THE VERVE: Urban Hymns

 

(#579: 11 October 1997, 5 weeks; 3 January 1998, 6 weeks; 21 February 1998, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Bitter Sweet Symphony/Sonnet/The Rolling People/The Drugs Don't Work/Catching The Butterfly/Neon Wilderness/Space And Time/Weeping Willow/Lucky Man/One Day/This Time/Velvet Morning/Come On/Deep Freeze

 

"Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected."

(Earl Spencer, funeral speech, Westminster Abbey, Saturday 6 September 1997)

 

"Well I've never prayed, but tonight I'm on my knees, yeah."

(Richard Ashcroft, "Bitter Sweet Symphony")

 

 

I suppose the word to use here is "relentless." All these intentionally big albums, each one bigger than the last, all building up to some kind of momentum that might have revealed to us what the year of 1997 was all supposed to have been about. A momentum, an expansion, so relentless and unquenchable that it could only have been stilled by colliding into a wall at top speed.

 

You know what happened. When I went to bed that very early Sunday morning there had only been one victim. When I woke up it was to a brighter yet bleaker world. At East Dulwich Sainsbury's hordes of middle-class white couples fought over incomplete early editions of The Mail On Sunday. Nobody else seemed greatly bothered by events, including the tourists in St James's Park where I later wandered (any "mourning" seemed to have been staged by a couple of willing stooges for the cameras). To all appearances, it was just another pleasant Sunday afternoon in (the) late summer.

 

What I did in connection with what was about to happen is none of your business, and also breaches rules of professional confidentiality, so allow me instead to speak of who precisely was expected to speak for the people who craved being spoken to.

 

"But the airwaves are clean and there's nobody singing to me now."

 

I remember how xfm was supposed to launch as a legal radio station that Monday. Of course its launch became so muted, out of necessity, and it is arguable that the station, set up to celebrate the sunny days of Britpop, never truly recovered. Meanwhile, on the BBC and elsewhere, there was to be heard nought save the pastel hushes of compulsory melancholy. I saw an angry WH Smiths assistant angrily shove a man out of the Oxford Street branch for criticising "Candle In The Wind 97."

 

Yet Britain, much like five springs ago, seemed uncertain whether they were being forced to be sad or being prohibited from being sad. You had to bend your head and keep your mouth shut in a respectful British manner but to mourn openly? To weep? That was confined to coarse tourists who were not expected to know better.

 

"This is a big fuck you. THIS IS A BIG FUCK YOU! COME ON! JUST LOVE SOMEBODY IN THE BACK!!"

 

No more. At least, not for a fortnight. We came so close to...well, and it suddenly became clear to everybody that what constituted "Britain" was not enough. Unfit for purpose. "...immutable, generation upon murderous generation pitifully clings to the absolute of the past, resisting change, beheading and button cutting. It doesn't include the ideal of progress: it inhabits a polar world. It wants to be backward, it yearns for the age before yesterday," as Jonathan Meades says of something else (1962 Algeria, if you must know) in his new novel Empty Wigs.

 

We needed to hear something else. Another story, or a tale so big as to dwarf complacency, reserve and the enemy of all elemental humanity, debate.

 

Something that wasn't hot shiny fun but also wasn't a lecture from a willed darkness.

 

Songs that recognised the pain in ourselves but were barred from the paranoically clean airwaves.

 

Hymns for self-besieging cities.

 

* * * * * *

 

The first time I saw Verve, then still to take forced possession of the definite article, was at what was then still known as the Town and Country Club in Kentish Town, on Sunday 10 May 1992. They were supporting Spiritualized and Sonic Boom - awkward. The shoegazing boom was spent; I saw Chapterhouse's live reception dwindle from ecstatic to indifferent in a matter of weeks. And, of course, the unanswerable (here, anyway) question, the same one Kevin Costner silently asks himself when he's backstage midway through In Bed With Madonna; what the hell am I doing here?

 

Even nearly thirty-three years on I remember with damnable vividness exactly what I was doing there and why. Be content that my mind at the time inhabited a baffling space. Things had and/or hadn't happened. That really is all you need to know. The good old days, no thank you. Spiritualized and Sonic Boom bored the excreta out of me (that hasn't changed in the interim). But The Verve were...different. This Richard Ashcroft prowled around the stage in the manner of an impatient scorpion suffering from acid reflux. He unashamedly played the role of The Rock Messiah in ways that would have got him laughed off and canned all the way back to Seven Sisters if he hadn't believed it so fervently and unironically.

 

The rest of the band were also quite exceptional, especially the guitarist Nick McCabe whose notes and tones seemed to trace and expand upon Ashcroft's arc absolutely naturally. At that stage the band were about grooves, improvisational excursions, rather than songs as such. But at no point did they plan to mumble apologetically into their axillae, explaining that it was all about the music that they made for themselves and if anybody else liked it no we don't do politics, how unseemly, how not cricket. They seemed to be showing us a way out of the quagmire.

 

Subsequent experience confirmed that The Verve were a fabulous live band whose magic didn't quite translate to record, as good as "She's A Superstar" and "Gravity Grave" were (and are). In 1993 their first album A Storm In Heaven came out; I duly paid £6.49 for the cassette edition in Berwick Street Selectadisc, listened to it once on the coach home, thought oh that's unexpectedly dank, and never listened to it again (I didn't get rid of it, though; it's still here! I even listened to it again for the purposes of this piece and my hindsight-aided verdict is: yep, work in progress). As with so many music press-approved records of the period, it seemed to demand your Serious Attention and you certainly weren't allowed to have vulgar fun or bunk off and listen to all of that allegedly moronic Top 40 pabulum like "Oh Carolina" or "All That She Wants" or "No Limit" or "Informer" or "Relight My Fire" or...

