The Verve

Wigan, 1990. Four young men from a town better known for rugby league than for string sections. The Verve spent their early years as a louder, more chaotic band than the one most people remember, all feedback and sprawl, fronted by a singer, Richard Ashcroft, who carried himself like a star long before the sales backed it up. Nick McCabe’s guitar was the other half of the equation, a player who could make a single chord hang in the air for a verse.

They nearly didn’t survive. The band split in 1995, the friction between Ashcroft and McCabe part of the reason. Then they reformed, McCabe rejoining just before the sessions that would change everything, and recorded a third album with the breakup still in the room. That record, Urban Hymns, turned them from a respected British band into a national one. Its singles, “The Drugs Don’t Work,” “Lucky Man,” and the one that opened the door, became the sound of late-90s Britain.

The success did not fix what was broken between them, and the story of their biggest song would shadow the band for more than two decades. But for one album, The Verve made strings and swagger feel like the same thing. Press play and hear a band winning the argument with itself.