More details on the store website: https://shop.theverveband.com/
 |
| Richard Ashcroft holds a tin of Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, 1997 |
Northern Heart films has announced that they are working with Richard Ashcroft on a special anniversary film project. The film will screen to 23,000 fans during Richard Ashcroft's ‘Homecoming’ shows at Robin Park, Wigan on July 20-21. Northern Heart is an award-winning film and digital studio based in Wigan, England.
Northern Heart said:
"It’s official, we’re working on a special film for Richard Ashcroft which will screen to 23,000 people during his special ‘Homecoming’ shows at Robin Park arena in Wigan this July."
Richard Ashcroft said:
“I’m really excited to be working with Northern Heart Films as there’s a lot I’ve seen and heard about the company that’s exciting.
It’s exciting that they’re offering people from the area an opportunity to expand their skills and I think that’s commendable.
You want to work with talented people and you want to work with people with the right mindset.
We know we’ll make something good together in the end.”
Natasha Hawthornthwaite, Co-Founder Northern Heart Films adds:
“We’re absolutely thrilled to be working with Richard and his management team on this special anniversary film that will be used as an entrance film for his iconic shows.
It’s been lovely meeting Richard and helping bring his ideas to life. It’s a really great opportunity for us and one we’re putting a lot of love into.
We want to make something special as we know how important these homecoming performances are for him. We can’t wait to make this film and support our town and local people along the way.”
 |
| Scott Bradley, Richard Ashcroft and Natasha Hawthornthwaite |
By J. Adams
Two of the most fearsome words in the entire rock ‘n’ roll lexicon: solo career. The genre is strewn with the wreckage of great and near-great bands that shattered into lesser side projects, seldom managing to summon the magic that attracted a mass audience in the first place.
There are some exceptions: Van Morrison was better off on his own than with Them, I prefer Clapton to Cream and maybe even Simon without Garfunkel. But, generally speaking, creatives tend to be better off collaborating and butting heads with stubborn equals rather than commanding pliant employees.
The most iconic archetypes are the individual Beatles, of course, who’d been well on the way to becoming solo acts before finally formally breaking up in 1970. But even as they were writing together less and less, and recording more and more of their parts separately, there was still that lingering inertia and competitiveness and need to live up to the legacy brand name providing some quality control.
I’m hardcore enough a fan to love each Beatle’s solo discography, with a soft spot even for Ringo’s ill-advised foray into disco. Yet it’s hard to ignore that, but for John’s stark Plastic Ono Band and George’s lavish All Things Must Pass (which both included Ringo), there aren’t too many tracks that wouldn’t obviously have benefited from the others’ input. The scattered songs featuring one another are almost invariably the highlights of any particular album, bringing out each other’s strengths, but there were fewer and fewer of those as time went on. I quite liked Sir Paul’s Covid-era McCartney III, recorded entirely on his own, but it didn’t attract half the excitement as the subsequent “Now and Then,” the apparently final Beatles song as finagled by overdubs on an old John demo enhanced by algorithmic witchcraft.
By early 1970, there were certainly what felt like lots of good reasons to break up and stay that way: the distracting Yoko, the rapacious manager Allen Klein, the tiresome legal and financial squabbles, the sheer exhaustion of having run at maximum throttle for years, and the likelihood of each doing plenty well without having to compromise with the others. But after five decades plus, whatever the egos and rationales, it feels like a missed opportunity—the fellas should have taken a few years off for vacation and family and resolving legalities and getting whatever solo larks out of their systems before convening again fresh to get back to getting the best out of one another. But alas, fans are left to sift for minor gems on mostly mediocre records.
The ultimate example of ‘solo-itis’ might well be one of my all-time favorite bands, The Verve, often considered one-hit wonders in North America for the megahit “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but who got huge in their native U.K. and Europe with several big singles from the multiplatinum Urban Hymns back in the late ’90s, including “Lucky Man” and “The Drugs Don’t Work.” They’d been an inherently combustible combo from the beginning, their unique cosmic intrigue derived from the foundational clash between the pop classicism of the brilliant frontman and emerging singer-songwriter Richard Ashcroft and the oceanic grooves of the rest of the band—especially the enigmatic guitar genius Nick McCabe.