 

The Verve's second album, 1995's A Northern Soul, sounded as though the band was moving in the right direction (look..."History"! An actual song!). They weren't quite there yet but at least they were heading towards something. Ashcroft always said it would take three albums for The Verve to become great. But tensions arose between singer and guitarist and the band split acridly on stage. No wonder a worried Noel Gallagher wrote "Cast No Shadow" with Ashcroft in mind; did the man know where he was going to?

 

The initial intention seems to have been for Urban Hymns to be an Ashcroft solo album. He went away to Bath and wrote several of the record's most memorable songs there. But it quickly became apparent, once he and what was left of The Verve - keyboardist/guitarist Simon Tong, bassist Simon Jones and drummer Peter Salisbury - entered the recording studio, that what they needed was a lead guitarist.

 

Nobody really fitted the bill. There was talk of hiring John Squire, but ultimately Ashcroft couldn't sum up the courage to go and speak with him. Bernard Butler came on board for a couple of days' worth of jamming but no personal electricity was generated and anyway he wanted to incorporate his own songs as well. It became increasingly obvious that Ashcroft would have to go back to Wigan and try to patch things up with McCabe since he was very clearly the man these songs needed. Though reluctant to rejoin, McCabe was nevertheless very thankful for Ashcroft approaching him and agreed to return.

 

McCabe's return - and therefore also the conversion of the first Ashcroft solo album into the third Verve album - disgruntled the band's record label no end...oh noes! He's going to bring in...KRAUTROCK (hardwired prejudices are difficult if not impossible to erase) instead of the CALMING, UPLIFTING soft rock ballads which they had been hoping would sell a tonne. Well, his return proved the best of both worlds since his guitar ingenuity helped bolster up the power of the songs already written - put the punctum into them, if we must - while the band's old improvisational spirit reasserted itself; "Chasing A Butterfly" and the brief interlude "Neon Wilderness" basically evolved from McCabe mucking about with his effects pedals.

 

There was, however, no slackening of the belief that, if it was going to work at all, Urban Hymns HAD to be one of the big ones, get up there with Pet Sounds, Maggot Brain and Grievous Angel because what would otherwise be its point? That's almost the first thing you notice with "Bitter Sweet Symphony" as Wil Malone's strings creep into the picture before titanic crashes of drums, guitars and bells fall from the heavens like newly-liberated space junk - it sounds massive (attack?).

 

And still few people truly get this song, which owes only a tangent of shade to David Whitaker (who at this time was happily working on orchestrations for Air's unimpeachable Moon Safari) and his 1966 pirate radio jingle Jagger/Richards adagio. Most view it as a tumultuous lamentation, a fortissimo protest against a world too wilfully deaf to hear it, a chafing at the limits of life itself. And indeed, in parallel with Ashcroft's Beckettian duende ("No change, I can change"), the song does inhabit a firm and unbending Sisyphean loop, the same moribund habits recurring over and over, a variation on the unceasing coda of Presley's "Suspicious Minds."

 

But "Bitter Sweet Symphony" isn't an elegy sung by somebody preparing to expire. No, Ashcroft is made of much sterner stuff than that, and so the song can be interpreted as the singer fighting to escape his limitations - and succeeding. For this song is structured to sound like a triumph, a victory over the mediocrity busy muffling the rest of us. If anything it is a song of hope and fulfilment. It is among the most gigantic of fuck-you V-signs to emerge from rock and indeed roll. It says NO, I WILL NOT DIE.

 

Urban Hymns' undeserved assumed status as a stockpile of 1974-style soft rock HobNobs rests on the basis of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and three of its other songs, one of which is "The Drugs Don't Work." But none of this music sounds anything like Poco, or the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver. I understand how many of the record buyers who ensured that the album went ten times platinum in the U.K. probably elected not to venture beyond "Bitter," "Drugs," "Lucky Man" and "Sonnet."

 

But, really, former early afternoon Radio 1 disc jockeys who really ought to have known better - 1974-style soft rock? Granted, Ashcroft's voice does bear a faint resemblance to the Allan Clarke who sang "The Air That I Breathe," but faint is as far as that comparison goes, and I do not recall Tony Hicks or Terry Sylvester doing even a fraction of what McCabe achieves on "Drugs." What is the song about? I'm not sure those in mourning cared too much about the song's specifics, but if you had to care for somebody dying of...well, a disease (as so many millions do)...then the grief in this song's delivery is palpable. It may or may not be about Ashcroft's father, who died when the singer was eleven, or about coming down from heroin or similar, in the manner of Snow Patrol's "Run" (yes I know, it should be vice versa).

 

But the emotion in this song's structure and performance enables Ashcroft and the Verve to achieve a very real bond with human feelings. This is one of the many factors which marks Urban Hymns out as leagues above, say, Spiritualized's contemporaneous and atrociously overpraised Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. Now, I ought to be fair here; that latter record fulfils about seven-tenths of its potential - the title track sounds far less awkward with the restored Presley quotation, and the surface mayhem of "Cop Shoot Cop" is quite elevating if you've never heard of Manfred Mann Chapter Three or are unfamiliar with the work of Geordie Greep. It's in the house and we're not taking it to the charity shop.

 

Jason Pierce, however, simply isn't a sufficiently strong or dominating personality to make one believe in his music or his mission. Mainly he seems to be moaning in a mutter about his drug supply, and there's only limited empathy one can lend to that. Along with much else, Geordie Greep has confirmed the infinite difference a clearcut and sharply-defined personality can make to this sort of music - and, like Richard Ashcroft at his best, he's smart enough to leave a lot of the groundwork to his colleagues (as with the early Verve, Spiritualized had far more power as a live act; the renditions of L&G's songs on their collection Royal Albert Hall October 10, 1997 - which performance we attended, Laura and I, as a couple - are far more febrile and, yes, spirited).

 

"Drugs" is a soul song, and at its core a quiet and contained one. As with many of Urban Hymns' other songs, it is best interpreted as an internal monologue - after all, "If you leave my life, I'm better off dead" isn't something you'd say to a seriously ill loved one who is if anything in need of cheering up. And perhaps, as some have commented, it would have been better left in its quietude without the "never coming down" coda, which the same commentators have found spurious and structurally unbalancing.

