Download new Verve demo

Last week bassist Simon Jones posted on his myspace about the Verve reunion:

the remainder of the week was spent rehearsing "up north" (what a freakin luxury to make music away from that big London place!) with Nick and Pete. Richard will be joining us later when we've gotten the music together. Gotta say - twas the greatest few days playin' old tunes!

Started with Life's an Ocean and gotta say it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up! So far we got a short list of about 20 odd tunes to pool from for these first gigs, in no particular order we played -

Make it till Monday, Virtual world, She's a Superstar, Gravity Grave, This is Music, A New Decade, On your Own, History, Stormy Clouds, Life's an Ocean, A Northern Soul, All in the Mind! (Sounded Amazing), B.S.S., Drugs don't Work, Sonnet, Lucky Man, Come on, Weeping Willow, Rolling people, Velvet morning, Space and time, Man Called sun, Starsail and new ones, should I give titles away yet? fck it - Sit and Wonder, Judas, Appalachian Springs. Other new ones we are planning to do - maybe - Mona Lisa and Rather Be.

I don't want to give the game away (already have) but I would like some feedback on all this-Now's the time to speak up! What have we missed that u wanna hear? Is it too early to play new stuff? do we skip the obvious? do we do the obscure? Let me know! Later.....Si Jones.

Very cool to see that they're rehearsing songs from all three albums. I'm particularly partial to Urban Hymns and was kinda worried they would overlook a lot of that material, since most of it was written solely by Richard Ashcroft during the time when the band was broken up.

As for those new song-titles, wasn't "Mona Lisa" one of those pre-Urban Hymns demos that Ashcroft did?

UPDATE: NME has posted a rather uninspiring new jammy demo from the band:

• "The Thaw Sessions" [14:08]

If this is an indication of what the new album will sound like than I'm no longer excited.

Comments

[matt]

This is the band that I want to see when they play over here in North America.

...and NME.com DOES seem to always have "special breaking news" that tends to be less than what it appears...

[Pete]

It's not possible they'd overlook Urban Hymns. It's their commercially most popular album and most of the audience would feel short-changed if they didn't hear Bitter Sweet Symphony or The Drugs Don't Work.

But the main point in The Verve's comeback is that it's not all nostalgia: they've got new material too. I hope they won't shy away from playing it even at these very first gigs.

[torr]

yeah, nme always say "We'll have HUGE NEWS TOMORROW" and then it's a release-date or some such.

Also, we don't even know for-sure about how/when the album will get a U.S. release, so don't hold you breath about any North America shows any time soon!

[Pete]

"If this is an indication of what the new album will sound like than I'm no longer excited."

What did you expect then, man? A Richard Ashcroft solo song with a Nick McCabe guitar solo?

This is how The Verve write some of their material. It starts out as a 20-minute jam or something and eventually it'll become a fine 5-minute song. I think this one sounds quite promising and interesting, especially considering that this is the very first thing they did after meeting again after all those years: straight into the studio and into the music.

This is more A Northern Soul than Urban Hymns but I bet there are going to be those more conventional songs on the album as well. It's all part of the balance that made The Verve so interesting and Urban Hymns such a masterpiece.

[torr]

"It's all part of the balance that made The Verve so interesting and Urban Hymns such a masterpiece."

actually that's the problem, I don't like the tracks on Urban Hymns that were written by the band, and not just Richard.