “All of the sound on the stage went down. Their crew and the tech people from the stage were running around trying to find out what happened. Elements of their sound came back and Pete started playing, Simon joined in on bass and the impromptu jam session was underway. The result was ‘The Rolling People’ [later to feature on the multi-million-selling Urban Hymns]… They were writing a brand new song in front of us.”

“There were few bands that could touch us live,” agrees McCabe, primary source of The Verve’s celestial cacophony. “There was a degree of telepathy that – if you’re a bit high – feels like a magical thing because it’s coming through you.”

Famously, The Verve were often “a bit high”. Determined to make extraordinary music, they were convinced that in order to do so, they needed to keep testing themselves: physically, mentally, chemically. “I think we bought into the myth that being altered gives you the key to the secret door where all the interesting stuff happens,” says McCabe. “I know that’s rubbish at this point, because if you haven’t got an open mind, you’re not likely to do something interesting anyway.” Nonetheless, The Verve sought out mind-expanding adventures with a hunger that many bystanders found alarming – dropping acid in the studio, staying up for days, dallying with the occult, or simply matching Oasis drink-for-drink. “Too much fun,” smiles McCabe ruefully. “We lost tour managers by the score…” Perhaps it was no surprise that they managed to implode, not once but twice, before the ’90s was out.