 

I'm not so sure about that. After all, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" maybe should have been a muted hymn all along, but for it to work in its end-of-a-sixties-era context it had to raise its voice, go for that Righteous Brothers coda, its silent scream becoming a proclamation of consolidation and security. Likewise - well, not really likewise, but you might see what I mean - Ashcroft sounds as though he's trying to finish the song, but the song hasn't necessarily finished with him, and he's in imminent danger of getting trapped in another loop. That ending sees him trying to break free of the song's intrinsic grief. He fights against the easy lament; note how the "cat in a bag" analogy inadvertently connects with Radiohead's "Fitter Happier."

 

One listen to "The Rolling People," with McCabe's introductory zigzagging processed guitar making a better job of sounding like a helicopter than "D'You Know What I Mean?," is enough to realise how much sharper and better formed this record is than Be Here Now. This is a common feeling which has been felt and expressed by many people, including Noel Gallagher. But "The Rolling People" is an overwhelmingly powerful performance...and this time, McCabe has a tangible hook of a song on which to hang his explorations. This is Be Here Now achieved. I don't know that any other British rock band of 1997 exhibited as much sheer power as The Verve. They are thoroughly and absolutely assured, know exactly what they're doing and why it needs to be done. As the band mostly produced the album themselves - following unsuccessful sessions with Owen Morris (who had produced A Northern Soul) and John Leckie, Martin "Youth" Glover was present for a time but gradually delegated nominal production responsibilities to his engineer Chris Potter - they are able to focus upon and magnify their authority. "The Rolling People" is the inarguable pronouncement of accomplishment.

 

When not pondering the whereabouts of his own soul, Ashcroft spends much of the album contemplating the course that love takes. "Sonnet," which is about someone who knows full well he is falling in love but is uncertain how to deal with it and convey his feelings. It is not quite an articulate speech of the heart, but everything the singer does not say can clearly be heard and understood. Would any standard soft-rock ballad be able to accommodate the variety of approaches McCabe brings to this song, from his crisp, staccato Hi Records introduction, like a determined mourner rhythmically crunching the underlying gravel, to the Morse Code bleeps adumbrating Ashcroft's "Eyes open wide"? Or indeed, at the other end of the spectrum - with love articulated, found and reciprocated - all the unearthly strangeness his guitar bringt to "Lucky Man" ("It's just a change in me," sings the man who at the record's beginning was unsure about his capacity to change).

 

What occurs in works like "Catching The Butterfly" is the band harnessing its early improvisatory power in the full service of communicating something in the form of a song. The variety of accents and crenellations McCabe utilises here are unending and always surprising. It is as if somebody has walked into the dark cave housing A Storm In Heaven and switched on the light. Everything now dazzles rather than concealing itself.

 

The record's second half principally concerns Ashcroft finding his way out of emotional entrapment by means of love. "Space And Time" is a delicate ballad which the band are still able to pull every which way with their infallible telepathy; the occasional blast of rock noise ensures that we do not become too comfortable. "Weeping Willow" in contrast is a raging ballad in which Ashcroft finally expresses his love and his despairing wish to be loved back.

 

Through the conduit of "Lucky Man," the plateau of happiness is reached, and there only really needs to follow the summing-up. The next three songs find Ashcroft amazed at what he has found and seen in himself and encouraging others to follow ("One Day"), then looking back at the angry man in the loop of "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and marvelling over an upbeat trot at how far he has come and how much he has actually changed ("This Time"), and finally finding himself at peace ("Velvet Morning"); as much as he insisted in "The Drugs Don't Work" that he was never coming down (perhaps a nod to the final line of "Sorted For E's & Wizz"), he has actually managed to come down, and to land.

 

All that now remains is the insanely euphoric coda, "Come On," which many thought and still think the best ending to a British rock album since "I Am The Resurrection." Here The Verve are no longer working up to greatness, but rather walking in its orchard. Ashcroft is talking to God on the 'phone - just as Liam Gallagher does in "D'You Know What I Mean?" - but now turns to the audience, to you, to us, and pleas with us to follow him and his band ("Don't wait to be found/Come along with my sound"). Little surprise that so many treated this record as the album they felt Be Here Now should have been; where the latter delightfully runs singalong rock alongside abstract noise as few albums had done since Mike Westbrook's Metropolis, Urban Hymns has already climbed to the top of that mountain.

 

Not an atom of time is wasted in "Come On." If this is the most immediately approachable of all those big albums we've been talking about throughout 1997, then it is also the most fully realised; here Ashcroft and his colleagues have no hesitation or fear in taking on and surpassing even the tiring U2. And, as though summoned by magic, Liam Gallagher himself pops up at the song's climax, cheerily yelling "COME ONNNNNNNN-UHH-AH" in the middleground.

 

Then the explosion, the unleashing of all that bottled-up angst and uncertainty into something terrifying and new and great. "PLUS, BESIDES" yells the man from Wigan (giving his forefather Ian McCulloch a run for his money - this album has the Bunnymen written right through it...look, Heaven IS here!). "THERE'S ONLY ONE LIFE...LET IT GO (over and over)!" And then the cry of "THIS IS A BIG FUCK YOU!...COME ON...JUST LOVE SOMEBODY IN THE BACK!" - and it is a cry of utter exultation, of a peak claimed and it looks higher than everyone else's, as though Richard Ashcroft can't believe that people didn't think he meant what he meant about needing to take three albums to get to the stage of supping with the greats, and it is an enormous fucking YES to the preservation and continuation of LIFE and you know THAT'S WHAT DIANA'S PEOPLE NEEDED TO HEAR AND BE TOLD. "WE'RE BREAKIN' IN!" Ashcroft roars delightedly and repeatedly at the song's climax - even he cannot believe that he went and bloody DID it.

