INTERVIEWS...cont'd
This is a more comprehensive version of the article / interview from The Guitar Magazine which spawned the article "An appreciation of Nick McCabe" on the Official Verve site.
Richard Ashcroft
and friends Simon Jones(bass) and Pete Salisbury(drums) had
already played together in various Wigan bands(sometimes with
guitarist/keysman Simon Tong, who returned to the fold for Urban
Hymns) when in 1989, they heard of the quiet guitar"genius"
who would really complete their lineup. If Richard Ashcroft was
pilot of The Verve, Nick McCabe was to become the band's
bombadier. Ashcroft had first heard the guitarist play in a
college practice room and described McCabe's sound even then as
"a whole other universe."
......From the very beginning, Verve's onstage focus was the
rolling eyeball antics of Ashcroft - yet much of that musical
dynamic came fron the fingers and feet of Nick McCabe. TGM first
met Ashcroft and McCabe - polar opposites of motor-mouth self
confidence and quiet introspection - in 1993, on the eve of A
Storm In Heaven's release. In this early interview, none of which
has been published before, they reflect on their music and
ambition.
"This album is us just jamming in the studio, same as we've
always done," said Ashcroft. We've got the freedom to do
what we want, and I think that gives us the best results 'cos
we're not scared - we're not scared to run on "too long",
not scared to try new things. It's less contrived and packaged
than a lot of music over the last few years."
The notion that Verve's elliptical approach to songwriting would
yield a hit seemed fanciful in those early days - but Ashcroft
and McCabe's enthusiasm for their idiosyncratic path remained
unwavering.
The band McCabe concurred, were "totally selfish, totally
self-centred and self-indulgent - just the way it should be."
Accusations of being psychedelic hippies - hardly the sharpest of
stances in the early days of so-called mod-esque Britpop- failed
to bother the band. "Psychedelic bands, to me, are horrible,
plastic dayglo bands - we're certainly not like that,"
McCabe grumbled to TGM. But we can be psychedelic on one level,
emotional on another. The music can work on loads of different
levels.
"Our music's got a diversity that a lot of psychedelia -
particularly English psychedelia, which can be a bit fey -
doesn't have." Ashcroft added, "It's not as if it's
just based on drug experiences. But psychedelic these days just
seems to be used to describe something that's slightly strange as
opposed to something that you can really enjoy with a high-grade
class joint. I'm not a great fan of psychedelic music to tell you
the truth."
........While some saw that sound, dominated by McCabe's part-shimmering,
part pulverising guitar textures, as a natural extension of the
Cocteau twins-plus-Mary Chain sonics of early '90's shoegazing -
the apogee of which was My Bloody Valentine's Loveless LP -
McCabe insisted to TGM that much of his inspiration arrived from
a different direction.
"When I was 14 or so I listened to a lot of Joy Division - I
loved the textures of their records. Now though, it's more John
Martyn, his 70's albums in particular; that's where my textured
guitar playing comes from, honestly," he explained. "And
I had Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd forced on me wheh I was
younger, and although I tend not to listen to that sort of thing
now I guess it's lodged in my brain."
"I won't say that bands like the Cocteau Twins were not an
influence, but that's not the stuff I really like....I like Vini
Reilly( from The Durutti Column) because he could be flashy but
he was really simple about it. I also like Funkadelic's Eddie
Hazel who, to me condensed the best bits of Hendrix. You can
probably hear all my influences in what I play, whether it's
recent stuff or old blues records. It's all about sound. I think
guitar players who strive for technical excellence have lost the
plot, really. The whole point of the electric guitar started when
Charlie Christian plugged his guitar into an amplifier to make it
sound like a saxophone or whatever....and if I can press some
button in the studio to make my guitar come up with a new sound,
then what's so bad about that? It's like the whole idea that
techno isn't "proper" music 'cos they can't play
instruments - it's so short-sighted. That's surely where new
music comes from."
McCabe's search for new sounds saw him go through a dizzying
array of effects for the recording of A Storm In Heaven. "I
love buying gadgets, and I go through loads of different setups,
so what I use changes constantly," he confessed. "For
guitars, my standard Strat is the one I really like, and I also
have a Gibson ES-335 for a lot of the feedback stuff. I've got a
Jazzmaster which I bought mainly 'cos I liked the shape....and
then I found out how shit it was. It was TomVerlaine's fault, as
usual."
"My main Marshall packed in and started to sound horrible
just before we recorded the album so I got hold of a Mesa /Boogie
(MkIII) combo. For effects I started off with a Watkins Copicat
and I used to have one of those old Roland Space Echoes, but at
the moment I 've got a Roland GP-8 that I picked up second-hand.
It's pretty reliable, it does the job. But in the studio, it's
just a case of using anything I can get my hands on - a GS-6, a
Roland Jazz Chorus combo....I hooked those up after the Mesa/Boogie,
and it's that which gives the great big sound on The Sun, The Sea.
"I come up with new ideas just by dribbling guitars over
everything and picking out something that makes some sort of
sense," he continued."We sample stuff, loop bits I've
played and it's sounds great. John(Leckie) has actually tamed me
down a bit, really. But live it's different - we never try and
exactly recreate the studio sound and I think all our songs will
always take on a different character when we play them live."
......And for Nick McCabe, the band's burgeoning live power was
already foreshadowing a harder approach to his playing; "A
lot of the songs on A Storm In Heaven have three guitars on them,
but they're interlocking rather than just layering and I think
it's unnecessary. Live, it's an even better sound even though
it's simple....so I want to get out of overdubbing. That simple
blend - guitar, bass, and drums - it's the perfect one isn't it?
Classic.
