One hopes not...
The 90's US One-Hit Wonders Rate: WINNER REVEALED - Goodbye, farewell and amen
- Thread starter Ironheade
- Start date
she/her
I better not see Haddaway here tomorrow
Since it is @Ironheade's final 10 I kind of feel like it is poor Richard.
he/him
Is one likely to give a 10 to a song by a band whose other song was once described by one as “my favourite Britpop(-ish) song ever”?
Yes.
After a few more listens to this next one, though, I may have to revise that opinion...
4. BITTER SWEET SYMPHONY
Average score: 8.711
Highest scores: 1 x 11 (@Conan ); 19 x 10 (@Ironheade , @CorgiCorgiCorgi , @2014, @Sprockrooster , @DJHazey , @ModeRed , @pop3blow2 , @berserkboi , @DominoDancing , @unnameable , @Andy French , @CasuallyCrazed , @chanex , @GimmeWork , @Hurricane Drunk , @LPMA , @K94 , @4Roses , @Blond )
Lowest scores: 1 x 4 (@Daniel_O )
Chart positions: #12 Hot 100, #15 Radio Songs, #23 Mainstream Top 40, #8 Adult Top 40, #4 Modern Rock, #22 Mainstream Rock
Year-End Hot 100: #79 (1998)
Who? Oh yeah, them...
You know what? I've only just thought of it now, but three of our final four are from outside the United States! A celebration of US one-hit wonders this may be, but it's looking, at this late hour, as if the Yankees are about to go down fighting! So, for the final time, let us return to Britain, and the peak years of Cool Britannia, driven by Britpop. Breaking out later than the genre's Big Four, but to no lesser commercial success if at all, were The Verve, with their stunningly unique baroque-pop masterwork “Bitter Sweet Symphony” - but sadly, this turned out to be another band who scores their only American hit just as they are on the verge of disappearing. So let us hark to the sour note that this symphony ended on...
Cheekbones and floppy hair, that's what you need to be a Britpop frontman. That and a coke habit.
Just like the other greatest British creation of the period – I speak, of course, of Wallace and Gromit – The Verve originate from Wigan, where the members met at Winstanley Sixth Form College. (Yes, Wallace and Gromit live in Wigan. Look it up.) The band – which consisted of lead vocalist Richard Ashcroft, lead guitarist Nick McCabe, bassist Simon Jones and drummer Peter Salisbury – played their first gig in 1990, and they were not quite the mainstream Britpop act we came to know by the time of “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. No, the original incarnation, which was just called “Verve”, was a psychedelic-influenced shoegaze band who created their material through extended jam sessions, and some of their music from this early period could be outright freefrom. Still, they came along during the peak years for shoegaze, so even with how out-there and experimental they could be, it didn't take long for Hut Records, a fully-owned subsidiary of Virgin, to snap them up in early 1991, largely on the basis of their apparently amazing live shows. Their first three singles came out the next year, followed by a self-titled EP in December 1992. For a young band, these were astonishingly mature, experimental yet accessible pieces of work, and attracted critical hype in the midst of the Scene That Celebrates Itself almost immediately. (In particular, you should check out their second single, “She's a Superstar”, which I would hold up as the equal of anything by Slowdive or Ride.)
Shoegaze bands sure like smeared stuff on their album covers, huh.
