I remember vividly the first two times I heard Bitter Sweet Symphony; they were a consecutive Friday and Saturday in 1997. Back then, Top of the Pops was on a Friday night and I was 13, so it was pretty important to be on top of whatever music was coming out, even if most of it was rubbish. One Friday they showed the video for Bitter Sweet Symphony for the first time, and it pulled me in and amazed me like it did so many other people. I remember the strings and Richard Ashcroft's cocky swagger and his leather jacket and the layered vocals at the end and thinking the whole thing was so fucking cool. The next day I was sat with my dad in the car waiting whilst my mum took the cat to see the vet and The Verve came on the radio. Even without the video, I was still blown away by the song and I decided there and then that I was a fan of The Verve. I had no particular musical taste at the time and no music of my own (other than a 7" of Bryan Adam's Everything I Do (I Do it for You) that I'd bought when I was 7), so this was a pretty big moment.
Bitter Sweet Symphony blew up and was huge that summer. At the end of it, Urban Hymns came out and I bought the cd in some shop in Swindon. God knows where I got £12 to buy it at that age, but this was before cheap cds, so I probably just figured it was the only way I get to hear the album. The also-dramatic The Drugs Don't Work had been a single too so I knew there'd be at least two good songs on it. At that age, if you liked something you had to love it, and I'd spent a long time ranting to my friends about how great The Verve were and how great their album would be. Given that it was the first album I bought, I have no idea what I was basing that on.
Anyway, Urban Hymns turned out to be a pretty sprawling and varied record. I was way too young to understand quite how many drugs they were on, but enjoyed it nonetheless. For me, the album fell naturally into four parts (although not the way they're split on the vinyl): there was the accessible pop part consisting of the first four songs, the druggy mind-fuck of Catching the Butterfly through to Weeping Willow, the secretly great songs hidden away at the end, and finally the crazed Come On. Despite not getting it at all, I quite enjoyed the druggy shoe-gaze tracks, but it was songs like One Day, This Time and Velvet Morning that made me feel like I'd found this secret stash of songs no one else knew about and those people who only heard the singles wouldn't get to find out about them. My favourite changed between those three songs almost weekly, although it was always really Bitter Sweet Symphony.
Fifteen years later the album is still great. Unlike most of the other albums of that age I've written about on here, I've been listening to this album for all of those fifteen years. Sure, there have been some large gaps in there, but it's nice to know that a record I've been playing for more than half my life can still be one of my favourites. Weeping Willow and Come On stand out particularly as highlights now. I became a pretty big fan of The Verve and A Northern Soul even beat Urban Hymns in my list of the best albums of the 1990's I made a few years ago.
I spent a while thinking I should pick up a vinyl copy of Urban Hymns but never really putting the effort in to win copies on eBay. I eventually decided to order a copy into Spillers as one of my Tuesday-Records-From-Spillers, but with a bigger goal in mind. Since Urban Hymns occupies row #1 in my record+cd collection spreadsheet, I though it might be nice for it to occupy another significant number, and row #1000 was fast approaching. Unfortunately, due to some miscounting, the Urban Hymns LP sits in #1006 (with #1000 taken by the Tuesday-Record-From-Spillers from three weeks earlier - Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin by O'Death - a nice but in no way significant record). Spillers had to import Urban Hymns, but £20 is worth it to have this record in my racks.
I saw The Verve once, at Glastonbury in 2008. My friends and I were working on the bar for our friend's uncle's charity (our wages went to charity but in return we got free entrance to the festival and more free alcohol than we could handle). Unfortunately our shift clashed with The Verve's set, but our bar overlooked the main stage and I took a long break to catch some songs from a better angle with my friend Olly. When they played Bitter Sweet Symphony, I was having such a good time I didn't even care that I was stuck behind the bar. That song played such a huge part in me becoming the music fan I am today that it's almost impossible to explain. Bitter Sweet Symphony is definitely up there amongst the top three, if not number one, in the list of "Songs that Changed my Life".
Format: Double 12", picture sleeves
Tracks: 13
Cost: £20 new
Bought: Spillers
When: 23/10/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