....... For their second album A Northern Soul, Nick McCabe
jettisoned much of the FX overload that had characterised A Storm
In Heaven. Where Verve were all blissed-out grooves and gently
uncoiling guitar figures, The Verve were harder and leaner, more
soulful and bluesy, and the band's improvisational powers were
reaching their peaks.
"Since the last album, we've spent two years playing music
every night, and that means you get a lot better," observed
McCabe- though he also hinted that the band's chemistry was
fragile. "When it's working it's amazing, but when it's not
it's horrible. That's what's different about The Verve."
....McCabe The band hooked up with Oasis producer Owen Morris and
the initial sessions for A Northern Soul went supremely well.
remarked that the first three weeks of making the LP were not
"the best three weeks of my life. We were making music and
thinking about it. And then it all went nuts..."
Yet the best of A Northern Soul still grew from The Verve's
protracted jam sessions: the choppy Funkadelica of the title
track, the whiplash chords on A New Decade, the strolling psyche
- blues of Life's An Ocean and the verge -of-feedback wail of
Stormy Clouds. And perhaps for the first time, Nick McCabe didn't
sound like a product of 80's post punk but a player tapping a
much deeper seam. "I'm not trying to sound 65 years old....it's
not this retrospective thing. Listen to (The Stone Roses') John
Squire on The Second Coming and you can almost hear the taste
barriers go up. He's become too obsessed with this idea of what a
good guitar player should sound like. He's lost the plot really
hasn't he? "F'rinstance, you walk into Wigan practice rooms
and you'll hear bands playing Cream songs and that. They must see
it as their apprenticeship, I suppose - as if, once you're good
enough to play all these other people's songs, then you're good
enough to to do your own. That's rubbish. The Verve have never
played cover versions. Why should we? Why not make something new?"
McCabe's central guitar contribution to A Northern Soul was all
the more remarkable given that 99 per cent of it - even the
roaring, distorted chords that fade into delicately-toned blues
bends - was rendered in real time with minimal overdubbing.
"What you're hearing on A Northern Soul is the room,"
he said. "We're playing the room, getting the room on tape.
We wanted that feeling we get when we make the rehearsal room
vibrate."
For his part, producer Owen Morris reckoned McCabe to be "without
doubt the most gifted musician I've ever worked with. You can ask
Noel Gallagher to play the same guitar line a hundred times and,
as long as there's a good reason, he'll do it. With Nick , you've
got no chance. He just doesn't want to do that."
To make his multi-voiced approach even more flexible, McCabe
devised a two-tier amp-switching system for the recording of A
Northern Soul; a Marshall JCM800 stack served up the gutteral
growl for the heavy riffs, while a new purchase, a vintage Vox AC30,
delivered the more delicate FX passages when flighty whims took
hold. Guitar wise, McCabe's Fender Strat remained in service but
a sunburst Les Paul replaced his onceUS -beloved ES-335 (the
repaired neck of which finally expired midway through the band's
'94 tour); also used were a Tokai Talbo (a weirdly shaped '80's
aluminium bodied electric) for slide work, plus a Takamine 12-string
acoustic and Ashcroft's square-shouldered 1970's Gibson J45
acoustic. For effects McCabe employed the Roland GP-8, an Alesis
Quadraverb and a reissue Watkins Copicat. Morris then recorded
his guitar with plenty of compression, but no desk EQ.
While A Northern Soul represented palpable artistic and
commercial progress - This Is Music became The Verve's first Top
40 hit, and the album outsold A Storm In Heaven within it's first
month on the shelves - the wired craziness of the recording
sessions spilled over into the the group members' "real"
lives. Nick McCabe was rumoured to be suffering from clinical
depression and he and Richard Ashcroft, even when they weren't
playing, were increasingly hardly speaking at all. In September
1995, two months after A Northern Soul was released, the singer
made public his decision to split The Verve. As the Top 40 made
way for History The Verve, it seemed, were just that.
In the wake of the split, Nick McCabe returned to Wigan to spend
time with his young daughter while Ashcroft headed for Cornwall
and then Bath, where he worked on new demos......By now, Simon
Jones and Pete Salisbury were back behind the singer and old
friend and multi-instrumentalist Simon Tong - who taught Ashcroft
and Jones their first guitar chords back in Wigan - was in place
to add guitar and keyboards.
.....Under the guidance of the first album's producer John Leckie
the foursome demo'd over 50 songs, mostly of new-found chordal
simplicity and everyman emotional resonance: Ashcroft even
pencilled in an album title....Urban Hymns. Though impressed by
Ashcroft's improving songcraft, it was Leckie who had to insist
that the new tracks still needed a high calibre guitar player.
"The one ingredient missing," recalled the producer
recently in Q, was the Mick Ronson the Keith Richards, the
whatever-you-want-to-call-it."
.....Eventually after a few months of soul-searching, Ashcroft
rang McCabe and asked him to return. While the details of the
realliance are closely guarded by the band, Ashcroft was
magnanimous enough to later admit; "I love Nick McCabe and I
never want to be in the band if he's not playing guitar. I hope
he thinks the same way about me. We just needed time to realise
it."
And the rest, as they say is, hysteria. Yet for all the brouhaha
of The Verve's rebirth, Urban Hymns remains less of a true band
effort than either A Storm in Heaven or A Northern Soul. By the
very nature of it's protracted birth, half the songs on Urban
Hymns - and, notably, all the hits- were developed from the demo
masters Ashcroft had prepared for his solo album: clearly, the
singer could indeed write three-minute hits to order and not, it
seems, "feel fake". The rest of the album was The Verve
as was, as is, and hopefully will be - with Nick McCabe to the
fore. Indeed, it's hard to imagine Urban Hymns' more unique
moments - the heavy Zep-esque groove of Come On, the icy, FX-swamped
Catching The Butterfly, the wah-led Weeping Willow - existing at
all without McCabe's contribution......
Michael Leonard