Verve's full-length debut, A Storm in Heaven, came out in 1993, and remains a cult classic among fans of shoegaze to this day. It's a brilliantly textured work of shoegaze with modern neo-psychedelic elements that never sound in thrall to its 60's predecessors, and with a better eye towards pop hooks and melodic smarts than the fuzz-loving studio denizens of the rest of the genre. If you only know “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, check it out – you might be pleasantly surprised. Though the album was a modest success, reaching #27 on the charts and eventually achieving a gold certification, the singles “Blue” and “Slide Away” both stalled low on the charts and failed to crack the Top 40. However, considering that they were playing in a fairly uncommercial genre that was kind of on the way out anyway (between My Bloody Valentine disappearing, Slowdive being screwed over by their record label, and most of the other big bands starting to change their styles), it could have gone a whole lot worse. As well as supporting the Smashing Pumpkins on the European leg of the Siamese Dream Tour, and playing with a young and unknown Oasis, Verve got a decent American push. They played Lollapalooza in 1994, and a new mix of “Blue” was released to American alternative stations, but it didn't take. To make matters worse, the band got hit by two nasty messes on 11 July while they were in Kansas: Peter Salisbury was arrested for wrecking his hotel room while in the throes of a drug-abusing binge, while Richard Ashcroft was taken to the hospital with severe dehydration after a marathon drinking session. Clearly, the US was not the place for them yet. And this was only the beginning of the troubles that would rip the first incarnation of the band apart, tragically so when they very well could have been, should have been, the biggest rock name of the decade for a long period.
No, for the last time, WE DON'T DO THAT SONG ABOUT THE FRESHMEN!
First, they had to change their name to the more familiar “The Verve”, because of a lawsuit by the jazz label Verve Records, which as we all know, was not the last time they would run into legal trouble! Even worse... well, where would any Britpop band be without a battle of wills between lead singer and guitarist, both of whom carried rather oversized egos and were constantly fucked up on drugs? Yes, we had the continuous warring of the Gallagher brothers in Oasis, and the feud between Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler that caused Suede to lose their greatest asset during the recording of Dog Man Star, and The Verve make up the third of this not-so-holy trinity. On the one side was Ashcroft, whose powerful, emotionally nuanced yet oddly detached voice added the human element to the cosmic crackle backing him up, and thus more of an orientation towards hooks and mainstream-oriented melodies; on the other was McCabe, master of reverb-soaked freakouts and buzzing colour-smeared tape effects in his densely orchestrated layers of psychedelic guitar, who made his disdain for such a mundane thing as pop music quite clear. To make the situation worse, the band ended up dividing right down the middle, with Peter Salisbury more aligned with Ashcroft and Simon Jones with McCabe. It got nasty almost immediately.
...What you looking at me like that for, Richie?
The Verve decided that their second album A Northern Soul would be fully written before they went into the studio, having had difficulty with the improvised approach of A Storm in Heaven, and so while the structures of the compositions still had a ragged and rangy freeform about them, the record was decidedly more vocally-driven and song-oriented (as opposed to instrument-oriented), and thus favoured Ashcroft's approach to music; it also expanded their instrumental palette from the guitar-bass-drums setup occasionally augmented by horns that it had been on A Storm in Heaven, integrating keyboards, acoustic guitars, and on its most successful single “History”, a string section. It was a much more “rocking” and darker sound than anything they had done previously, helped out by their switch of producer from the spacious and psychedelic Stone Roses associate John Leckie, to Owen Morris, the man who would give What's the Story Morning Glory? its charmingly boorish layers of crunch in the same year. Lyrically, too, it was rather darker than its predecessor, the lyrics reflecting Ashcroft's struggles with a recently broken relationship and the drug problems that tormented the rest of the band. The chaos was not confined to their personal lives, either: the band preceded recording with a three-week ecstasy bender and barely let up for the rest of the sessions, Ashcroft disappeared for five days with no explanation at one point, and Morris smashed one of the windows in the studio as a kind of catharsis after much painful work done on “History” (he later said that he would never work with The Verve again). A Northern Soul would end up providing The Verve with their commercial breakthrough, charting at #13 and getting a gold disc, while its three singles all made the Top 40. But just before the September 1996 release of the third single “History”, which became their highest-peaking song yet at #24, Ashcroft announced that the band had broken up. From his words, it seemed that he and everyone else needed some time away from work, and were no longer happy about playing together. This would remain the unhappy case forever afterwards.
Doesn't look very urban to me. Could've called it "Green Belt Hymns", maybe?
