The Verve - The Shape Of Things To Come

It’s a funny old game, this rock journalism business – about as unpredictable as a rock band, come to think of it. One moment you’re sitting at home in your Dublin flat rearranging your CD collection into alphabetical order, avoiding answering the door in case it’s the landlord again, and wondering how you’ll keep yourself amused for the rest of the week when all you’ve got left in your bank account is an ulcer-inducing debt.

24 hours later you’re cruising down a busy North American freeway in a yellow cab with a big shit-eating grin on your face, chuckling at the more surreal roadside billboards (“WHO’S THE FATHER? CALL 1800 - DNA TYPE”) and patting the inch-thick wad of dollar bills in your pocket, wondering what kind of nefarious treats your night has in store.

Out of the blue, you’ve just been flown to Detroit, Michigan, to see The Verve play their second American gig minus recently departed guitarist Nick McCabe. Speculation about the Wigan group’s imminent demise has been mounting ever since he announced his resignation from the tour a fortnight ago and, seeing as they’re due to play Slane Castle in a matter of weeks, you’ve been despatched to find out exactly what’s the story.

“They’re not talking to the press at all,” your editor informed you just before you left. “But if you come back without a damn good cover story we’ll be . . . disappointed.” The threat implicit in this statement is bothering you slightly but what the hell! You’ll do your best to scam your way backstage and just let events take their course. Whatever happens, you’re planning on painting the town a particularly techno-coloured shade of red after the show (Detroit being the original birthplace of breakbeats and bleepy noises).

It’s then that you realise you’ve already been in the cab for the best part of an hour. “Are we nearly there?” you ask the driver. “’Bout another half hour, man,” he calls back in a strong Deee-troit accent. Christ! You knew that Motor City was big but nobody told you that it sprawled out quite so widely. Tentatively, you enquire exactly what the fare is going to be. When he tells you, your face falls like a drunken Promise Keeper in a whorehouse. It turns out that Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport is nearly 60 miles from the city. A few quick calculations later and you suddenly realise that that inch-thick wad of greenbacks burning a hole in your pocket is only just going to cover your transportation costs for the next few hours. Suddenly your options for the night start closing down like so many car manufacturing plants. Bummer!

Ah yes, it’s a bittersweet symphony, this life. More swings and roundabouts than you’ll find in Funderland.

Life has certainly been fairly bittersweet for Richard Ashcroft and company over the last few years. Since they first formed in Winstanley Sixth Form College in Wigan in 1990, the group has had more ups and downs than the lifts in the Ilac Centre. Signed to Hut Records immediately after their debut London gig, their first album proper – 1993’s acid-tinged, psychedelic brew A Storm In Heaven – was rapturously received by the critics and eventually reached Number 27 in the British charts. A successful US tour followed and the band’s future seemed set. Unfortunately, by the time of their second big album release in 1995, the far more structured and hard rocking A Northern Soul, band relationships had fractured to the point where both Ashcroft and McCabe had each temporarily quit the group on separate occasions.

Even when things were going well between the singer and guitarist, the band still seemed dogged by problems – drug-induced nervous breakdowns, ill health or just sheer bad luck always striking at the worst possible moments. In their increasingly rare interviews, the band themselves jokingly refer to it as the ‘Verve Voodoo’ or the ‘Curse of The Verve’. Publicly, it first struck in 1994 when they were forced to prefix their name following a threat of legal action from US jazz label, Verve (unfortunately, they rejected the option of calling themselves Verv and entitling their album Dropping An E For America!). The following year, drummer Pete Salisbury shattered his ankle just days before a crucial Glastonbury gig. Months later, they lost an important Oasis support slot when McCabe broke his wrist following a violent altercation with a Parisian security guard.

Shortly after that, Ashcroft walked out on the group for five days, just as their album hit the British Top Twenty. It was no childish Liam-like temper tantrum, however. He just didn’t like the way the group was being promoted by the record company. Hardly surprising really, for when it comes to his art the frontman has always been highly principled.

“Everything we do is natural, we’ve never been pushed into anything,” he told Melody Maker in 1992, just after their first single release. “Obviously, we’re gonna get pressure from record companies to do certain things but we’ll never do them. I’ve liked bands before and you can see immediately when they’ve been pressured into doing something by the record company or the press and it stinks. As far as I’m concerned, if by the second or third single, Verve are getting pressure off men in suits, Verve will fold and we’ll just go off and do our own thing. Because we don’t need it. The reason I’m in a band is to express myself and to be different. If there’s a moment I feel that some fat fucking businessman is interfering with what we’re doing, we’ll give up because then I might as well be working on a factory floor. Great bands have only ever formed to satisfy themselves.”

Although Ashcroft returned to the fold within a few days, guitarist Nick McCabe obviously still wasn’t satisfied with the path the band was taking and quit the group in late 1995. It wasn’t exactly a happy parting of the ways. In fact, he didn’t speak to any of his former fellow band members for the next eighteen months. It wasn’t until he received a pleading phone call from a desperate Ashcroft in January 1997 – where he allegedly made the singer “eat shit” for several hours – that he eventually agreed to rejoin. After a long absence, The Verve’s original line-up reformed, returned to the studio and recorded the biggest and best album of their career to date.