 

There is nothing more to say...well, not for a few minutes, anyway, until a snatch of experimental guitar sneaks into the picture with unidentifiable radio chat and what sounds like an ululating female voice (Algerian rai, perhaps?) which eventually resolves into...the cry of a newborn baby. New life drawn from the old. As the man from Hibbing, Minnesota said in this same year of years, it wasn't dark yet. We would have expected nothing less from rock and roll.

 

 

OCEAN COLOUR SCENE: Marchin’ Already

 

(#578: 27 September 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Hundred Mile High City/Better Day/Travellers Tune/Big Star/Debris Road/Besides Yourself/Get Blown Away/Tele He’s Not Talking/Foxy’s Folk Faced/All Up/Spark And Cindy/Half A Dream Away/It’s A Beautiful Thing

 

Presume for a moment that you’re in your early twenties – 23 or 24, perhaps. You were brought up to expect such promise. You were given your moment and then either you blew it or – more likely – your moment was taken away from you. And now you’re stuck in whatever crappy suburb from which you’d hoped to have escaped years ago, impotent and watching your old mates – well, they were never really your mates, old or otherwise; they just happened to go to the same school and at the same time as you – get somewhere. Anywhere. Those joke bands you used to go and see rehearse in your pal’s front room or garage; why, some of them have recording contracts, you’ve seen them in the papers and maybe heard them on the radio, and one or two, if they’re truly lucky, get into the pop charts and suddenly your mother stares at you while Top Of The Pops is on and it looks as if she’s about to cry.

 

Nobody really gets you, anyway; what you know in your bones you are, weighed against what you’re expected to be. Since you have no desire and perhaps no capacity to connect the two, you’re marooned in the wilderness. People in the street laugh mirthlessly at you or cross the road you’re walking down, on your way to the dole office, and you can read their semi-concealed lips muttering about the you that never was.

 

But there’s something ultra-stubborn hidden in your you that won’t give up, knows you have something to say and by God and fortune you’ll eventually be given and grab the opportunity to say it. Presume that you’re a musician in a group and that group got shoved down the river of fashion and hurtled over the waterfall of cool before it was even able to complete its swimming lessons. You’re a hasbeen and not even twenty-five yet. But you’re also still a could-be.

 

So your group gets the chance to record sixteen songs for a Japanese record label, or something similarly remote. And because a couple of reasonably influential people remember what your group once was and could still be, twelve of those songs get worked up professionally and end up becoming your group’s second album – and what do you know; your timing is absolutely right, and you’ve hit the fuck-you jackpot.

 

And those twelve songs have been bottled up within you for half a decade; they speak of thwarted dreams, desperate ambitions to escape the rubble that’s been planned for you, the urgent craving to flee and finally to fly. Who’d have thought it – these songs are what hundreds of thousands of people also wanted, and they hadn’t even known they’d wanted them. And no, they are not radically different sorts of songs – your ambition is not to break the aesthetic bank but to express your emotions in the context of the type of music that you’ve known and felt flowing through your aorta all of your life.

 

The above is the story of Simon Fowler, and Ocean Colour Scene, and Moseley Shoals, which came out in 1996 to critical indifference and huge commercial success. That album didn’t make it into Then Play Long because it was kept at number two, mostly by Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill juggernaut. Most of its professional reviewers felt the album to be musically too conservative, overly shackled to the past. There may have been a subtext of class hatred (that certainly made itself apparent with the general critical reaction to Oasis).

 

Within its proudly-defined parameters, however, Moseley Shoals works surprisingly well, or perhaps it isn’t that surprising, given Brendan Lynch’s constantly inventive production which never quite allows these dozen songs to sink into stolid traditional mud. “The Riverboat Song” is unashamedly traditional in outlook, but less so in structure – you don’t get those odd rhythmic pushes and pulls with Golden Earring - and, as I’ve already intimated, it works. The chorus of “The Day We Caught The Train” may resemble the work of Chris de Burgh but its overall ambitions – you know, we’ve gotta get out of this place - and modest adventure shift the song a step above. You’re always aware that Fowler, lead guitarist Steve Cradock, bassist Damon Minchella and drummer Oscar Harrison function as a band – they interact and swing, as their West Midlands forefathers Slade had managed.

 

No, Ocean Colour Scene have never been an ostensibly radical rock group – their radicalism has been subtle. Yes, they exist as part of the generational lineage of British mainstream rock, but I fear that our music press’ constant, and ultimately fatal, search for instant and recognisable novelty has been in danger of throwing the consolidatory baby out with the bathwater. Disliking Ocean Colour Scene for not being, I don’t know, Pram or Broadcast or Orlando, is rather like knocking Ruby Braff for failing to be Lester Bowie, or Scott Hamilton for the alleged crime of not being Peter Brötzmann. Work needs to be carried out in all areas of music, not just the flashier and more readily accessible ones. Moreover, Moseley Shoals just made a lot of people feel good, and what is wrong with that?

 

The band retained Lynch to produce the follow-up, and what a solidly unnerving record Marchin’ Already is. What it isn’t is record collector rock, and the music that informs these thirteen songs is by and large not the sort that self-appointed authorities would tend to “collect.” It’s the music of the working classes, who don’t give a toss if Ian Indie thinks, never mind what he might think.

 

Marchin’ Already is also what a musical adaptation of Young Mungo might sound like. Remember what Douglas Stuart says in that book about how, as firm and protective ostensibly socialist working-class collectives (e.g. council estates in west central Scotland) can be, in certain aspects they can also be the most conservative and destructive of environments – anybody who exhibits the slightest sign of difference, intellectually or otherwise, is rudely instructed to remain in their place – “you’re letting the rest of us down.”