In the end, though, The Verve ended up having a shorter retirement than Jay-Z. Ashcroft, Jones and Salisbury got back together within weeks of announcing their breakup, but it was without McCabe, so in the guitar slot (also doubling on keyboards) was an old schoolfriend named Simon Tong. They spent the remainder of the year quiet, working on songs for their third album, and in early 1997 Ashcroft made peace with McCabe and asked him to return, stating: “I got to the point where nothing other than The Verve would do for me”. The expanded five-piece group would put out Urban Hymns, one of Britpop's last great masterworks, in September 1997. Unlike their previous albums, which had songwriting credits given to the entire band, two-thirds of Urban Hymns had solo writing credits for Ashcroft, and you can definitely tell. It is, essentially, pop-rock, with a strong emphasis on epic stadium-destined ballads, often driven by acoustic guitars and strings rather than the loud electric guitars of previous work. It was a sound that ushered out the laddishness and jam-packed-pub-party fun of Britpop, and paved the way for the pensive yet still arena-ready post-Britpop balladeers like Coldplay and Travis to take the lead in British rock. However, The Verve did still retain a solid link to their old psychedelic sound and complex, layered textures, creating quite a fine two-headed beast that never falls into the insipid AOR territory it might have threatened to. The producer credits reflected this duality in sound too – on the one side was Chris Potter, otherwise best known as a mixing engineer for the latter-day Rolling Stones and on Gabrielle's second album, but on the other was Martin “Youth” Glover, the legendary former Killing Joke bassist turned experimental psychedelic rock-electronic fusion guru. One of his songs was “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, and his influence is evident in the obscure choice of sample driving it: strings from an orchestral arrangement of the Rolling Stones' “The Last Time”, credited to the Andrew Oldham Orchestra (Andrew Loog Oldham being the Stones' original manager and producer). But, yes, we will get to the discussion of that sample... later.
I can't really exaggerate how huge Urban Hymns was. If you're British and about my age, your parents most certainly have a copy right in between No Angel and White Ladder. It took off in a way that, arguably, no album had in the couple of years since Morning Glory, spending twelve weeks at the number one spot on the album charts, and remaining on them for 85 straight weeks. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was an immediate hit upon its release as the album's lead single in June, going to #2 and managing a three-month chart run, which in the hyperspeed environment of the UK charts in the late 90's was a crazy level of staying power. Come September, “The Drugs Don't Work” became The Verve's only UK number one single, and in November the campaign was rounded off nicely by the #7 placing for third single “Lucky Man”. When all was said and done, Urban Hymns had been certified eleven times platinum in the UK; it was the second highest selling album of 1997, bested only by Be Here Now, and as of October 2018 it had sold 3.34 million copies, making it the UK's nineteenth highest selling album of all time! Compared to all that, its performance in the US – a mere Top 30 placing and platinum certification – seems rather muted, if markedly better than what bands like Pulp or Suede could manage over there. But at least one of its singles managed to match the rapturous reception it had received back in its homeland...
Knocking hatas aside since 1997.
So what do I think?
TEN.
