The Verve - The Verve EP

Despite loving the first three Verve albums when I was a teenager - and again at various points throughout my adulthood - I've never really cracked their b-sides and early EPs. I suspect timing was an issue - I got the No Come Down compilation when I was 21, six long years after I'd got all their proper albums (a long time at that age), and it just wasn't what I was into at the time (the same day I bought cds by Thursday and the Murder City Devils). I'd seen it about for years and knew I should have bought it sooner, but just never did. In the end, I bought a copy on the other side of the world to where I'd been when I got into them.

I can see the parallels between these songs and those on A Storm in Heaven, but these are far more psychedelic and wandering, compared to the slightly more concise and hard-hitting songs on that album. She's a Superstar, their second single, has hints of those themes they'd lean into later, but it doesn't do loads for me. I'd known of the song Gravity Grave from early on, but I don't see the fuss. Endless Life is five minutes where nothing happens at all and Feel isn't much better (and twice as long).

Anyway, when this record was announced for Record Store Day in 2013, I knew I wanted it even if I wasn't familiar with the exact release, or what songs were on it. I remember opening the sleeve for Urban Hymns when I was 13 and seeing all the single, EP and album covers and just thinking it was really cool to see - I suspect that was an influence on me becoming a record collector - but it was also kinda daunting. It definitely instilled the idea that having a vast collection of Verve releases would be cool, even if it wasn't something I'd actively indulged in.

Format: 12"
Tracks: 5
Cost: £12 new
Bought: Banquet Records, Kingston
When: 20/04/13
Colour: Transparent red
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Verve - Forth

Forth probably isn't a bad record, but it's certainly not one that needs to be exist. That sounds bad, but it's proving to be the case for most new-albums-from-reformed-bands. I listen to the first three Verve albums a lot still, each with it's own charms; I almost never play Forth. 2008, when it came out, was eleven years after I'd got Urban Hymns and eight years after I'd got A Storm in Heaven and A Northern Soul; moreover, I was 24 rather than a teenager, listening to punk-rock and had just been to my first All Tomorrow's Parties - The Verve weren't a cool band in the same way the other bands I was listening to were.

That said, 2008 was also the only time I'd ever see The Verve, and I was so fucking excited. It was Glastonbury and we were working on the bar in exchange for free tickets. I was pretty gutted that our Sunday shift was when they were playing, but our bar faced the main stage, so I got to watch from behind the bar, and took my break in the middle of their set. I sang along to Bittersweet Symphony with a bunch of drunk people I'd just sold beer to. I don't want to understate the impact that song had on my life - it was the first song that made me genuinely feel anything about music and I wouldn't be sat here writing about my records had I not heard it. Watching The Verve that day was purely about satisfying teenage-me, and it more than did the job.

If The Verve making a new album is the price we had to pay for them to reform and play shows, then this album is worth it. I got to the see The Verve, which is something I never thought I would do. I remember watching their Haigh Hall set live on the BBC and hearing that they were breaking up and feeling so annoyed that I came to them slightly too late. I'm very pleased I was there the second time around.

Is it a bad album? I mean, maybe. There's no way to hear it without the context of the three albums that came before it, the three albums that had already been played more times than this album could ever expect to be heard. Richard Ashcroft had started his dubious solo career and that would taint the enjoyment here - Rather Be is crazy-catchy but feels like a step further away from the direction they'd gone on Urban Hymns, and sounds more like a Richard Ashcroft solo song than a Verve song, which isn't that surprising when you see that he has the sole credit on it. Love is Noise is somehow both really annoying and one of the best songs on the album. Not sure how they managed that. Valium Skies was also a highlight, and the song I find in my head after playing the album. The closer, Appalachian Springs finally sees them letting loose, which is a long time coming. A whole album of songs like that would have worked for me.

Side B is entirely underwhelming - there are hints of the spaciness of the earlier albums, but executed in the most unexciting way. It's early for the album to start dragging. I See Houses has a chorus that has some bite, but musically is still too restrained; if they'd let themselves go for it, it could have been one of the best songs on the album. Noise Epic has one of those titles that you just know isn't going to deliver - it was a big promise and the six songs that proceed it suggest that they're never going to get as noisy or epic as they used to. It gets going eventually, but in the context of the rest of the album feels a bit out of place. There are two bonus tracks that aren't on the cd album: Ma Ma Soul and Muhammad Ali. The first sounds like a mid-career b-side, that is to say, I actually quite like it. The second has a bit more power than a lot of the album tracks, but isn't particularly memorable.