 

Because if there’s anything Simon Fowler still wanted in 1997, it was to get the fuck out of the polite and less polite outskirts of Birmingham – it is worth remembering that many of this album’s songs derived from the same built-up stockpile as its predecessor. Anyone stuck on the perimeter of Glasgow, Liverpool or even London will recognise his emotions immediately. Over and over, these thirteen songs tell of the urge to break suffocating bonds, to get away from what people expect Fowler to be and move towards what he is – the principal theme of the closing song “It’s A Beautiful Thing” is about the singer coming to terms with his gayness, hence the deliberate conflicts encased in its refrain: “Ooohhh it’s a beautiful thing/Ooohhh it's a terrible thing.”

 

Musically, the album veers all over the place, which isn’t as confined and certainly not as loud as you’d have initially imagined. On a hit-after-hit basis it’s hard to argue with its first three songs. “Thousand Mile High City,” powered by a riff which at the beginning reminds me a little of “The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme” and guitars that clang like fire engines when they’re not being spooled backwards, not to mention the mid-song punctum of a police whistle, is terrific rock, a bit like a Thin Lizzy demo produced by a Midge Ure looking for more adventure and they’re just waiting for Phil to wander into the studio and do his bit. It’s as traditional as marmalade but really, what a rhythm section – these guys know how to listen. “Better Day” is Oasis balladry filleted down to its core. “Travellers Tune,” one of two songs co-starring P. P. Arnold, rocks and bumps as mellifluously as the Primal Scream of 1994 never managed to achieve.

 

Unexpectedly, the lights go down somewhat after that introductory triptych. About half of Marchin’ Already is quiet, virtually folk-like music. With “Big Star” and its patient congas underlining Fowler’s clenched whisper, you could almost be listening to mid-period Tim Hardin. “Debris Road,” which I guess is about the rubbish suburb and preordained ruination that Fowler and the band are keen to escape but from which they can’t really pull themselves away emotionally (“I’m not scared but it’s something I cling to”), establishes a not displeasing halfway house between early seventies Fairport Convention and the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker.”

 

One could spend days trying to work out the grain of Simon Fowler’s voice. Overall he tends to remind me of the ballad-singing, non-yelling variant of Noddy Holder, the one that sang “How Does It Feel?” – it’s that West Midlands thing again – but throughout the more restrained moments of Marchin’ Already’s second half I’m drawn to think of the quieter George Harrison (“Long, Long, Long” etc.). Indeed, in songs like “Besides Yourself” and to a slightly lesser extent “Tele He’s Not Talking” we could be back with the Boo Radleys of Giant Steps, dreaming about leaving, formulating fantastic plans – Fowler sings “Besides Yourself” as though he were underneath his bedclothes.

 

In the midst of which you stumble across a pretty phenomenal song in “Get Blown Away” which not only cross-references a central theme of “Better Day” (“And then the nightmares come, and you get blown away”) but whose main riff and harmonies are fit to reside three streets away from “I Hang Suspended.” If the Suede of Coming Up had come up with this song we’d have long been celebrating its power. “All Up” is also a convincing Northern Soul-ish instrumental, akin to a sequel to “Wake Up Boo” awaiting its lyric.

 

In Marchin’ Already’s final three songs, Ocean Colour Scene remind us that, as much as they protested about the unauthorised remixing of their first album, the shoegazing element hadn’t really been jettisoned from their music – “Spark And Cindy” is embellished by all sorts of guitar and electronic oddities. “Half A Dream Away,” with obliging guest trombonist Rico, dabbles in dub with guitar pedal elements which place us back in the Town and Country Club circa 1991 (these elements sound awfully reminiscent of…Slowdive).

 

Meanwhile, the superb album closer, the aforementioned “It’s A Beautiful Thing,” which Fowler vocally divides between P. P. Arnold and himself – I wonder how Ms Arnold, uniquely placed as both participant in and observer of the multiple musical scenes in the West Midlands of the nineties, having worked with both Ocean Colour Scene and Stafford’s Altern-8, viewed things; far more fully than us, I’d imagine – sees the experimental dams slowly being burst as abstract noises slowly flow into the musical picture (complete with the bookmarked return of the clanging fire engine guitar effect); damn you who would deride us as trad fodder for bricklayers (who have generally harboured a more comprehensive understanding of what makes pop music click over the decades than most music critics – they are mercifully allergic to writing out tick sheets), bear witness to what we have sneaked into the world!

 

In acting terms, Fowler does not possess the slightly self-conscious extravagance of Brett Anderson (not that there’s anything wrong with slightly self-conscious extravagance) but is rather more Scofield than McKellen; turning inward to contemplate what he can create from the ruins that he inherited. If you seek to be quickly thrilled, Marchin’ Already may not be the record you might wish to seek. But if you possess openness and patience, it might prove one of those records you didn’t know that you wished to seek. It’s sometimes too easy and simple merely to presume anything.

OASIS: Be Here Now

 

(#577: 30 August 1997, 4 weeks; 4 October 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: D’You Know What I Mean?/My Big Mouth/Magic Pie/Stand By Me/I Hope, I Think, I Know/The Girl In The Dirty Shirt/Fade In-Out/Don’t Go Away/Be Here Now/All Around The World/It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)/All Around The World (Reprise)

 

 

 

A lot of people have been waiting for this one. Well, a few. Perhaps two or three people; quality, not quantity. What was that last remark again?

 

I am fully aware of the forest of clichés surrounding the reception of the third Oasis album. Overblown, glutinous, simultaneously overhyped and under-publicised, impossible preconditions imposed by a thoroughly paranoid management which enabled the degrading of the British music press into a  willing mouth for advertisers, hysterically raving reviews composed out of fear, everything and everybody under the influence of that sneaky white powder, overconfidence, betrayal.

 

You know what? On the sunny morning of Thursday 21 August 1997 it felt exciting for everybody, including me (if not Laura). Tony Blair was newly in power and hadn’t yet screwed anything up. Everybody and everything felt good, and what a pop lark to buy the new Oasis album first thing in the morning, on a day of the week when records didn’t normally come out. Not that Be Here Now was a “normal” record. Oh no; it wouldn’t be here if it had been.

