When a band clicks, they flex together as a muscle and become more than the sum of their parts. Thursday’s Verve concert at the Ricoh Coliseum was one of those occasions. Walking onstage wearing the colours of our local football club and in front of an audience warmed up by more than an hour of a DJ spinning funky northern soul and dub, The Verve wasted no time before getting right down to business.
The rhythm section was not only impeccable as timekeepers but loud as hell. Pete Salisbury gave us more than an hour of a solid hybrid between Bonham-style thunder and the now classic Stone Roses or Happy Mondays swaggering shuffle. Simon Jones, his partner in low-end-frequency-generating, was clearly the one having the most fun, constantly egging the audience on, getting them to provide backing vocals at times and at one point, in the middle of some jamming, even sneaking in the bass line to Chic’s "Good Times."
A lot has been said about Richard Ashcroft the shaman, but the spell he casts only works when backed by the right people. Solo, he can easily slip into schmaltz. With his Verve compadres, his performance takes on preacher-like qualities. At one point he and Jones brilliantly segued from vocal jamming on a Stone Roses song, into what he called his “own Resurrection”: “Come On,” one of the more muscular songs in their repertoire.
And then there’s Mr. Nick McCabe. Simon Jones said it himself in a recent interview: no, Nick; no Verve. The man unleashes wave after wave of echoes, seagulls, squeals, thunderclaps, feedback and rumbling that reminds you why this band are shoegaze heavyweights and not just Ashcroft’s vehicle for churning Britpop power-ballads. Barring a couple of exceptions, the studio tracks’ orchestra swells were replaced more than competently by McCabe with his guitar, making some of these decade and a half old tracks feel new.
The audience were even receptive to new material, such as the new song “Sit And Wonder” which keeps getting honed and tweaked and is now, I assume, as close to finished as it will get. The same reception, warm by Toronto’s vaguely-swaying-to-the-rhythm standards, was given to non-greatest-hits tracks like “Life’s An Ocean.” The emphasis was on Urban Hymns material, as you might expect, but A Storm In Heaven and A Northern Soul were also revisited.
By the time “Bittersweet Symphony” was played as an encore, the audience had rocked out to the best of the band’s catalog. You could feel that another wave had crested as the band brought us down softly, saying goodbye with a funky number in the vein of vintage Charlatans. For a gig that some predicted would be just another nostalgic reunion, hopes were raised for that forthcoming fourth album. Even if making it took them a decade.