Partly to appease teenage-me, but also because I had genuinely loved seeing the band play that summer, I bought Forth on the day it came out as my Tuesday-record-from-Spillers that week. I knew it was never going to be the "classic" that the hype sticker (quoting the NME) claimed. Nearly a year later, the Virgin Megastore in Cardiff was closing down and everything was dirt cheap, so I bought a lot of cds. One such album was the cd and dvd edition of Forth for £6. The LP hadn't come with a download code so it felt worth it to get the mp3s, plus I wanted to watch the dvd to see the band play live again (the reissues of the original albums would provide much better live shows on dvd, but I wasn't to know that back then). I remember seeing the ridiculous boxset version of the album quite cheap a few times as well, but given that it just contained this double LP and the cd and dvd, I had no need for it.

Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve, picture sleeves
Tracks: 12
Cost: £19 new
Bought: Spillers Records, Cardiff
When: 27/08/08
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: none

The Verve - A Storm in Heaven

When you sit down and listen to them - really listen to them - the three albums The Verve released in the 90's were all incredibly different to each other. It's not a realisation I've always had, but over the 17 years I've been listening to them, each has stood out at different points in time as being the best. I hope in another 17 years, I'll have cycled through them all again.

Urban Hymns was the first album I ever bought, having had my mind blown away by Bitter Sweet Symphony. That was in October of 1997; a full year later, I'd get my second album (This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours by the Manics) so it's easy to imagine quite how much play Urban Hymns got in early teens. By 2000 I had a Saturday job so could start to buy music at faster pace and amongst the first 25 purchases was The Verve's debut album, A Storm in Heaven, bought second hand at a record fair for a mere £5. I remember on the first listen enjoying it, but not as much as I hoped. Then The Sun, The Sea hit and I was knocked back. For some reason I was going out for dinner with my family that night, but I can still remember sitting on the floor in my room listening to the album before we went out and just being blown away by how heavy that song was.

The mistake I made was an easy one to make - I wasn't listening to the album loud enough. If you really crank the volume, Star Sail and Slide Away are songs of enormous proportions, and a huge duo to open the album. Put the volume even louder and Beautiful Mind sounds perfect. To my 15-year-old brain, it was floaty and did very little - I can still see how it's possible to think that (this was pre-, if not on the cusp of, nu-metal, so I was listening to a lot of stuff a lot heavier), but now I can see that it doesn't need to (necessarily) be heavy to all-encompassing, it can be shoegaze if you play it at the right volume. But, fuck me, those guitars at the start of The Sun, The Sea will snap you right out of that daze at any volume.

For a long time, in my teens and my early 20's, The Sun, The Sea was the only thing I really listened to A Storm in Heaven for (maybe a bit of Blue too - how I could have overlooked Slide Away for so long I don't know). Of course, the earlier of those years were dominated by Urban Hymns, and then for a while I considered A Northern Soul my favourite Verve album - I mean it had History on and, for a man who was made a music fan by hearing Bitter Sweet Symphony, how could I not fall in love with History. More recently, I've come to think that A Storm in Heaven might be my favourite Verve album. There's something brilliantly simple about it. History wouldn't have worked on an album like this. In fact, listening to it now, it's hard to imagine that they'd go on to write anything like that at all. The pained horns on The Sun, The Sea are almost the exact opposite of the strings that would provide the obvious highlights on their later albums.

Recently, they re-released the first two album as fancy boxsets with bonus music and DVDs, so I eagerly got both, in chronological order. Spending all that time with A Storm in Heaven really made me love it even more. The albums were also re-released on vinyl, which I eventually bought online. Back in the day, I'd seen original copies on eBay from time to time, but never bought one - they were often expensive and in fairly poor condition, unexpectedly given their age. I bought Urban Hymns on vinyl back when I was living in Cardiff (timed such that it'd be the 1000th cd/record I'd bought, which seemed fitting since it was also the first), and their 2008 album, Forth, when that came out. The idea of having all of them on vinyl was nice, but not one I'd actually thought much about pursuing. The re-releases put that idea back in my mind, and it is nice to have them all sat there together. I don't consider myself a huge Verve fan, but they were the first band I fell in love with and that's important.

Format: 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 10
Cost: £18.50 new
Bought: website
When: 20/07/17
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no

The Verve - Urban Hymns

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