Unfortunately, despite the massive success of Urban Hymns, the ‘Curse of The Verve’ struck again when former Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein successfully sued them for 100% of the royalties earned from their now-classic comeback single ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ (they had sampled a couple of seconds from an old album of Stones instrumentals). “It’s horrible, it’s a pisser and it’s a downer, but it’s beautiful,” Ashcroft declared last year, just after he heard the news. “Because, as the song says, ‘You’re a slave to the money and then you die.’ I’ll build and we’ll make another fucking symphony!”

He was as good as his word. The band’s next single – the wonderfully maudlin ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ – went straight in at Number One and became an essential part of the summer soundtrack. When the album was released in Autumn 1997, it sold 300,000 copies in its first week. A hugely successful tour followed and the ‘Curse of The Verve’ seemed to have been shaken off for good.

Until now, that is. Three weeks ago, for reasons as yet unspecified, Nick McCabe announced that he wouldn’t be joining the band on its most important Stateside tour ever. A week after his shock announcement, Massive Attack dropped out of their supporting slot, thus causing the tour to undergo a drastic series of downsizing venue changes and cancellations. The band’s show at the Montreal Moison Centre has been cancelled, while their show at the 7,800-seater Paul Tsongas Arena in Lowell, Massachusetts, has been moved to the 4,000-seater Harborlights Pavilion. They’ve also downscaled their all-important New York show’s venue from Madison Square Garden (20,000) to the far less prestigious Hammerstein Ballroom (4,000).

At the time of writing, the band’s future seems seriously uncertain. But maybe that was always the way it was going to be for The Verve. Although undoubtedly an essential part of the band’s chemistry, McCabe never seemed to have properly fit back in following his 18-month sabbatical. If you look at the cover of Urban Hymns, you’ll notice that while the other four band members are looking to the right, the guitarist is staring dreamily in the other direction. But that was then and this is Detroit . . .

The Phoenix Plaza Amphitheatre in the Pontiac section of the city is the location for The Verve’s second gig of what is sure to be their most testing tour ever – and quite possibly their last. A large outdoor venue, it holds around 5,000. Like the previous night’s show in Chicago, tonight is a sell-out, despite the pre-publicised absences of both McCabe and Massive Attack.

I arrive there shortly after 8 o’clock to find the crowd chilling out under a warm and almost purple sky to the strains of The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’, courtesy of DJ Wayne – an old schoolfriend of the band, who opens for them at every show. There’s a carnival-like atmosphere inside – stalls selling everything from band merchandise (including those sunhats!) and myriad kinds of food to African statues and beachballs. Curiously, for such a large city, the crowd is almost exclusively white.

Gaining access to the band’s dressing room proves ridiculously easy. The fact that I’m wearing a dark suit, as opposed to the standard American rock fan’s uniform of band T-shirt, tattoos and cut-off jeans, and speak in what the security men mistakenly take to be an English accent, leads them to presume that I’m somehow affiliated to the group. Remembering my editorial directive, I don’t bother correcting them. They escort me through the crowd and direct me towards a small marquee directly to the left of the stage.

Unfortunately, the band aren’t there when I arrive. Still, I stay long enough to check out their rider. The Verve’s pre and post-gig requirements are much the same as any other moderately successful rock band’s – a small feast has been laid on, along with several crates of beer and about two dozen bottles of wine and champagne – with one small but notable exception. A bowl in the centre of the table is filled with packets of King Size Rizla papers. The drugs may not work but The Verve obviously still enjoy a good smoke.

Jazz Summers – the former Yazz manager who has been looking after the band for the last two years – isn’t too pleased to find that a journalist has breached security but mellows a little when I make a joke about his resemblance to Peter Stringfellow in an old photo reprinted in the current NME (“Fuck off!”). Even so, our conversation is little more than a routine exercise in evasive action for the undoubtedly beleaguered manager. He’s reluctant to comment on McCabe’s departure from the band, save to mention that he’s been temporarily replaced by pedal steel player BJ Cole and that the original guitarist’s absence puts a lot more pressure on Ashcroft during the shows. He acknowledges that Slane will be their last gig for the moment but points out that, “Slane was always the last gig. Nobody’s really too clear about what’s happening after that at the moment.”

When I ask him about the possibility of getting a few informal minutes with the band after the gig, he pulls a face. “I’ll ask them,” he says, shrugging noncommitally. “But I wouldn’t get your hopes up if I were you. They’re not really into talking to the press at the moment, they’ve got enough on their plates already. Anyway, they don’t really tend to stay around after the gigs. To be honest, they don’t party all that much, not in a rock ’n’ roll way anyway. They usually just go back to the hotel to chill out.”

Somebody arrives into the room to tell Summers that a former member of Killing Joke is outside looking for tickets and, apologetically thrusting a bottle of beer into my hand, he sends me on my way, promising to at least ask the band if they’ll talk after the show (much later he tells me that he didn’t bother because: “They looked completely knackered and I just knew they’d say no.”).

