“That music comes from a long, long time ago. Long enough for it to feel like it was another person in another place... like it’s not really me.”
Nick McCabe, guitarist with The Verve when they were still a going concern, is talking about his former band and the re-release of their 2004 greatest hits collection, This is Music: The Singles.
“At the same time, I am aware that time can bring perspective to bear,” he adds with a grin. “As a 53-year-old man, I can look back and think, ‘Not bad... not bad at all’. There are some painful memories, too. I was sacked in 1995 and I knew that I had to clean my act up - I was enjoying myself a bit too much! But that break allowed me to go away, look at life, look at myself, all the rest of it. Then, when I was invited back into the band, we made Urban Hymns.”
Urban Hymns was the Wigan band’s third album and one that allowed them to soar in the same bright, Britpop skies as the era’s linchpins, Oasis and Blur. Songs like "The Drugs Don’t Work" and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" were not only huge hits, but gave Britpop - a term McCabe isn’t particularly comfortable with - a ragged, soulful wisdom that was sadly lacking from much of the late-’90s music.
It seems rather bizarre then that, during McCabe’s enforced hiatus, it was futuristic digital technology that helped him find inspiration and a way forward. The producer Owen Morris (Oasis, Ash, Madness and the Verve’s second album, A Northern Soul) once described McCabe as “the most gifted musician I’ve ever worked with,” but also admitted that he was a producer’s nightmare because he would never play the same piece of music twice.
“I suppose I took the idea of spontaneity to its extreme,” McCabe laughs. “I love the idea of a live band, feeding off each other and the audience, and I thought every bit of music had to be ‘in the moment’.
“One of my favourite bands is Can, well-known for the improvisational nature of their music. Well-known for getting into the studio and letting the tape run and run and run. But then I thought about their working process and realised that after they’d collected all the tapes together, they would start the editing process. Looking for individual pockets of magic.
“During that period when I’d been sacked, I started playing around with things like Pro Tools and realised that I didn’t need to create perfection every time I plugged in my guitar. Yes, I’d always wanted Verve’s music to have a spontaneous, natural feel, but it wasn’t a crime if I got a bit of help from technology. I started to look at making an album like editing a film... it didn’t have to all be done in one flawless take.”
In that sense, did technology change how McCabe played the guitar? Has his playing continued to change? If he was recording some of those classic Verve singles today, would the guitar parts be different?
“It’s that old adage, isn’t it,” he laughs. “You spend six months making a record and you think you’re making the best music you’ve ever made in your life. Then the album is released and you think it’s the worst music you’ve ever made. Considering how fucked we were, I think we can all look back with a certain amount of pride on This is Music, but I still feel that the stuff I’m making today is much better. I’ve been working with Pete and Simon from the band, plus a whole bunch of other great artists. I don’t want to just sit here and remember what I’ve already done... I want to imagine all the stuff I can still do.”
McCabe didn’t actually pick up a guitar until he was 15. Prior to that, he’d played brass in the school band and noodled around on a Roland SH-101 picked up at a local junk shop. But the minute his dad brought back a slightly knackered acoustic, he was hooked.
“I had older brothers who were listening to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, but I seemed to get naturally caught up in punk and post-punk: PiL, Stranglers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, Joy Division. Guitarists like John McGeogh [PiL, Magazine, Siouxsie and the Banshees], Hugh Cornwell [Stranglers], Keith Levine [Pil, The Clash] and Geordie Walker [Killing Joke]. When I heard Levine and John Lydon talking about PiL, they were namechecking Can, Captain Beefheart and King Tubby, so I started investigating all of that. Hearing stuff and thinking, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Bands who were taking the guitar to all these strange places.
“Me, Richard, Pete and Simon were together at sixth form college, but we all came from different musical backgrounds. Pete was a Santana fan; Si was listening to folk; Richard was apparently a Bros fan but found what he was after with the Stone Roses. Put us all together with a bit of Funkadelic, early hip-hop, Northern Soul from Wigan Casino, the Stooges, the Mondays and it came out as Verve.
“Equipment-wise, I had a Marshall in the early days, but Mesa Boogie became my thing ’cos I liked the sound of the active EQ. I bought multiple versions of the Ibanez FL-303 flanger pedal, an Alesis Quadraverb, a Gibson 335, a black Strat and a 65 Jazzmaster that I picked up for 75 quid from a local secondhand shop. Ah, those were the days. I’ve always had a few synths knocking around, too, and I’ve gone back to messing about with electronic music... back to my days with the SH-101. Platform-wise, I moved to Logic after Pro Tools, but if I was starting out today, I would probably go for Reaper. I like how it works.
“All of the tech stuff has come in handy because I now teach music technology and talk to a lot of students who want to make dance music. Yes, I do come across a lot of young musicians who are caught up in specific genres - house, drum ‘n’ bass or what have you - but there will always be people who want to look beyond the usual boundaries. It’s quite reassuring, really, knowing that music is constantly searching for something new.
“If I think back to my own childhood, that was part of the job if you were a music fan. A magpie mentality. I remember going to the library and seeing albums by Miles Davis, Tomita, Faust, Yes... bringing them home and, even though I might not have completely understood them, there was something that made me want to listen.”
Despite his old bandmate, Richard Ashcroft, being out and about this summer on the massive Oasis reunion tour, McCabe offers little more than a slightly apologetic shrug when I mention the current vogue for all things Britpop.
“I could never see the connection with the Verve, really. I had nothing against Britpop at all and there was some amazing music that came out of it, but it wasn’t the sound that we wanted to make. In the early days, it was actually Oasis supporting us, but that changed very quickly. I suppose it was easy to look at what was happening to Oasis and think, ‘Yeah, I want a bit of that’. There’d always been a pop element to us - even when we were making eight-minute songs - and it wasn’t much of a jump to get to something like Urban Hymns.
“Problem is that it’s very easy to get trapped by a genre. I have to be very careful here, because I’m not talking about anyone or any band specifically. It’s just that, personally, I’ve always preferred a no-filter, omnivorous approach to music. Take anything that comes your way, stuff it into the mix and see what happens. That’s still how I look at music and... it still makes me happy.”
Nick McCabe’s Top 5 guitarists
Jimi Hendrix
“Why? Because he’s Jimi Hendrix. Prior to Jimi, the guitar had rules; after Jimi, no rules. Plus, he was a Coronation Street fan! Have a listen to Third Stone from the Sun; there’s a touch of the Corrie theme tune in there. He used to love watching it on tour.”
Eddie Hazel
“Parliament, Funkadelic... I guess he was Hendrix’s first heir apparent. Taking what had gone before him, then adding his own mind blowing take on it.”
Robin Guthrie
“Bit of a wild tangent from the last two, but I’ve always thought that Guthrie is one of those amazing guitarists that slipped through the cracks. People didn’t realise how good he was. He turned the sound of the guitar into a language!”
Vini Reilly and all the post-punk lot like John McGeogh, Keith Levine and Geordie Walker.
“I remember hearing Jaz Coleman [Killing Joke vocalist] talking about Geordie and saying that he was able to add a little poison to the melody. A wonderful description!”
The Barry White Guitar Pit
“Bit of a cheat, this one. So many great names like Melvin Ragin, David T Walker. I’ll chuck Dennis Coffey in there, too, for the same reasons: texture, right amount of twist, tasty lines that are neither lead nor rhythm, but do the job of both.”
- Source: MusicRadar, by Danny Scott
- Kudos: Jesse