 

I was working at King’s College Hospital at the time and habitually bought my new albums from Woolworths on Denmark Hill. However, they didn’t have the album when I popped in on my way to work that shiny Thursday morning – they hadn’t already sold out of it; they just hadn’t received their delivery yet. So I crossed the road to what was then still Safeway in the little shopping centre whose name I can’t remember after nearly twenty-eight years. There wasn’t a queue or anything but they had the CD in stock all right, and the girl at the checkout smiled at me and gave me a thumbs-up. It felt good to be part of something bigger, and if the Alan Moore fan in the attic is going to sneer at that, then it’s a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a human being.

 

Yes, I was part of the “hype.” I joined in because I am not Peter Purist McRechabite who imagines himself on a higher plane than the plebs and doesn’t listen to any music with tunes. It was thrilling to go home to East Dulwich with the record and put it on and listen to it. Many others initially felt the same way; it is estimated that over 424,000 copies of the album were sold on that first day alone.

 

But, as the anaesthetic block of optimism wore off and people decided to become disappointed by Blair – and therefore also, by extension, by Oasis – the excitement filtered away pretty quickly, and we were encouraged to believe that we had been sold a gigantic bill of goods. The Music and Video Exchange shop on Notting Hill Gate had boxes full of recycled copies of Be Here Now in their basement down those impossible stairs and were declining to take any more (they had too many). Since then the record has been snorted at with raised eyebrows (not to be confused with all the snorting that was allegedly going on around the time of the record’s release). It was mixed too loudly. There are too many guitar overdubs. Too much of everything. Sniffy sniff sniff.

 

So I approached listening to the record again for Then Play Long with very serious and mindful ears. I admit that I haven’t listened to it too much – if at all – since the summer of 1997 but, as regular readers will not need to be reminded, other things got in my way. However, I knew that I had to get it right, that I had to approach the record with open ears and mind. So I’ve listened to it very carefully some eight times over the past week and am relieved that my reaction to the record now is fundamentally unchanged from what it had been when first I listened to it on that sunny Thursday evening.

 

I am floored. I am in awe. What an incredible fucking album this is. It is overwhelmingly brilliant.

 

The question I then had to address was – all those renowned critics who gave Be Here Now instant, turn-of-a-dime rave reviews in 1997 and allegedly besmirched their reputations by doing so…what if they had been right all along, and, moreover, what if Noel and Liam Gallagher and Bonehead and Guigsy and the brother of the drummer out of the Style Council actually knew exactly what they had been doing all the time?

 

Yes, Be Here Now is loud. In your face, oh Christ please turn it down/pass the paracetamol levels of in your head. Yes, few of its songs are content with five minutes when seven or nine will do. And I think that was absolutely deliberate. If Oasis wanted this to be the biggest-sounding album ever – and, pray, what would its point have been if it hadn’t? – then they had to go over the top. Almost Metal Machine Music levels of going over the top; indeed, some of these songs play as though MMM is running in the background (even the tape hiss on “Magic Pie”). Why, it’s almost as if the band had decided, well, you liked What’s The Story so much to make us this big, then we have the licence to run some SONIC EXPERIMENTS past and through you. Full credit to producer Owen Morris, who previously took care to excise the multiple overdubs from Oasis records but now, perhaps buoyed by his success with Ash, presumably felt encouraged to go for broke. If it’s fifty guitars you want, Noel, you have them – the album on occasion musically resembles a Maine Road variant of Rhys Chatham.

 

Be Here Now is rock ‘n’ roll in macroscopic close-up, every detail magnified and maximalised to the point of aural intolerance. Or maybe it’s yet another of those Creation records designed to persuade you to change the way you hear things.

 

 

It’s bloody obvious, isn’t it, yet in twenty-eight years I can’t think of one writer who’s spotted it. It runs right through the gigantism of “D’You Know What I Mean?,” the unearthly dynamism of “My Big Mouth,” which latter in August 1997 was enough to convince me that no “rock” band was playing better than this, and even through the shaky four-step ascents and descents in the bridge of “Magic Pie” and the many choruses of “Stand By Me” – Be Here Now is up to its eyes in hock to Loveless. It’s as if Noel Gallagher listened to that record and worked out ways in which to develop its implications and forward them to a far larger audience than the one which demoted it to number 24 in the November 1991 listings.

 

Most – not quite all – of Be Here Now is so big people missed its bigness, or were intimidated by it. Watching the Top Of The Pops performance of “D’You Know What I Mean?” - all seven-and-a-half minutes of it, closing credits included – only the wilfully blind or purist failed to recognise that this was a MOMENT. You know, those milestones by which we mark pop’s road. In this instance it was a case of WE DID IT, WE BROKE THROUGH WITH OUR TOP POP TROJAN HORSE.

 

(And throughout this album there are references to, well, we did this from nothing, why can’t or won’t you? That line from “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” about building something, anything, it doesn’t matter, but build it and call it your home – “Even if it means nothing/You’ll never, ever feel like you’re alone”; that couplet might be the key to understanding why Oasis did what they did. Noel warns repeatedly about not taking what he has to say too seriously; like those other warring brothers [and major influence on Gallagher’s songwriting] the Bee Gees, fascination with words trumps any meaning. Do they fit in, do they sound right? “Maybe the songs that we sing are wrong” – well, who’s to say that they are the wrong songs? Who decides what’s wrong and right? Isn’t the “wrong” song sung with persuasive conviction always better than the “right” song handled so precisely the musicians might as well have utilised a forceps?)

 

But there are other factors to “D’You Know What I Mean?” which are easy to overlook, not least one of the most unapologetically experimental and elongated introductions to any number one single with the aircraft drone – my father served in the Royal Air Force so I know that’s no helicopter – or the repeated references to other song and album titles (and that also goes on throughout Be Here Now’s length, Beatles, Dylan and especially the Stone Roses alike, e.g. “But then they want to be adored” from “Magic Pie”) which would not have raised any fuss had this been sometime fellow Creation recording artists Saint Etienne – actually, in balancing a purposely patient pop procedural with opaque abstractions, the song is a bumptious second cousin to “Avenue.”

