The four original members of The Verve, reunited on a San Francisco stage last week for the first time in about a decade, set list slightly dumbed down for American ears. They skipped over the first batch of early blissed-out ’90s import EPs, their epic debut album, A Storm In Heaven, and a good chunk of its follow-up, A Northern Soul, focusing instead primarily on songs from 1997’s Urban Hymns, the final release that made the group a household name thanks to a little song called “Bittersweet Symphony”.
That they waited to dispatch that tune until the end of the night was a little disappointing, considering the sold-out room was packed with die-hard fans that would have been just as thrilled to hear an encore stuffed with obscure b-sides. But this was just a warm up for the band’s Coachella show, and minor sequencing grumbles aside, the concert crackled with electricity.
Not only did singer Richard Ashcroft, guitarist Nick McCabe, bassist Simon Jones and drummer Pete Salisbury still look like lithe young men–a rarity at any reunion show–but they played with the kind of wild-eyed conviction usually reserved for pimple-faced acts with funny names like the Arctic Monkeys and The Kooks.
Ashcroft remains one of rock’s great frontmen, capable of kicking songs into orbit simply by hunching over and opening his eyes really wide. They ran through an absurd number of great tunes–”The Drugs Don’t Work,” “History,” “Lucky Man”–and even splashed out a pair of decent new ones, suggesting the reunion isn’t so much a nostalgic space-rock trip as a new beginning.
Photo via Stereogum