The Comedy of Errors: The Verve - Feel (13 June 1992)

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Oh fuck, it’s The Verve again.  The musical equivalent of cod liver oil or Brussel sprouts: good for your health, occasionally nourishing in certain situations but a real struggle to get through without grimacing.

Feel, the B-side to She’s a Superstar, runs for 10 minutes and 44 seconds.  You only probably need to bother with the first three and a half minutes, because after that, boy does this meander on.  At around  the seven and a half minute mark, you’ll be brought out of your coma when the band start launching into a Day in the Life style ascent.  But, frustratingly, this dissipates leaving the band fading out as the song ends and presumably they carried on playing until the studio caretaker told them that he would be locking up and turning off the power in 5 minutes, and didn’t they have homes of their own to go to?  Peel felt that elements of the track reminded him off Children of the Future by the Steve Miller Band.

So irreverence reigns in terms of how I look at Feel, but for all my carping, the opening third of Feel is a gorgeous piece of music. Gentle, reflective but with a soundscape that sounds like a summertime night sky stretched over a desert.  Richard Ashcroft’s hushed, delicate vocal sounds like it’s calling the listener to take part in some kind of collective emotional connection.  A desperate plea for physical and spiritual feeling in a world that’s forgotten how to let its guard down.  The morbid strangeness of the lyrics (“I’ve never seen this before/See you dead on my floor”) eventually, and in classic Verve fashion, leads onto a chorus that feels like it will lift all who hear it up into the sky, caused in this instance by Nick McCabe’s shimmering guitar work playing underneath Ashcroft’s gently insistent exhortations, “And I want to know/And I want to feel”.  They sound like rocket boosters gently engaging with a line which if taken up by a full congregation could lift the listener off into the stratosphere through a sheer sense of will. Verve gigs were often compared to spiritual events, and for non-converts like myself, could look very po-faced and solemn.  But Feel, despite the longeurs, does an excellent job of showing what disciples of The Verve could find in their music.  A sense that their music will save us all and there will be cod liver oil and Brussel sprouts at The Last Supper.

As for me, I would have been eating with The House of Love.



Video courtesy of Emanuele Miraglia (Verve) and xcitergr (House of Love)