 

Yet what nearly nobody grasped in that song was that it is the most convincing number one single about domestic abuse, specifically the violent and drunken shit with which the Gallagher brothers had to put up from their father. Hence the reference in its second chorus to “All my people, right here, right now – THEY know what I mean”; i.e. if you grew up, not necessarily with us, but like us, then you’ll understand exactly what we’re saying here.

 

And the song’s moral? Not that far away from the Bill Fay of “Strange Stairway,” actually; “Get up off the floor and believe in life – no-one’s ever gonna ask you twice.” Get up off the floor, and believe in life. Who can possibly argue with that?

 

The rest of the album seems to be about endeavouring to believe in life, even to the point where it’s on the verge of being extinguished. Its best and most heartfelt song, “Don’t Go Away” – the record’s “Be My Wife,” its “Love Comes Quickly,” the one moment where the masks fall off and real emotion shines through – is about the Gallaghers’ mother and also about Bonehead’s grandmother, who had then recently passed away from cancer, and to whose memory the record is dedicated. “The Girl With The Dirty Shirt” is a simple and direct love song (to Meg Mathews) which perhaps illustrates that the album’s real musical star is electric pianist Mikey Rowe (who later worked with Bill Fay, and is still a member of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds); he is always there, probing, illuminating – and the song is nicely undercut by the wink-wink snarly raised guitar eyebrow at its end. Even “Stand By Me,” which sounds like a non-committal tribute to the band’s fans, manages to get by its “All The Young Dudes” elements on sheer cheek and courage – can you top these repeated climaxes? Why do you not even try? Meanwhile, note how close “Magic Pie” sounds to “Karma Police” except Noel sounds like he’s having more fun with the Mellotron than Jonny Greenwood (two differing aspects of life; neither supersedes the other) in its wacky outro.

 

The only real dud for me on Be Here Now is “Fade In-Out,” the band’s Rattle And Hum moment, a fairly tedious and interminable slide blues jam (with obligatory celebrity guest) which seems to improvise on Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” and doesn’t really go anywhere until its closing moments, when the music suddenly becomes smudged and serrated, like a faulty photocopy of itself.

 

Otherwise, though, this is superlative guitar-based rock music. “I Hope, I Think, I Know” is not quite power pop but still worthy of Teenage Fanclub (or they of it). “Be Here Now,” the song, rolls along most agreeably with an earworm whistling refrain which makes me think, somebody must have heard Skee-Lo’s “I Wish” on late 1995 radio. “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” might be for me the record’s most moving song because it sees the band reaching out to its listeners – “Say something…make it sort of mean something” (that “sort of” makes the song in itself) – and its final acknowledgement of the Beatles: “Hey, what was that you said to me?/Say the word and I’ll be free?,” “It’s calling out beyond the grave”; we can make that music, those beliefs, LIVE again. Its climactic calling-out – “You’ll never, ever feel that you’re alone” – doesn’t just remind me of “You’re Not Alone” by fellow Mancunians Olive, but more encyclopaedically of Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”; you know what those words were, and how they resonated with so many.

 

Which leaves us with “All Around The World,” which (a) needs its eleven-and-a-half minutes and (b) seems to have been built for the purpose of being the last pop song ever sung. They begin in the gutter and slowly strive for the stars, and if it is supposed to be about nothing, then what was “Hey Jude” about (other than asking John’s lad to cheer up a bit)?

 

Actually “All Around The World” is about everything, and not just “We Are The World” (“We’re gonna make a better day”). Noel Gallagher says that he wrote the song when Oasis were just starting out but held back on recording it until he was able to afford to give it the big arrangement (via Nick Ingman) it deserved. It is epic, because it would be pointless as a strummed whimper – and it has to be listened to in the context of it being summer, Blair just having got rid of eighteen-plus years of Thatcherism (or so it was thought at the time) and the future suddenly having become good again. Hold on, the song seems to plea, we can pull together and make this rancid old fucker of a society mean something again. There are la-la-la singalongs – one of the “la-la-la”ers is, meaningfully and prophetically, an uncredited-for-contractual-reasons Richard Ashcroft – there are strings, a harmonica (Mark Feltham, who worked on allegedly uncommercial records by Talk Talk), echoes even of Julian Cope and the Teardrop Explodes. Oh, and of another band from Liverpool to whom I’ll be returning in a moment.

 

Yet what makes “All Around The World” sparkle and work is, not just the lovely little touches that could have come from no other pop group, e.g. the modest upward climb of guitar that bridges the song’s first chorus and second verse, the slowly-dawning realisation that it’s being sung as the actual world around it is collapsing. Hence those two key changes are maybe not a thing in themselves – it’s still less than half of what you get in “These Eyes” by the Guess Who or “Love On Top” by Beyoncé – but in timid late nineties Britain it stood as a giant declaration of intent; and you can feel Liam Gallagher’s near-hysterical cries of desperation as we prepare for the final key change – “IT’S GONNA BE OKAY!” he screams as the sky seems to fall around him, and us; the ship is sinking.

 

Then, after the bring-our-boys-home flag-waving singalong – don’t knock it; you could say the same about “What You Want” - of “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!),” where you can briefly believe no band rocked harder or better or more happily, the instrumental backing track returns in time for the end credits roll, only Alan White’s drumming is more pronounced, there are now also trumpets (heralding an ascension to Heaven?) and eventually the entire planet collapses, everything mutates into shrieking distortion, leaving just one piano refrain, approaching footsteps, and a door calmly closed in our faces.

 

Or an airbag.

 

Or some not-so-poor people of Paris nine days after Be Here Now’s release who probably could have done with the judicious use of some airbags.