I once submitted a book proposal about the fraught sessions piecing together The Verve’s big breakthrough. They’d barely survived (literally) the making and touring of their second LP, and perhaps mercifully broken up shortly thereafter. Yet within weeks the restless Ashcroft had reunited everybody except for his primary foil, bringing in a more miscellaneous guitarist, and begun months of lukewarm journeyman rehearsals and recordings nowhere near releasable. It was only when in desperation he’d swallowed his pride and given McCabe an apologetic phone call that the classic record really started to come together.
Some of the sessions were new jams, some were revived old chestnuts, some were judicious overdubs on material already taped—and it all took tons of painful compromise, as increasingly revealed across various bootlegs over the years. But by mid-1997 it had come together into something extraordinary, almost like a more romantic and spiritual Oasis. Urban Hymns wasn’t quite a psychedelic cult classic like the band’s previous works, but delivered the essential sound to a vastly larger audience.
Inherent in the “Verve voodoo,” as the band’s chronic dysfunction had become known, was that they’d inevitably become victims of their own success—and indeed Ashcroft quickly jumped ship for a solo career bringing along only the drummer. Even as he evolved as a singer and songwriter, he seemed obsessively intent on proving he’d never needed the others, working mainly with forgettable yes-men and botching the bulk of his recordings even as reviews soured and sales declined. And it wasn’t like the rest of the band were covering themselves in glory, either, on what little they were up to.
So a lucrative reformation seemed increasingly in the cards, especially after Ashcroft performed “Bitter Sweet Symphony” with Coldplay at Live 8. I was as pumped as anyone when a big reunion was announced late in Urban Hymns’ 10th anniversary year, not just touring Britain and beyond but recording again anew. The Verve were outstanding when they came to New York, especially the second night, even as it was palpable that these people didn’t like each other too much. A new album, Forth, came out that summer just as the band was disintegrating again with even more acrimony than before; even if the record was clearly a Pro Tools-assembled race against time before the impending implosion, it was still easily the best thing any of them had released in a decade.
Over the next number of years Richard Ashcroft attempted a hip-hop inflected comeback with the dubious “United Nations of Sound” that sank like a stone, and Nick McCabe and the bassist embarked upon their own new band, eventually known as Black Submarine, which released its lone album New Shores ten years ago this spring. Fans had long dreamed that McCabe and co. would at last release a sprawling opus of mind-melting soundscapes, just like the old days. But the eventual self-released LP was curiously muted, a tentative compromise between the Verve-y psychedelia audiences wanted and its own gothier tangents. There were a handful of great tracks that could almost stand toe to toe with The Verve, but not enough for the record to catch fire or attract much notice.
After some years of silence Ashcroft eventually reemerged with a couple of pretty decent solo albums clustered around Urban Hymns’ 20th anniversary, and lots of headlining festivals as backed by generic hired hands. When he’s hungry, with something to prove, I’ve seen Richard Ashcroft rate among the all-time greats, but he’s been phoning it in for years. Nick McCabe, for his part, has uploaded several hours of spacey noodling onto his Bandcamp. It's pretty excellent if you’re into that kind of thing—to my ear McCabe belongs in the conversation with sonic auteurs like Brian Eno and Kevin Shields—but perhaps not about to inspire the multitudes.
As a fan, it’s an utter tragedy: that a toxic stew of pride and ego and resentment prevents these immensely talented artists from achieving peak performance together. Year by year, song by song and show by show, the opportunity costs of operating without one another grow more and more egregious. And in that respect, it’s reminiscent of what’s been happening across our fragmented society, with people retreating into self-indulgent “safe spaces” affirming all their priors.
Read the rest at The Ivy Exile
J. Adams is a New York-based writer and critic. His previous writings include: Lacking Verve: Richard Ashcroft’s acoustic hits underwhelm (2021), Bitter Sweet Twilight: A Rock Legend Embraces Middle Age (2018), Urban Hymns and What Might Have Been: The Verve's lost tracks in review (2018), The Captain Returns: Richard Ashcroft’s These People In Review (2016), Black Submarine – Selections from the Java Heat Soundtrack (2013) and A Critique of RPA & The United Nations of Sound (2010).
MSC Cruises is ushering in 2024 with a new global marketing campaign titled “For a Greater Beauty.” The cruise line will launch the new integrated marketing initiative in more than 30 countries. The campaign aims to encourage audiences to “discover the beauty of cruising in a more conscious way with a profound respect for the ocean and the planet,” per the cruise line. Crews filmed the TV ad aboard MSC World Europa, which is the line’s first vessel to run on liquefied natural gas.