The last of my tens, is “Bitter Sweet Symphony” - and I can't be too bitter about it, I'm just pleased that it got this far after half-fearing it would crash out low in the top 40. Where to begin? Well, let us begin, like the song, with that dive-bombing six-note string melody. What a tune! It's one of the most immediately memorable, distinctive melodic hooks in this rate, tinged with both downtrodden spectral melancholy and a glittery, sunlit kind of uplift, and the way The Verve manipulate it throughout the song is tremendously clever. Throughout the verses, the strings largely keep to long, extended chords to back up the other instruments, but the main melody does keep going, with the smallest snippet occasionally poking out of the dense orchestral fog as a teaser. So when the main melody comes back in in its fullness for the chorus, it's an immensely satisfying moment, something that truly feels earned by the build-up to it in the verses. But think not that the sampled strings are doing all the work here, friends! Peter Salisbury's drum track is a masterwork of minimalism, with its single snare hit widely spaced from the few sharper strikes and the quick syncopated bass kicks to give “Bitter Sweet Symphony” a gorgeous sense of spaciousness and light, while a tambourine and bells so subtle they feel like they're barely there most of the time give the song a rolling, undulating feel to its groove that stops it from ever feeling like a rote rock-ballad plod. And the interaction of the guitars with the strings is just beautiful, too. With Tong in the right channel, ably holding down the glistening orchestral chords of the verses with his warm and thick tone and rock-solid low-end arpeggios, and McCabe in the left dressing the song with almost subliminal single-note slides that are nonetheless lovely in their minimalism, the two of them also layer the song with vast piles of cloudy fuzz that seem like they're hardly there at times... you don't catch them until you realise, “Wait a minute, it can't just be the strings doing all those sounds!”. It's rare that you can hear two guitarists playing so few distinct notes between them, and yet making a song sound so grand by their playing. Lyrically, too, it's a fine little thing dealing with existential doubt and the hunt for a place in a cruel world. Not only is Richard Ashcroft's powerful voice, edged with a slight sneer and a swaggering tomcat grace that belies the difficult emotions and roiling angst of the verses, an excellent instrument on its own and the best possible choice to deliver it, but the mixing is just perfect. There's a slightly sad, isolated sound to it, as if he was recording it on his own in an echo chamber and wishing he had somebody there to share in it. And it's a sound extended well into the song's coda, as the reverb overwhelms the band members and they are dragged into the fade. With “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, The Verve succeeded at what a lot of chart-indie successors never quite managed: making a lighters-in-the-air ballad that is accessible to so many people, and yet still retains its alternative chops and dense textured atmosphere such that it never veers close to the middle of the road. One of Britpop's greatest achievements? I'd like to say so, and that is no small feat, for British guitar music was never quite the same afterwards. Ten it is!
...I don't even know.
Where Are They Now?™
By all rights, as “Bitter Sweet Symphony” peaked on the US charts in early 1998, The Verve should have been on top of the world. Urban Hymns was selling like wildfire on both sides of the Atlantic and attracted praise so effusive you'd swear the music press were ejaculating out of their fingertips, and they had arguably established themselves as second only to Oasis among British rock bands. They won for Best British Group, and Urban Hymns won Best British Album, at the 1998 BRIT Awards, and at the MTV VMAs of that year, “Bitter Sweet Symphony” got nominations for Video of the Year, Best Group Video, and Best Alternative Video (though it won none of them). But unlike all too many artists presence in the rate, the fall of The Verve came about, not through any fault of their own or releasing un-compelling music that could not capture the public's imagination, but from the very height of their fame. And as with so many awful things, this sad turn of events all begins with a run-in with the law.
Would you trust a man who smokes a pipe like that?
You see, though the Verve had got the rights to use their sample of “The Last Time” from Decca Records, who held the copyright for the Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording, they did not get them from former Stones manager Allen Klein, the man who owned the copyright to all the Stones' pre-1970 recordings. Klein refused to grant a license for the sample, but while the resultant lawsuit with his holding company ABKCO Records was settled out of court, it didn't go well for Ashcroft, to say the least. According to Simon Jones, the Verve had been told that they would split the royalties 50/50 with Jagger and Richards, but then Klein forced his hand again when he saw how well the song was doing, threatening to force them to take the single off the shelves if they didn't give them 100% – in the end, Ashcroft relinquished all his royalty rights for the princely sum of $1,000, and the songwriting credits were given solely to Jagger and Richards. Even Andrew Oldham belatedly got on board in 1999, successfully suing for mechanical royalties that he claimed he was owed from “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. In fairness, I don't blame the Stones for this: even Keith Richards said in a 1999 interview with Q that “I'm out of whack here... if the Verve can write a better song [than us], they can keep the money”. It's the money men, as usual, Because Record Labels Are Dicks. (Bit rich of Allen Klein too, considering the whole drama with him bilking the Stones themselves out of copyrights and royalties... but that really is too long a story to go into here.)