 

Or another ambitious album which had come out on Creation Records at another point in the nineties…

 

 

Over the past week, I’ve also been listening repeatedly to Giant Steps, the third album by the Boo Radleys. I listened to it quite a lot on cassette on my Walkman thirty-two years ago but never managed to keep it fully in focus except the last track which was a sort of campfire “Hey Jude”-type singalong (“Do you remember, do you remember” which inevitably makes me think of those other Liverpudlians the Scaffold). It was all over the place but to me at the time never quite found its place. In the meantime I wrote about the follow-up album on Then Play Long. But, swotting up on Be Here Now, something struck me. Not a blunt instrument, but a possible musical connection. That would have been the only possible connection between Oasis and the Boo Radleys, Alan McGee ordering both to write hits notwithstanding, since in the late David Cavanagh’s exhaustive and at times exhausting history of Creation Records, My Magic Pie Eyes Are Hungry For Those Other Pies, oh hang on a minute, Martin Carr says there was no talk about music, big or small, between the two parties. The Radleys would endeavour to initiate a discussion about the Beatles and all they got from Oasis in response was No Beatles Mad For It. As you would.

 

But, following a self-engendered lead, I’ve given Giant Steps several more listens this week. Holy “Skip” Spence, Batman, what an album! Recorded on what I’d estimate was a budget of as near as possible to zero, it nevertheless does not skimp on its ambitions. It begins with some ambient guitaring which wouldn’t been out of place on a Boards Of Canada record five years later, along with obligatory radio chatter – is it just a Liverpool thing to remind everybody just how important and influential a record Dazzle Ships was? – before drums and pining guitar kick in and “I Hang Suspended” immediately reveals itself as a glorious, upfront pop song which in some ways foreshadows Oasis, in other ways parallels Suede and Blur but in most ways anticipates what Ash would do a few years later (I’m looking at you, “Goldfinger”).

 

Sice has very rarely been an in-your-face singer of the Liam Gallagher variety; his is rather the voice of the introvert in the chair at the far end of the room where the party’s being held, or the humble office worker who never says anything because they know they’d be instantly drowned out by all the other natter and chatter. His is the voice of somebody who is never really offered the opportunity to speak; hence the earnestly-buried fury of “Wish I Was Skinny,” “Barney (…and Me)” and some of “I’ve Lost The Reason.”

 

But, much as Liam sings Noel’s words, Sice sings Martin Carr’s words. Occasionally, the two sing them together (“Butterfly McQueen”), but mostly it’s up to Sice to sing what Carr plays, or vice versa. “I Hang Suspended,” despite or perhaps because of its all-expense-spared literal-minded video – well, they look like they’re having a good time – is an awesome song, top five in any reasonable world.

 

The rest of Giant Steps is the sound of a band exploring, using anything they stumble across, in order to find itself. They approach dub (“Upon 9^th and Fairchild”) in a curiously chaste 1982 Peel session manner, which in 1993 was refreshing in itself, and they could do straight indie as well as anyone (“Wish I Was Skinny” – but how many straight indie bands would have dreamed of that police siren ending or the jumpcut into the post-Albini quiet-LOUDisms of “Leaves and Sand”?).

 

The overall inventiveness of Giant Steps does not fail to astound in 2025. “Thinking Of Ways” got me thinking of mid-to-late period Talk Talk with its pastoral brass and clarinet commentaries (great clarinet playing, incidentally, from one Jackie Toy, of whom I can find no mention elsewhere, either before or after this album – what became of JT?). Throughout, trumpeter Steve Kitchen, though never a freeform player as some of the album’s more excitable (and less knowledgeable) reviewers leapt to describe some of his playing, works as an indispensable foil to the band, much as Mikey Rowe does on Be Here Now.

 

Listening to “Barney (…and Me)” – and yes, the central riff sounds a bit New Order-y in places – one can only marvel at the abrupt yet natural transitions from monochrome folk to Technicolor lounge. “Best Lose The Fear” would be a fine pop ballad in any setting. In the brief “One Is For” I imagine I hear “Maggie’s gone” rather than “Man is God.”

 

But what does any of this have to do with Be Here Now? Well, there are four songs in particular which seem to point a fairly direct path towards what Oasis would do. Bear in mind that the album was originally conceived with the thought of Screamadelica, and the then-imminent prospect of Bobby and the boys coming back with some straight-down-the-line good-time get-down rock-and-rooooooll, in mind – and maybe also the notion that “well, if Bobby doesn’t want to push this any further, then perhaps we can?”

 

Nevertheless, the song “If You Want It, Take It” sounds like a virtual blueprint of where Oasis would go, from Sice’s relative vocal swagger to Carr’s just-the-right-side-of-dogmatic guitar commentary, while the cautiously-escalating pain of “I’ve Lost The Reason” can be repressed no further and Sice’s voice suddenly ROARS out of the speakers…as though he’s giving birth to Liam Gallagher.

 

Then there’s “The White Noise Revisited,” the aforementioned campfire singalong that concludes the album (with supplementary backing vocals from members of Moose and others) and actually cascades in a near-bipolar fashion between the verses’ hissing, treated threats and the plaintive choruses. It’s a low-key counterpart to “All Around The World”…but where does the large-scale counterpart come in?

 

It happens, of course, with “Lazarus,” where everything the Boo Radleys have been experimenting with on this album suddenly comes into focus. The opening reggae/dub section leads almost imperceptibly into the imperious trumpet-led main theme – and that trumpet is not played by Steve Kitchen, but by Chris Moore, once of Pigbag. Sice sings the relatively minimal lyric as though it were a prequel to “D’You Know What I Mean?” “I…you know I never go out/And you know that I start to forget things/But it’s okay, they weren’t essential anyway” – this could so easily be the younger Gallaghers, stuck in Burnage penance, who haven’t yet worked out how to get themselves up off the floor. Yet the song’s title implies that its singer will rise. One possible interpretation of Be Here Now would be as a sequel to Giant Steps, or Noel Gallagher’s revenge on those who would belittle its ambitions; these things you can’t have, we’ll get them for you. “All Around The World” is “Lazarus,” finally risen, and come good.