In the 30-second TV spot, “Beauty” is personified as a woman’s voice. As the opening notes of The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” play in the background, she asks: “Can you see me? I’m here in pure wonders reached with a cleaner fuel. Can you hear me in the loudest music and in quieter propellers? Can you spot me in the lights of the show and in the shimmering sea?”
Richard Ashcroft has recreated the music video for The Verve’s "Bitter Sweet Symphony" for Sky Sports.
The singer recreated the visual accompaniment to the 1997 hit for a Sky Sports promotion of Formula One, and filmed the clips a couple of days before last week’s British Grand Prix 2023 kicked off.
Instead of walking the streets of London as in the original video, Ashcroft is seen performing the track around the UK’s Silverstone Circuit, which hosted the first British Grand Prix in 1948. The footage also features retro footage from previous Grand Prixs, including footage of the audience.
Arriving over a quarter of a century ago, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" remains The Verve’s most popular song, and first appeared as part of their third studio album Urban Hymns.
This isn’t the first time that the frontman has revisited the single in the time since its release. Back in 2021, the singer re-recorded the hit for his Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1 album. In a three-star review, NME said: “Opener ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ is a sprawling, symphonic masterpiece reworked acoustically to allow Ashcroft’s gravelly vocals to take centre stage over subtle piano keys and twanging guitar chords.”
That same year, Ashcroft also revealed that Netflix showed interest in making a docuseries documenting the infamous copyright dispute revolving around the song.
The band were involved in a row with The Rolling Stones’ former manager Allen Klein over its sampling of the Stones’ "The Last Time". The dispute was resolved in 2019, with Ashcroft and The Verve no longer having to pay royalties to Klein’s company ABKCO.
“I saw an absolutely terrible script Netflix were going to do about "Bitter Sweet Symphony". It was an insight into just how far from reality these shows can go,” he said at the time. “It was an absolute piece of garbage. It’s quite scary [that] someone wanted to make it and make people believe it was the reality. I hope it doesn’t happen."
Currently, Ashcroft is embarking on a series of live performances around the UK, with a slot at Sheffield’s Tramlines festival set for later this week, as well as a gig at Englefield House in Reading on Saturday (July 22).
The Album First Came Out on June 21, 1993
A century ago Rudolf Otto cultivated the concept of the “numinous” (from the Latin “numen,” “the divine, magic spirit of a place”), envisioned as “mysterium tremendum fascinans” (“mysterious, terrifying, and fascinating”). Romain Rolland called this the “oceanic feeling.” Carl Jung thought that the numinous could be a healing experience for the human psyche. Aldous Huxley associated the numinous with the psychedelic drug experience in his Doors of Perception.
During seven weeks at Sawmills Studio on the River Fowey in Golant, Cornwall, four young men in the band Verve (singer Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe were only 21 years old) recorded their debut album with producer John Leckie, who had previously worked as an audio engineer for Pink Floyd in the 1970s. These seven weeks of recording resulted in 10 tracks that are deeply numinous and often oceanic. This is also reflected in the album’s title, A Storm in Heaven. The album art by Brian Cannon completely summarizes the album’s mission statement, a front cover with a womb like cave and a figure of rebirth and a back cover with an old man giving a peace sign in a cemetery. A Storm in Heaven was released June 21, 1993, back when the band was just Verve and not The Verve, and four years before releasing the very different sounding hit “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” one of the defining songs of the ’90s. A Storm in Heaven stood apart from other albums that decade (and subsequent albums in the band’s discography) because of Nick McCabe’s guitar soundscapes.
“Star Sail” is a mind blowing opening song, with bassist Simon Jones and the band’s friend Mark Corley on choral background vocals while Ashcroft sings from a God’s eye point of view (“throwing stones from the stars on your mixed up world”) and McCabe’s space rock guitar soars. According to McCabe, the celestial textures of “Star Sail” were from the Eventide 3000, what he described as the “best effects box ever made.” “Slide Away” is sculpted from Jones’ opening bass groove while McCabe’s guitar flies into Ashcroft’s “night skies.” “Already There” is the album’s cosmic centerpiece, Peter Salisbury’s subtle tribal tom percussion and the lyrics at their most poetic (“If trees cut stars and eyes to heaven/I’ll bend them back and bend them again”), while McCabe’s Alesis Quadraverb effects on his guitar sound like a harp submerged underground and underwater. In a conversation with me, McCabe describes “Beautiful Mind” as “Van Gogh’s Starry Night contained in a snow globe.” McCabe used a Chorus Strings 2 effects patch on his guitar and a Solid State Bass Amp with “graphic eq tweak for sparkle.” McCabe says he “was very stoned, lots of red wine” and that the guitar on this track “seemed about four miles deep.”
