20 years on, The Verve’s autumnal masterpiece ‘Urban Hymns’ feels like the very end of an era for British guitar music.
by Ed Biggs No amount of hypnotherapy will make anyone who heard it forget how poor Richard Ashcroft’s last album United Nations Of Sound was back in 2010. To hear this totemic figure of Britpop, who defined the zeitgeist in 1997 with The Verve’s multi-million selling masterpiece Urban Hymns, stoop to such depths in a flawed attempt to re-brand himself would have been hilarious if Ashcroft hadn’t been responsible for such
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by Ed Biggs While The Verve may be more famous for their hugely successful third album Urban Hymns (1997), its 1995 predecessor A Northern Soul deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. The sound that would bring them mainstream success two years later, a powerful brand of alternative rock with strong elements of prog and distortion – think Oasis and Spiritualized in equal parts – really began to take shape
