By 1997, Britpop’s clashing titans were diverging in sharply different directions—Blur with the discordant experimentalism of their self-titled album, Oasis with the overblown and obvious Be Here Now. That opened up a big lane for Wigan, UK misfits the Verve to swoop in and conquer the nation with their blockbuster third album, Urban Hymns—a record that has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony, but at the time suggested an intriguing next stage in its evolution. It boasted all the anthemic grandeur of Oasis at their Wembley-baiting best while spinning away from Britpop’s traditional 1960s rock/1970s punk axis for a greater emphasis on lush atmosphere and deep groove. As such, it was the rare Britpop album that could be embraced by those who were turned off by—or had outgrown—the genre’s unabashedly retro indulgences and two-fingers-aloft, cigarettes ‘n’ alcohol hooliganism.
But even when they were on top of the world, the Verve were always on shaky ground. Urban Hymns was the surprise third act for a band that seemed doomed after its second. Their most successful single up to that point—1995’s string-swept ballad “History”—doubled as an epitaph, with the notoriously embattled relationship between frontman Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe triggering the band’s demise just before it snuck into the UK Top 30. Ashcroft, bassist Simon Jones, and drummer Pete Salisbury would swiftly reconvene with a new guitarist (their old school chum Simon Tong) to begin work on a record that, for a time, seemed destined to become an Ashcroft solo release. But the singer quickly realized his vision would be incomplete without McCabe’s six-string sorcery, and after inviting his old foil back into the fold and reformulating the group as a five-piece, the Verve’s comeback narrative was in motion.
However, even with McCabe back at Ashcroft’s side, his hallucinatory guitar squall would prove less of a defining feature. On the Verve’s first two records, McCabe was the engine that rocketed the band to the stratosphere—but on Urban Hymns, the Verve achieve their heady cruising altitude on a cloud-bed of cosmic funk grooves, hip-hop-schooled beat science, and elegant orchestration. Where, in their early days, an ominous ambient piece like “Neon Wilderness” might get stretched out to a 10-minute excursion, on Urban Hymns it functions as a brief, sides-bridging interlude, a foggy flashback to the band they once were. Strobe-lit, wah-wah-splattered jams like “The Rolling People” were now the exceptions rather than the rule.
McCabe’s presence is barely perceptible on the album’s crowning achievement, “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” a glistening, swan-ice-sculpture of a song that injected Britpop with a healthy dose of boom-bap. (Alas, this monster hit wholly lived up to its name when the band was forced to fork over the royalties from their biggest hit to the Rolling Stones and their iron-fisted rights-holder Allen Klein for sampling an orchestral version of “The Last Time” without the proper clearance.) Urban Hymns’ other towering peaks—celestial, lighter-waving sing-alongs like “The Drugs Don’t Work,” “Sonnet,” and “Lucky Man”—likewise use windswept strings and tasteful ambient shading to fill in the space where McCabe’s heavenly storms used to rage.
At the time, Ashcroft was still fueled by enough underdog insolence and the maniacal self-belief that he could make even those soft-rock songs hit hard. Equal parts boho Bono and Jagger swagger, he wasn’t merely content to earn song dedications from Noel Gallagher, he wanted to overtake him at the top of the charts. At the same time, as “The Drugs Don’t Work” unsubtly suggested, he was eager to put his Mad Richard reputation to bed—and for much of Urban Hymns, he sounds less like the barefoot shaman of old and more like someone easing into a pair of slippers.
In the wake of possibly the only British space-rock soap opera in history, Ashcroft had married Spiritualized keyboardist Kate Radley in 1995, and in stark contrast to the psych-jazz meltdowns her ex-boyfriend/bandmate Jason Pierce unleashed on his own 1997 opus, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space, the prevailing mood on Urban Hymns is one of sunrise-summoning renewal. The album’s second half is mostly given over to clear-eyed statements of devotion like “Space and Time,” “One Day,” and “Velvet Morning”—the relaxed, contented sound of Britpop entering middle age (the net result of which was a slew of younger bands—Coldplay, Starsailor, et al—who would emerge already sounding like genteel old men). Even when the Verve momentarily revisit their primordial roar on the closing “Come On,” with Ashcroft screaming “fuck you” to no one and everyone, it’s ultimately an expression of joy rather than psychosis.
As this five-disc expanded edition reveals, Urban Hymns could’ve easily wound up an even mellower record. The sessions yielded enough material to fill another album, and for the most part, the Verve made the right calls to hold it back. Many of the Urban Hymns holdovers are less compelling versions of the songs that made the final tracklist: acoustic ballad “So Sister” is “The Drugs Don’t Work” without the dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning; “Echo Bass” and “Three Steps” are medium-heat psych-funk workouts that never reach the roiling boil of “The Rolling People.” (Notable exceptions include “Never Wanna See You Cry,” which makes for a fine “Sonnet II,” and the nocturnal voodoo soul of “Monte Carlo.”) And then there’s the slick, celebratory folk-rock of “This Could Be My Moment,” which even in light of Urban Hymns’ sunnier disposition, represents a swerve into MOR too far.
But if those outtakes present the Verve at their most pedestrian, the wealth of bonus live material here serves to restore some of their formative mysticism. Urban Hymns represented millions of people’s first contact with the Verve, and the band used live appearances to bring the newbies up to speed on their previous travels—like on a 1997 BBC Evening Session where they dip into moody, mercurial versions of A Northern Soul’s “Life’s an Ocean” and ’92 debut-EP cut “A Man Called Sun.” And while including the band’s entire May 1998 set at Wigan’s Haigh Hall (i.e., The Verve’s own Oasis-at-Knebworth moment) plus a whole ’nother disc worth of random live tracks from the era may seem like overkill, the recordings capture a band committed to elevating concerts to holy communions, no matter the venue. Even when the Verve were playing to a thousand or so people at Washington D.C.’s 9:30 Club shortly after Hymns’ release, they were already envisioning the 30,000-plus that would greet them a half-year later in their hometown.
For all the inter- and intra-band drama that fueled its creation, Urban Hymns ultimately centered around a very basic, universal theme: live for the moment and give it all you got, because we’ve only got one shot at this thing called life. It’s a sentiment that would seem terribly cornball and clichéd—if the Verve’s subsequent history didn’t so thoroughly reinforce its veracity. Less than a month after their Haigh Hall coronation, a disgruntled McCabe left the band once again, prior to a North American summer arena tour. What should’ve been a victory lap instead became a funeral procession, with Ashcroft and co. dutifully going through the motions alongside a session-player replacement before calling it a day once again. Of course, as the lyrics to “Bitter Sweet Symphony” attested, the Verve had at that point become well accustomed to life’s cruel twists and unforgiving ironies. Like the resuscitated heart-attack victim who had cheated death once, this was a band that knew it was living on borrowed time. But this collection is a testament to what can happen when you make the most of it.