The first four songs on A Storm in Heaven guide the listener on a mystical voyage. The album changes with the climax, the last track on the first side, “The Sun, The Sea.” McCabe exclaims that he was “power tripping with a Mesa Boogie Mark III!” The delicate, ethereal guitar of the first four tracks is now a hurricane accompanied by a free jazz freakout horn section.
The album’s sequencing is superb as there is an instrumental and lyrical shift on the second side. “Virtual World” has a spare, stark introduction that differs completely from the more psychedelic songs on the first side. After the high, the come down. All of the songs on the second side (with the exception of the last minute appended rock single “Blue”) had acoustic versions, as well, the second side of the album being a return to earth after the otherworldly explorations of the first side. “Virtual World” is Ashcroft’s contemplation of death (“I can see it now, the hearse”) while Yvette Lacey’s flute lightens the melancholy mood. The acoustic version of “Virtual World” (featured in the 2016 collector’s deluxe reissue) is graveyard blues, deeply haunting slide guitar by McCabe—he says he used the Crystal Echoes effect on the Eventide 3000 to enhance the ghostly vibes.
“Make It ‘Till Monday” is a meditation by Ashcroft about surviving a drug trip over a weekend (“another Friday night waiting for a revelation, I can see a million faces in the condensation”), McCabe’s guitar and keyboard visualizing these misty vapors. The acoustic version is early morning foggy folk. “Blue” continues the drug motif with a violent, wild story about the dark side of ecstasy, the power of the track is Salisbury’s backwards drum loops. “Butterfly” was, similar to “Virtual World,” a late night improvisation, the Kick Horns (from “The Sun, The Sea”) making another appearance and adding to the tempestuous atmosphere. The closing track, “See You in the Next One” is a plaintive, poignant song (possibly written from Ashcroft’s mother’s perspective to Ashcroft’s father who died young when Ashcroft was only 11 years old), the accordion and piano are nostalgic and plangent. “May be a lifetime before I see you again.”
I first heard A Storm in Heaven at the age of 16. My childhood best friend had tragically drowned at the age of 15 that summer. A Storm in Heaven spoke to my soul during this sad time. I met Nick McCabe and thanked him in person for his music the 10th anniversary of my friend’s death. I will never forget hearing the album on my headphones during my summer wanderings through Cornwall and Wales. The album saved my life at the end of my 20s when I was in a deep depression. I will never forget hearing the album on my headphones as I stargazed in the spring in the Gila Wilderness or now in my 30s sharing it this year with my international students at United World College in New Mexico, my teenage students now the same age as I was when I first heard this masterpiece, all of us staring out of the classroom windows at the swirling snow.
When I am at my darkest depths, Ashcroft’s lyrics and McCabe’s music enlighten and illuminate me. “You can do anything you want to/All you got to do is try,” Ashcroft sings in “Already There.” “I thought the best days had left me/My best years had left me behind/Then I watched them come back/If my skin looks tired and old from living/I’ll turn right back and live it again/ I’ll be hearing music ‘till the day I die.”
A Storm in Heaven is a masterpiece, still as mesmerizing 30 years later as it was when it was first released.
Liner notes:
"Improvised early 2023, part of an ongoing practice of variable feedback looping (see also We Are Are We).
Unreconstructed from the two sessions, captured by Sound Devices recorder, microphones in M/S, meaning interaction in the room is audible.
Being a vérité recording = no value assumptions. Amp noise is free.
Released May 28, 2023
All live. Guitar, hum, post processing, Nick McCabe."
The Verve were one of the greatest bands of the 1990s. From the psyche-infused shoegaze of the Verve EP and their debut album A Storm In Heaven right to the anthems of Urban Hymns, the stage presence and lyricism of Richard Ashcroft and the glorious guitar tones of Nick McCabe made the Verve the essential British rock band of the late 21st century.
