It's the night of Monday, February 9th, and the Brit Awards 1998 ceremony is underway in London's Docklands: maverick singer Finley Quaye strolls in from left-field to win Best British Male Solo Artist; The Spice Girls fall flat on their platforms as All Saints grab the girl power accolades; and The Verve oust Oasis as the band of the moment, sweeping Best British Group, Best British Album (for Urban Hymns) and Best Producer (Youth and Chris Potter).
Unfortunately, The Verve can't be here to accept their award because they're playing a concert in Brixton Academy; while the guests at the Brits Awards watch from afar by video link, Richard Ashcroft, lead singer with The Verve, is shimmying onstage to the swirling, uplifting beat of Lucky Man. The gangly singer is barefoot, treading on a specially-made carpet which bears the band's logo, and about 3,000 fans answer his taunts of "Come On!" with ever-increasing roars of appreciation.
The sold-out gig is in aid of charities for the homeless, and Ashcroft proudly sports a T-shirt bearing the logos of the Big Issue magazine, House Our Youth 2000, and the NCH Action For Children. While the band play on regardless, their Brit Award is accepted on their behalf by Ashcroft's long-time hero, George Best.
The non-event that is the Brit Awards plods along slowly to its anticlimactic end. The only excitement comes when Danbert Nobacon from anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba pours a bucket of water over British Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.
Nobacon's act of rock 'n' roll rebellion grabbed a few headlines the next morning, but The Verve's achievement was still the main story, and the band shared front page glory with girl group All Saints, the other big winners of the night. The story of The Verve has all the right rock 'n' roll ingredients: from near-annihilation to Best British Group in just one year, the band has run the gauntlet of drugs, decadence, depression and self-destruction, and come out swaggering at the pinnacle of British rock.
URBAN Hymns is the fifth fastest-selling album in British rock history, and looks set to outlast its nearest rivals, Be Here Now and OK Computer; the band has also beaten Oasis and Radiohead to win Best Band accolade in both the Brit Awards and the "alternative" NME Brats Awards; Bitter- sweet Symphony has been acknowledged by NME readers and critics as the best single of 1997.
The Verve may have snubbed the Brits, but they did attend the NME Brats Awards, held in the London Astoria on January 27th - although they didn't bother to walk the last few yards to the podium to collect their gongs. Instead, NME editor Steve Sutherland carried the awards down to The Verve's table. Afterwards, Richard Ashcroft told NME: "The reason I'm here tonight is because people have voted, it's not voted by an industry. It's not voted by anyone who wants the album to sell a bit more for their own purposes. I think any other awards ceremony is an absolute farce, but I'm happy to be here because I know there's people out there that have put a cross on a piece of paper and I'm here to say thanks a lot. Nice one. Thank you to everyone who voted for us."
Ashcroft also announced that the band wouldn't be "doing press" for the foreseeable future: "It's difficult 'cos I'm trying my best not to do a lot of interviews 'cos I see how a lot of people have basically said too much, been overexposed. But it's almost like the more you say no, the more you find yourself in positions like now talking about yourself. But, yeah, at that point [prior to the release of Urban Hymns] I was saying we were the greatest band in the universe, I believe that. I believe in the music and, I think at the end of the day, I've seen people say things about the band, saying we're treading a familiar path and I believe we are. We're making music that people feel something when they hear it and it's a beautiful thing and I'm buzzing."
The Verve may have had their share of adversity, but their slow, unsteady rise to glory has also been marked by intensity, self-belief, determination and an almost religious sense of purpose. Formed in Wigan by Ashcroft and his schoolfriends Nick McCabe, Simon Jones and Pete Salisbury, The Verve started out as simply Verve, but had to add the definite article to avoid legal problems with the American jazz label of the same name.
