FEATURE:
Space and Time
The Verve’s Urban Hymns at Twenty-Five
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EVEN though…
the album is not celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary until 29th September, I wanted to throw ahead to that important day. The album I am referring to is The Verve’s Urban Hymns. I often think of that album as a debut. It is actually the band’s third studio outing. Their 1995 album, A Northern Soul, is wonderful. They were definitely cemented as one of the best British bands. The Wigan warriors, led by the amazing Richard Ashcroft, stepped things up to unimaginable heights on Urban Hymns. It seemed to capture a mood and perfectly encapsulated the spirit of 1997. It is unspringing that Urban Hymns was one of the biggest-selling albums of the year. It is the only Verve album to feature guitarist and keyboardist Simon Tong, who initially joined the band to replace their original guitarist Nick McCabe. McCabe re-joined the band soon after. Go and get Urban Hymns on vinyl if you do not own it already. It is not only a classic of the ‘90s; Urban Hymns is one of the greatest albums ever. To prove that, I have a couple of reviews I am going to end with. There are some brilliant features that take us inside the making and release of Urban Hymns. The first, courtesy of Udiscovermusic.com from 2021, is a fascinating read. I have selected some sections from that feature:
“When Oasis’ feverishly-anticipated third album, Be Here Now, was released in August 1997, it rocketed to the top of the UK charts, becoming the fastest-selling album in British chart history. Yet the celebrations were brief and strangely muted, for it was the record that knocked Be Here Now off the top of the UK Top 40 – The Verve’s Urban Hymns, that captured the zeitgeist as Britpop went into terminal decline.
Fronted by the intensely charismatic Richard Ashcroft and precociously talented sonic foil, lead guitarist Nick McCabe, the idealistic Lancashire quartet had promised something of this magnitude from the moment they signed to Virgin Records offshoot Hut in 1991. Produced by John Leckie (Radiohead, The Stone Roses), The Verve’s 1993 debut, A Storm In Heaven, was an ethereal, psychedelia-streaked beauty of considerable promise, while its acclaimed successor, 1995’s A Northern Soul, veered closer to the mainstream, eventually peaking inside the UK Top 20.
Though contrasting with the hedonism inherent in Britpop, the introspective A Northern Soul had still generated two British Top 30 hits, “On Your Own” and the keening, string-kissed ballad “History.” both of which suggested that Richard Ashcroft was rapidly emerging as a songwriter of major significance.
Going gold, A Northern Soul left The Verve seemingly all set for crossover success, yet with the band burnt out by the usual rock’n’roll symptoms of excess and exhaustion, Ashcroft rashly split the group just before “History” began climbing the charts. As events proved, however, the band’s split was only temporary. Within weeks, The Verve were back in business, albeit minus guitarist Nick McCabe, but with the addition of new guitarist/keyboardist Simon Tong, an old school friend who’d originally taught Ashcroft and bassist Simon Jones to play guitar.
The band already had working versions of emotive new songs, including “Sonnet” and “The Drugs Don’t Work,” with Ashcroft having written the latter on Jones’ beaten-up black acoustic guitar early in 1995. Instead of the exploratory jams that produced The Verve’s earlier material, these vividly and finely-honed songs were the logical extension of A Northern Soul’s plaintive ballads “History” and “On Your Own,” and they reflected the direction The Verve tenaciously pursued as they started work on what would become Urban Hymns.
“Those two tunes [‘Sonnet’ and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’] were written in a much more definitive way… more of a singer-songwriter approach,” Ashcroft says today. “For me, I wanted to write concise stuff at that point. That opened up a well of material and melodies.”
Urban Hymns came together slowly, with The Verve cutting demos at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios in Bath, and then with A Northern Soul producer Owen Morris, before the album sessions proper commenced with producers Youth (The Charlatans, Crowded House) and Chris Potter at London’s famous Olympic Studios in Barnes. At Richard Ashcroft’s instigation, string arranger Wil Malone (Massive Attack, Depeche Mode) was brought in and his swirling scores added a further dimension to a number of the album’s key tracks, including “The Drugs Don’t Work” and “Lucky Man.”
During these protracted sessions, The Verve expanded to a quintet after the estranged Nick McCabe was welcomed back into the fold. Among his arsenal of guitars, McCabe brought a Coral electric sitar and a Rickenbacker 12-string to the studio, and his spontaneity was encouraged as he added his inimitable magic to the guitars already precisely layered by Simon Tong. “What [Nick] did was very respectful,” Jones says today. “He made it all intertwine. He embellished what was already there and how it turned out was a beautiful thing.”
Assisted further by what Richard Ashcroft enthusiastically refers to as the “loose discipline” of Youth’s production methods, The Verve emerged triumphantly from the painstaking Olympic sessions knowing they had created music that would have a lasting impact.
“I knew the history of that room [Olympic Studio] and we were now a part of it,” Ashcroft recalls, speaking of the studio that had previously hosted the likes of The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. “We’d hit a timeless seam. When Wil got those scores down, it was this incredible feeling that we could just hit Rewind and hear them again and again. It was like walking into a bank with millions and millions of pounds’ worth of music.”