I would have tried to sneak back in after the show but I guess I lacked the verve.

“This is a song called ‘Space And Time’.”

The Verve arrive out onstage at 8.45 to tumultuous applause. Or rather, Richard Ashcroft and band arrive out onstage, for it very quickly transpires that this is going to be his show and his show only. Simon Jones, Pete Salisbury, Simon Tong and temporary recruits BJ Cole and percussionist Steve Sideinyk come out and take their places but, throughout, the spotlight remains focused on the most angular-cheeked frontman in rock – tonight sporting exactly the same clothes as he wears on the album cover.

As also on the album, they open with ‘Space And Time’ and move quickly into ‘Sonnet’. Neither song really lends itself to the kind of onstage stadium rock antics so beloved of American audiences, so there’s not much to say about them other than that they’re both note perfect. Ashcroft plays the guitar parts superbly, quickly putting paid to the notions of Nick McCabe being indispensable to the group (in a live scenario at least).

Things perk up considerably for ‘This Time’, the singer discarding both his hat and guitar and really going for it. Before the song begins he gets down on his honkers – a move stolen from Liam Gallagher – and stares into the crowd for a while before talking. “You’ve all ‘eard the stories,” he says. “But I fucking love this city and we’re gonna do the best we can for this city!” His performance here is extremely energetic, both vocally and physically. When the song ends, he laughs: “I’m just another white boy pretending to be black, really.”

As it happens, I actually witnessed Verve’s first ever American gig at the Tilt club in New York during the CMJ seminar of 1992. My main memories of that particular performance was the way ‘Mad Richard’ (as he was then known, thanks to some rather unwise statements concerning reincarnation and astral travel in an NME interview) brought the house down. Literally. I remember him coming out on stage brandishing two bottles of beer in each hand, climbing up on the PA and accidentally knocking a massive fibreglass dolmen-style stone off the ceiling. It swung on its chains, crashed into the drums and briefly caused mayhem on the night. Six years on, his live performance skills have developed to the point where he can bring the house down without resorting to such extreme measures. Thankfully.

‘On Your Own’ from A Northern Soul follows and then it’s straight into a superb ‘Weeping Willow’. ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ is played on acoustic and, oddly enough, dedicated to Nancy Reagan. In truth, it’s a somewhat strained and muted version and, although it gets the lighters out in certain sections of the audience, it still doesn’t touch the parts of me that it usually does. A rather lacklustre ‘Lucky Man’ and ‘History’ follow. I start to think that maybe the heat’s getting to him. ‘One Day’ and ‘Velvet Morning’ take the tempo up a bit but he’s still not going at full power. When he’s on top form, Richard Ashcroft is a veritable human firework – colourful, explosive and not someone you want to get too close to. Off form, he begins to remind you of Spider from Coronation Street.

Then he suddenly pulls one out of the bag. Although he jokingly expresses his doubts that he can manage the guitar parts on it, ‘Come On’ is even more wild and furious live than it is on the album – a real full-on blood and guts effort that really gets the crowd moving. When it ends, he knows himself just how great it was. “Fuck it man!” he roars enthusiastically. “That’s why the songs are so good! We’re not some cheesy fucking rock ’n’ roll band and these aren’t cheesy rock ’n’ roll songs! They come from the soul!”

With a wave, he walks off the stage, soon followed by the rest of the band. Four minutes pass, by which time the crowd are positively baying for more. When he returns he’s on his own, with just an acoustic for company. He plays two solo tracks. The first is dedicated to his girlfriend, Kate Radley from Spiritualized, and I think was called ‘Goodbye Love’. The second track, ‘So Sister’, is prefaced with a rant about the record company screwing up its release (as an extra track on the ‘Bittersweet’ single) so the song is only available on import in the US. “You probably don’t know this one,” he says, “or if you do then it’s because you bought it on import at an inflated price.”

Although Ashcroft recently admitted to being completely freaked out and humbled when he played a solo acoustic slot to Oasis in Madison Square Garden last year (“I suddenly realised that I was a frontman, not a solo artist!”), he’s actually almost a stronger performer when he’s on his own – really stripping the songs bare and allowing you to wallow in their depth and luxuriate in their slow beauty. If the band do split up then you can probably expect a solo acoustic album from him in the near future.

And will the band split? Maybe it’s still too early to tell but when they end the show tonight with a full-blooded ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ (ironically dedicated to Allen Klein), Ashcroft leaves the audience with this possibly prophetic parting shot: “Thankyou Detroit! We may meet again someday. And, if not, well then, thanks for some really good years!”

Catch The Verve in Slane if you can. You may never get a chance to see their like again.

• The Verve, with Manic Street Preachers, Robbie Williams, Finley Quaye, The Seahorses and James, play Slane Castle on Saturday, 29th August. Tickets, costing £29.50 (plus booking fee) are available from Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. 24-hr credit card bookings telephone: (01) 4569569.