As for Ashcroft himself, in the early days, he was cruelly tagged with the nickname ‘Mad Richard’. He was known to say some outlandish things in interviews – for instance (via NME), “I believe you can fly, and I believe in astral travel” – dance around on stage in skimpy clothing and bare feet and write at length about his deepest dreams and fears in his songs.
In hindsight, especially considering the strides that have been made in mental health in the music industry, it was a truly unnecessary and lazy thing to call one of the greatest vocalists, lyricists and frontmen of his generation.
In 2018, Ashcroft fired back at those early journalists who called him such a name. “That image of Richard Ashcroft keeping his shit together, marrying someone and having a family and not fucking up, funnily enough, wasn’t the image that people wanted projecting,” he told Radio X’s John Kennedy, “which I think says a lot of where we are now.”
It’s true that Ashcroft got it in the neck when he was just trying to make a living as a musician. “It was all about death, negativity and nihilism – that was the engine of this industry,” he added. “That’s why Kurt Cobain’s estate earns so much now. Death sells in this industry, nihilism… They want that to be projected at all times.”
The Verve frontman went on to highlight the fact that he was writing about his mental struggles, and the press still seemed to go after him without concern for how it may affect his mood. “So when you’re suddenly saying, hang on a minute, I was in this crazy band, and I was this lunatic. Check me out now. So not only were you calling me ‘Mad Richard’ when I was a kid… So now we’re all so right on about mental illness now, though, aren’t we?”
“But I was ‘Mad Richard’ then a few years later I was picking up an Ivor Novello Award for ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’,” he forcefully added. “So, who’s the mad one? Who’s the mad one?” That Urban Hymns classic single alone ought to prove that Ashcroft was doing his bit for mental health long before anyone cared about it as they do today.
Ashcroft then went on to note how people take the wild claims of Kanye West with a pinch of salt, given his mental disorders, but none of the press in the 1990s gave Ashcroft a second consideration. “So you’ve got Kanye saying people are exploiting him for being bipolar,” he said. “Did Kanye have, for the first X amount of years of his career, did he have the prefix ‘mad’ before his name? No, he didn’t.”
Further highlighting the hypocritical nature of journalists, Ashcroft continued, “And would any of these oh-so PC journalists now do the same thing to anyone else? Oh no, they wouldn’t.” And the Britpop icon now wears that title with pride. “So I’m proud of that tag,” he added. “You can call me mad. Call me mad. Ban me from music at school, don’t let me take it as a GCSE, ban me from art, call me the cancer of the class because it’s all food for me. It’s motivation.” Fair play to you, Richard.
Richard Ashcroft claims that some of his songs are “so powerful” that they take on a life of their own, including this classic Urban Hymns track.
Richard Ashcroft has admitted that some of his songs are so powerful that they are “beyond him” - including the classic 1997 track "Sonnet."
But The Verve almost didn’t release the song as a single from their hugely-popular album Urban Hymns.
The reason? "Sonnet" would have been fourth single to be taken from the LP.
The band didn’t want to milk the album too much; in fact, by the time the single was released, it was a full six months after the parent album hit stores, but their label Hut insisted.
The Verve’s label Hut insisted that they capitalize on the band’s huge fame at the time, so the band agreed to the single release - but only if it was as a limited edition.
The track was issued as 12”, limited to just 5,000 copies, which came in a cardboard envelope that you could stash the rest of your Urban Hymns singles in. The single was issued to shops on 2 March 1998 and crept to a lowly No 74 in the UK charts.
Despite the low-key release twenty three years ago, Richard Ashcroft still admits that "Sonnet" can still move an audience.
He told Radio Xt: “Songs like Sonnet… they’re so powerful, they’re beyond me and I think that’s an exciting thing.
“What’s good is that now I’m in a position where each drop of new material just makes [picking a] setlist a problem - it’s like having an incredible team, you know?”
"Yes, there's love if you want it
Don't sound like no sonnet, my lord"
In fact, Ashcroft can’t choose a favorite song out of his solo back catalogue and his work with The Verve.
He explained: “The only way I can answer that is by saying: Which one out of those tunes sums up that feeling best?
“Looking back at them all, I’ve got a new song on this album called That’s How Strong, then I go through things that people don’t even know, like Brave New World.”