The band’s self-belief was vindicated when Urban Hymns’ first single, “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” shot to No.2 in the UK in June 1997. Built around Malone’s strings and a four-bar sample from Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral rendition of The Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time,” the song was stamped with a timeless quality and soon gained further traction thanks to a memorable, MTV-friendly promotional film of Ashcroft walking down a busy London pavement, seemingly oblivious of anything going on around him.
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With their star firmly in the ascendant, The Verve scheduled their first UK gigs for two years in September ’97, just as the album’s second single, the glorious orchestral swell of “The Drugs Don’t Work,” furnished them with their first UK No.1. Urban Hymns’ majestic trailer singles were inevitably singled out for praise when the album emerged, yet the record seamlessly ebbed and flowed between the band’s customary psychedelic wig-outs (‘The Rolling People’, “Catching The Butterfly,” the valedictory “Come On”) and expansive, existential laments such as “Space And Time’,” “Weeping Willow” and the elegant “Sonnet.” Barely a second seemed superfluous.
With Urban Hymns, which was released in all its glory on September 29, 1997, The Verve delivered the transcendent masterpiece they’d promised all along. With the critics onside (Melody Maker hailing the record as “an album of unparalleled beauty”) and fans unanimous in their praise, Urban Hymns not only knocked Be Here Now off the top of the UK chart (where it remained for 12 weeks), but also soared to No.12 in the US and went on to sell over 10 million copies worldwide”.
Recorded between October 1996 – May 1997, Urban Hymns is a classic without a doubt. It seems, as Diffuser wrote, that Richard Ashcroft was not happy with some of the initial recordings. Urban Hymns is an album that did not fall together that quickly or easily by all accounts:
“The recordings, which began in the fall of 1996, might have been a big step forward for Ashcroft, but – for better or worse – he didn’t feel they were quite worthy of the Verve, which he determined couldn’t be the same band without McCabe on guitar. The frontman threatened to leave music completely if McCabe didn’t rejoin the band, and the guitarist complied.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Youth told Select in 1998. “Richard was always going on about what a great player Nick was. Nick rejoining could have meant re-recording the album, but Richard had to do something radical. He put himself aside and did what was best for the songs.”
And so, McCabe added guitar parts to the existing Youth-produced songs. The reunited Verve (plus Tong) then did sessions with producer Chris Potter to record some looser, more jam-based material, attempting to strike a balance between the old Verve and the new. The resulting Urban Hymns, released on Sept. 29, 1997, would feature seven recordings produced by Potter and seven by Youth.
One of those seven Youth tracks was determined to be the record’s lead single, “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” It was a catchy, circular epic partially constructed around a string sample that was taken from a 1966 symphonic recording of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time.” The Verve had received permission to use a six-note sample, but when the Stones’ former manager Allen Klein (who held the rights to the band’s early recordings) heard how heavily “Bitter Sweet Symphony” featured the repeated string motif, he sued the Verve, who settled out of court.
As the song turned into a monster single over the summer, debuting at No. 2 in the U.K., Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were given co-writing credit (with Ashcroft) and all of the song’s royalties went to Klein’s ABKCO Records. The band’s big moment proved fruitless – at least financially – and was undercut in the press by the controversy. Ashcroft could only sneer.
“This is the best song Jagger and Richards have written in 20 years,” he told Rolling Stone, pointing out that “Bitter Sweet Symphony” had outpaced any U.K. Stones single since “Brown Sugar.”
Still, the single, along with its MTV-approved video of Ashcroft insouciantly strutting down the street, turned into a smash all over the world, bringing the Verve to the attention of American music fans, who made Urban Hymns a platinum record in the States. In the band’s native Britain, the album was even bigger, producing three Top 10 singles (including the No. 1 “The Drugs Won’t Work”) and eventually selling more than 3 million copies. Critics were nearly as effusive in their praise, with the album landing on best-of lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
But the Verve didn’t appear to bask in the glow of their success for long. While on tour, Ashcroft and McCabe’s relationship became fractious again, resulting in a scuffle and the guitarist’s departure. Live performances were panned and the Verve once again fell apart, with Ashcroft disbanding the group in 1999.
In the years that followed the split, Ashcroft desired more credit for Urban Hymns, something that his former (and future) bandmates seemed all but too pleased to give him. Bassist Jones later complained that the Verve was becoming all about “strings and ballads.” McCabe expressed displeasure with the final record.
“By the time I got my parts in there it’s not really a music fan’s record. It just sits nicely next to the Oasis record,” the guitarist said. Urban Hymns “was just a safe bet for people.”
Much of the public and rock press would respectfully disagree. Urban Hymns remains in the conversation of best British albums of all time among U.K. rock writers, while “Bitter Sweet Symphony” has established itself as a Britpop classic. In 2017, a 20th anniversary deluxe edition of the album was put out by Virgin, to mostly glowing retrospective reviews. Decades after its release, maybe the guys who made the album - who have since reunited and broken up again – can even enjoy it”.