Early Verve gigs were loose, psychedelic affairs, the music a trippy amalgam of The Stone Roses' spaciness and the Rolling Stones' loose-limbed rock 'n' roll. The band got stoned, dropped acid, took E, and each new sensation was reflected in the velvet textures of their blossoming sound. Their 1993 debut, A Storm In Heaven, was a thing of flawed beauty, but it felt totally at odds with the current Britpop climate, with its Suede smell of Animal Nitrate and its Blurred vision of Modern Life. The album got good critical reaction, however, and Ashcroft's passionate, pseudo-mystical outpourings provided good copy for the music press, which nicknamed him "Mad Richard".
When the band played Lollapalooza in 1993 and 1994, they out-partied the other bands on the tour, being regularly drunk and disorderly. They also became fast friends with Oasis, who supported them on a UK tour; each band has written a song about the other: Ashcroft wrote A Northern Soul after Noel went missing from Oasis's American tour, and Cast No Shadow is Noel's tribute to The Verve's ethereal singer.
Oasis soon overshadowed The Verve, however, becoming the biggest British band since The Beatles; The Verve, meanwhile, began the downward spiral into drug-abuse, depression and mutually assured self-destruction. The second album, A Northern Soul, had failed to grab the attention it deserved, the fans paying more mind to Blur's Parklife and Oasis's Definitely Maybe. By the end of 1995, the relationship between Richard and guitarist Nick McCabe had broken down - the former close friends were now barely speaking to each other. It was Ashcroft who put all four band members out of their collective misery by instigating the break-up.
Shortly after the release of the single, History, whose cover featured a sign saying "all farewells should be sudden", The Verve were indeed history.
But then the healing process began. Ashcroft secretly married his girlfriend, Spiritualized keyboard player Kate Radley, and started writing the songs which would eventually feature on Urban Hymns, using the setbacks and bust-ups of the recent past as inspiration. Slowly he began to reconvene the band, bringing Pete Salisbury and Simon Jones back into the fold, and recruiting new boy Simon Tong on guitar and keyboards.
Tracks were laid down with producer John Leckie, but it was clear that the new recordings lacked that special ingredient which made The Verve's music shimmer and sparkle. After aborted attempts to recruit Bernard Butler and John Squire, Ashcroft finally swallowed his pride and phoned his estranged friend Nick McCabe. The last fragment of the severed alliance was put back in place, and The Verve were alive and kicking once more.
The band released Bitter Sweet Symphony in the summer of 1997. The single went straight to No 2, and became last year's summer anthem; recently, it was used as part of a Nike advert in the US, and The Verve donated half their fee for the ad - about $87,000 - to charities for the homeless.
When the third album, Urban Hymns, was released, it signalled a big upset for the major league players, streaking past the likes of Oasis, Radiohead and The Prodigy to hog pole position for weeks on end. It's still at No 1.
The Verve may have wrested the Britpop crown from Oasis's iron grip, but some rock fans believe that the mantle is simply passing from one pretender to another. Both Oasis and The Verve share an almost arrogant self-belief, and both also hark back to traditional rock 'n' roll lifestyle, finding virtue in retro values, and solace in second-hand styles. To their fans, however, The Verve's loose, liquid approach to rock 'n' roll is a much-needed change from the monolithic chord structures of Oasis.
At the Brixton Academy last Monday week, The Verve came even closer to catching that elusive butterfly of rock 'n' roll. As the aromatic scent of songs such as This Is Music, Life's An Ocean, Sonnet and The Drugs Don't Work floated around the venue's colonnades and statues, there was a distinct taste of quiet victory in the air, a feeling that The Verve had at last reached their true goal, which was simply to bring their music to the wider audience they felt it deserved.
On May 24th the band play a triumphant homecoming gig in Wigan's Haigh Hall, the biggest concert of their career, and a reaffirmation that rock 'n' roll dreams can come true, even when they once seemed like a recurring nightmare. Whether The Verve can take it even higher or whether they'll suffer an Oasis-style backlash doesn't matter; after years of running up that hill, and having reached a critical and commercial plateau, all The Verve have to do now is kick back, light up, and let the songs do the healing.