"Not me." - Nick McCabe
As far as any further commercial potential for The Verve on the left side of the pond, it's kind of hard to say how they might have done. “Lucky Man” was a reasonable hit on the Modern Rock charts, reaching #16 there without crossing over to the Hot 100, but Britpop was always a tough sell in the US with the notable exception of Oasis. Whether The Verve would have been the exception that proved the rule is impossible to know: for you see, by the time “Bitter Sweet Symphony” had become an American hit, the band was already disintegrating. The supporting tour for the album started off well, but unfortunately Simon Jones would collapse on stage during an early show, a harbinger for how the wheels would soon come off, even as the VMA nominations and Rolling Stone covers began to roll in – yes, the tensions between Ashcroft and McCabe began to boil over again, with the two hardly speaking to each other at times. Things came to a head after a show in Dusseldorf, where a backstage argument between the two (over McCabe's on-stage drunkenness that day, according to him) turned physical and left McCabe with a broken hand. He pulled out of the tour after that, claiming that he could not take the pressures of life on the road any longer. Though The Verve gamely tried to continue the tour, replacing McCabe with ace session man B.J. Cole, the American leg was continuously hit with problems: it was poorly organised, venues were downsized due to demand being less than expected, and the support band Massive Attack were forced to drop out. The Verve played their last gig at Slane Castle in August 1998, but by now their shows were receiving poor reviews for the first time in their career, with critics making note of a lack of energy and overall dispirited tone to their performances. “Bitter Sweet Symphony” got itself a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Song in 1999 (they lost to Alanis Morissette's “Uninvited”), but it did them no good: in April of that year, The Verve announced that they had split for good, but the writing had been on the wall, if we're being honest, for almost a year at that point.
...Are you SURE you want to remind us of that other time you walked down a street right now?
Ashcroft proceeded on to a solo career – with Peter Salisbury remaining by his side for the first three albums - making his solo debut with the album Alone With Everybody in 2000. This was not a record without its joys, particularly the UK #3 hit single “A Song for Lovers”; the issue was that that song, and the record's other high points, had been written for Urban Hymns. The rest of the album was marred by a succession of over-bloated AOR ballads drowned in sickly orchestration, and Ashcroft's increasingly pompous lyrics. It went platinum and got to number one on the album charts anyway, and 2002's Human Conditions and 2006's Keys to the World also did well, both peaking in the Top 3, the former getting a gold disc and the latter a platinum. Together, the three albums produced a total of nine Top 40 singles. Unfortunately, the problems evident with Alone with Everybody only got worse, and by the end of the decade, critics were looking at Ashcroft as a great songwriter gone to pot, not undeservedly. As for the other members... the two Simons, Tong and Jones, had a short-lived band called The Shining, but they disbanded after their 2002 album True Skies proved unsuccessful. Tong would later replace a departing Graham Coxon live as part of Blur's Think Tank tour, and would remain in Damon Albarn's fold for a while after that, contributing most of the guitar parts to Gorillaz' Demon Days and playing with his 2007 supergroup project The Good, The Bad & The Queen; meanwhile, Jones joined the live backing band for Irish singer Cathy Davey, where he has remained since 2005. As well as playing on Ashcroft's solo records, Peter Salisbury opened up a drum shop in Stockport, while McCabe kept a relatively low profile playing only the odd session part on albums for John Martyn and Faultline... except when it came time to snipe at his old bandmates in the press, of course. McCabe sneered at Urban Hymns and its frequent emphasis on ballads and orchestral sections, dismissing it as “not a music fan's record... it just sits nicely next to the Oasis record”; meanwhile, Ashcroft said that he should have put it out under his own name, and claimed that he had only invited McCabe back to add in some guitars to his compositions because he had “bottled it” on releasing it as a solo record at the last minute. Though frankly, much like the Gallaghers regarding their infamous internecine feuds, neither Ashcroft nor McCabe is the most reliable of narrators, so make of the actual circumstances what you will.