I am going to finish off with a couple of reviews. Urban Hymns was met with universal acclaim. It is an album that is beyond criticism. Nearly twenty-five years after its release, it is still being played. It sounds thrilling and wonderful in 2022. This is what NME had to say in 1997:
“THEY USED to call him mad, you know. Back in the days when The Verve were making their first enthusiastic bounds into the musical arena, at a time when bands like Carter and Senser collected all the critical and commercial bouquets, the critics dubbed Richard Ashcroft 'Mad'. That was his name: Mad Richard. Funny that. Here's one of the things he said back then, in 1993, that first earned him the 'mad' nickname.
"I hate indie music."
He said that, in 1993, before Oasis had signed a record deal, when white English guitar music was about nothing else. Here's how he followed it up:
"I'm into great music. Funkadelic, Can, Sly Stone, Neil Young, the Stones. Jazz. I can name you 50 bands who are doing OK now and in two years they will be forgotten. History will forget them. But history has a place for us. It may take three albums but we will be there."
And so it proved. Four years and two albums later, nobody calls Richard Ashcroft mad any more. If his name has to be shortened he is known simply as Richard Verve now, the skinny face that owns the voice that sings the songs of the only white guitar band to seize 1997 by its neck and shake it free of complacency. Nine months and two Verve singles into the year and even history addresses Richard Ashcroft with respect.
But step back a year, less maybe, and history had cancelled The Verve's reservation near the head of its table. Their last album, the epic 'A Northern Soul', was assured its legend as one of the decade's lost greats but the band had disintegrated, its two principal sources of inspiration, Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe, torn apart by mental and physical burn-out. The tragedy of the piece was that a band that had put so much faith solely in the power of its own music had fallen in the end on the sword of this unrequited belief. As a nation romanced Oasis with a passion that would've suited The Verve fine, the obituaries that greeted their demise were slim... lights dim, curtains close, four shattered northern souls grieve quietly backstage with family and friends.
Act Two, Scene One opens in a burst of blinding light to searing, joyous strings, to the sound of a 'Bitter Sweet Symphony', The Verve's first single since their split and the opening song of praise from this collection of 'Urban Hymns'. Its sheer magnificence and spirit is such that the danger of it overwhelming anything that follows it is obvious. This, after all, is the musical signature of the year for anyone not so out of love with music that they're satisfied with Elton John's bleeding heart. But 'Urban Hymns' is a big, big record. Its scope and depth is not too dented by boasting two anthems like 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' and the chart-topping, tear-jerking 'The Drugs Don't Work'. There are other peaks to be scaled - the apocalyptic 'The Rolling People' and 'Come On', the aching odes to love setting in and breaking down on 'Sonnet' and 'Space And Time' - and the emotional pace is largely maintained throughout, only stumbling slightly towards the end when introspection perhaps begins to fog the lens a tad. But this is a long album too - 70 minutes, if you include the hidden track that jangles spacily like some outtake from their debut 'A Storm In Heaven' album, and echoes at its close to the sound of a baby crying - and as such it casts a powerful spell”.
I am completing things by quoting AllMusic’s views on the spectacular, epic and monumental Urban Hymns. On 29th September, 1997, the world with a masterpiece. It would take The Verve until 2008 to release their next studio album, Fourth (one that is great, but not up to the dizzying heights of Urban Hymns):
“Not long after the release of A Northern Soul, the Verve imploded due to friction between vocalist Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe. It looked like the band had ended before reaching its full potential, which is part of the reason why their third album, Urban Hymns -- recorded after the pair patched things up in late 1996 -- is so remarkable. Much of the record consists of songs Ashcroft had intended for a solo project or a new group, yet Urban Hymns unmistakably sounds like the work of a full band, with its sweeping, grandiose soundscapes and sense of purpose. The Verve have toned down their trancy, psychedelic excursions, yet haven't abandoned them -- if anything, they sound more muscular than before, whether it's the trippy "Catching the Butterfly" or the pounding "Come On." These powerful, guitar-drenched rockers provide the context for Ashcroft's affecting, string-laden ballads, which give Urban Hymns its hurt. The majestic "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and the heartbreaking, country-tinged "The Drugs Don't Work" are an astonishing pair, two anthemic ballads that make the personal universal, thereby sounding like instant classics. They just are the tip of the iceberg -- "Sonnet" is a lovely, surprisingly understated ballad, "The Rolling People" has a measured, electric power, and many others match their quality. Although it may run a bit too long for some tastes, Urban Hymns is a rich album that revitalizes rock traditions without ever seeming less than contemporary. It is the album the Verve have been striving to make since their formation, and it turns out to be worth all the wait”.
Looking ahead to 29th September, I wanted to get in early and discuss the approaching twenty-fifth anniversary of The Verve’s Urban Hymns. I heard the album first when it came out. As a fourteen-year-old, it spoke to me in one way. I loved the album. The older I have got, the deeper the album has dug. It has become more profound. That time and space has only made Urban Hymns a greater and more important work. It is hard to believe it is almost twenty-five! That said, Urban Hymns is an ageless and…
TIMELESS album.