Live Report: Richard Ashcroft – A Northern Soul in Dublin

Deep into his set, the man himself, Richard Ashcroft, ice-cool as ever, stands alone on stage, just man and guitar and performs ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ while thirteen thousand Verve fans abandon all reserve, bellowing the iconic words of the almost-30-year-old Number 1, a song embedded so deep in the public consciousness that it almost belongs to everybody. And into Urban Hymns confederate ‘Lucky Man’ we heave and the crowd are beautifully manic now, arms splayed, singing their hearts out to that vastly transcendental song released in the depths of winter ’97, The Verve’s annus mirabilis.

However, this was no straightforward nostalgia show – show opener ‘Weeping Willow’ is trucked from Urban Hymns into debut record A Storm in Heaven terrain – the cosmic drift of it superb, the pure psychedelic immersion of it incredible. Nick McCabe’s original Verve guitar work always seemed to arrive from another dimension and tonight guitarist Steve Wyreman brings the Hendrix squall, desert blues, soul revue looseness and bruised Americana groove. ‘Space and Time’ swirls in on a bedrock of keys and backing vocalists drenching it with great expanse, before the band returns it to its natural stomp-groove.

A string quintet suddenly appears on the psychedelic soul of ‘Music Is Power’, Ashcroft conducting the expanded revue with hand drum and tambourine through a wide eclecticism of desert funk, guttural rock blues and a Van Morrison type soul delivery. In a huddle, the engine room of the crew marvellously workout ‘A Song for the Lovers’ before taking ‘Break the Night With Colour’ into that beguiling Ashcroft territory somewhere between urban exhaustion and transcendence as they track through punk fuzz and Southern rock before plunging into a Velvet Underground afterburn.

After the purge - goddamn beautiful ‘Velvet Morning’ takes you back to your first listen, coming down to it, its conspiracy and shared secret still hammering the heart, epically triumphant. ‘Hold On’ brings talk of Oasis last year in Croke Park where Ashcroft was magnificent in support before recent single ‘Lover’ and its sublime sampling of Joan Armatrading brings the string quartet into their own.

If Carlsberg did encores. Returning alone for ‘Come On People (We’re Making It Now)’, Ashcroft dedicates the song to Liam and Noel before the band quietly slips back onstage behind him, slowly swelling the song into full communal release. The orchestral groove and yearning vocal ache of ‘History’ is tremendous before ‘Sonnet’, one of Richard’s greatest songs; a track which despite all of its cultural heft, still feels like a man noodling alone trying to articulate devotion. While ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ sends us haring down the quays with that endlessly looping orchestral motif ringing in our ears - a song that feels simultaneously both triumphant and trapped - a man sledging forward through systems larger than himself, a communal catharsis disguised as existential resignation sparking our pooled memory back to life.