Yes, one of the guys from The Verve is behind the genetically-engineered Japanese schoolgirl's guitar playing. Take that in.
But even when, as Ashcroft put it, “you'd have more chance getting all four Beatles back on stage”, the lure of the burgeoning Britpop nostalgia wave proved too strong. In 2007, The Verve ended up making amends and getting back together, though it was without Simon Tong, the claim being that “if you bring more people to it, it's harder to communicate and communication has always been our difficulty”. They turned down an offer for a multi-album deal due to not wanting to get back on the “treadmill” of regular recording and touring, but the reception for their return was rapturous: tickets for their initial six gigs sold out within twenty minutes, and nearly every performance they did through 2007 and into 2008 received glowing reviews and also sold out almost immediately – including prestigious spots at Coachella, Glastonbury, Rock am Ring, and T in the Park! Their return to new music came in the form of a new album called Forth (ho ho), which came out in August 2008 on EMI, the same month as their new single “Love is Noise”. That single was a major UK hit, peaking at #4, and also did reasonably well in a number of European territories; unfortunately, the second single “Rather Be” couldn't keep up the momentum, fizzling out at #56. Though Forth itself did well, topping the album chart and earning a gold certification, it came out to fairly mixed reviews: some noted that it more or less sounded like a continuation of Ashcroft's solo career (about half the album was solo writing credits for him), with some nods to their psychedelic past that made it sound like a slightly confused halfway point between their old sound and Urban Hymns. Not awful, but nowhere near as good as their first three... typical reunion album from a band that had had its day, really. At least they weren't fighting, right?
Heh heh, you see, geddit, the joke is that it's their FOURTH
Sadly, this interlude of peace was short-lived, as The Verve would come to a crashing halt again in 2009. And, yes, it's because Nick McCabe quit again. According to him, neither he nor Simon Jones was on speaking terms with Ashcroft by that time, and they accused him of merely using a Verve reunion as an ego boost, and a means of getting a solo career heading for the dumper back on track; meanwhile, Ashcroft claimed only that “we did what we set out to do”. And perhaps that is the case, because they've all been busy with their own things these days. Ashcroft has his continuing solo career, having released two UK Top 5 albums, 2016's These People and 2018's Natural Rebel, since the breakup of The Verve; McCabe and Jones have an experimental electronic rock project called Black Submarine, in collaboration with frequent Goldfrapp guest violinist (and “Viva La Vida” string man!) Davide Rossi; Peter Salisbury has been the touring drummer and part-time studio percussionist for the Charlatans since 2010, when their original drummer Jon Brookes was undergoing treatment for a brain tumour (sadly, Brookes would pass away in 2013); and Simon Tong has been a prolific session musician, reuniting with The Good, The Bad & The Queen for a second album entitled Merrie Land in 2018. With the exception of McCabe and Jones, always the closest-knit of the band members, they apparently have hardly any communication these days. Considering the relentless personal drama that seemed to follow The Verve everywhere they went, I would hazard a guess that all of them are much happier where they are. Also, y'know... I think having released the UK's nineteenth highest selling album of all time assuages any pains regarding unfinished business.
Oh yeah, and earlier this year, when accepting the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, Ashcroft announced that the Rolling Stones had signed over the entirety of the publishing for “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. Good for them!
OVER TO THE PEANUT GALLERY
Salty symphony
iheartpoptarts (5): When you’re 9 or 10 and you watch a lot of music channels and you just want the Backstreet Boys or the Spice Girls but all you see is this guy walking down the street.
əʊæ (5): All of this time i thought National Anthem was using the same sample! Lana, ha rock band derivation power.
Hudweiser (6): The strings are the only good thing here, the rest of it is landfill post-Britpop dirge that was somehow lauded with praise.
Happiness, more or less
Empty Shoebox (7): It's not that I don't like this song, it's that it's overplayed and there was much better on that album.
yuuurei (7.5): The lyrics and vocals are really just okay, but that instrumental is pretty entrancing.
Seventeen Days (9.5): When this came out, I was just starting to become aware of the Britpop movement. Unfortunately, it was right at the tail end of its reign, but whew. What a way to bow out. I docked half a point solely for the fact that it was so overplayed that summer, but it is still one of the best tracks of the 1990s.
Auntie Beryl (6.8): Not even their biggest UK hit (that was The Drugs Don’t Work, a number one), this did nonetheless do very well. For the Rolling Stones.
WowWowWowWow (7): Those damn Rolling Stones can’t just leave well enough alone, can they? You had “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” money. Now the rest of us are stuck dealing with Richard Ashcroft for the rest of our lives. THANKS FOR THAT.
pop3blow2 (10): Do I have to pay the Rolling Stones royalties for commenting on this song? Just checking. One of the defining moments of britpop & maybe also one of the last. Once OK Computer came out & teen pop took over, I really considered Britpop pretty much dead. Bittersweet, indeed.
unnameable (10): Nowadays everyone walks down the street in a video, but Richard Ashcroft did it with more panache.
CasuallyCrazed (10): A Perfect song with a capital P. The Madonna Reinvention Tour interpolation with Don't Tell Me is still one of the greatest mashups of all time.
DJHazey (10): One of my favorite 'depression anthems' of all-time.
chanex (10): As much as I have always taken it for granted its an undeniable anthem, and the "can't change" waterfall at the end always gives me a rush. I wouldn't complain if this won.
4Roses (10): A thing of beauty. Those strings are a musical redemption.
Andy French (10): The fucking strings. Just yes. Still holds up today too.
DominoDancing (10): Brilliant piece of britpop. I was originally a bit annoyed by all the post-release quarrels about royalties and credits, but the song's arrangement really is 95% the Andrew Oldham Orchestra version of The Last Time.
ModeRed (10): The Verve What a song! Grandiose, sweeping strings, epic. Of course nicking bits from the Rolling Stones isn't a bad idea either.
Blond (10): Y’all will probably trash this for no apparent reason but it’s an amazing song. The strings are iconic and so was that scene in Cruel Intentions that this was used in. I remember my dad had this album and there were some really good songs on it (Lucky Man and The Drugs Don’t Work are still great).
GimmeWork (10): Cannot separate feelings about this song with those of watching Cruel Intentions. SMG was one of the best things about the 90’s for me.
berserkboi (10): Wow at this massive act qualifying! Cant believe America didn’t take to further gems like The Drugs Don’t Work and Love Is Noise!! This is admittedly fantastic but also features in possibly the best movie finale scene of all time in my go to Teen movie Cruel Intentions! Sarah Michelle doing her best Glenn Close!
Sprockrooster (10): There are only three tracks I use from them. This, The Drugs Don't Work and Love is Noise. This might be their #3 for me, but it still is damn amazing. Oasis done right.
2014 (10): Made my Ultimate top 20 and super close to being my 11, it's so euphoric and I pray it does ok!
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He/Him
As mentioned, my other top picks by The Verve:
Very happy Bittersweet Symphony made it this far!
EDIT - Twinning with @Sprockrooster again I see! :D
Very happy Bittersweet Symphony made it this far!
EDIT - Twinning with @Sprockrooster again I see! :D
That is almost scary!
londonrain
Staff member
she/her
i support this
I love Bittersweet Symphony & can't believe it went number 4 here. Fantastic! I really thought it'd exit much quicker than it deserved to... just being a male vocal, a rock song, etc. Seemed like it has tough hill to climb against some other comeption! Just shows what tune it is & really what perfect moment in pop it was.
she/her
Would you trust a man who smokes a pipe like that?
Why does this guy look so 98 Degrees?
So maybe.
he/him
Maybe I should have read a newspaper or something so I knew what actually happened.
Richard always made me mad because I have been as facially gaunt as him approximately 0.0 days of my life.
How old are our host's parents? I remember being shocked by how young he is, and seeing as I unironically own a copy of White Flag, I suspect I may be close to his parents age.