Saturday Live

Back in January I started this series of posts featuring live gigs and sessions with a 1992 performance by Verve at Camden Town Hall, a band who conjured up an expansive psychedelic guitar experiment- four young, thin men from the wilds of Wigan with suede jackets, scuffed boots and long straggly hair, playing in the outer reaches. This is in the pre- The Verve days, just Verve. There's another long form clip on Youtube of the band a year later at London Astoria, recorded for late night music TV programme The Beat on a Monday night in October 1993. There are fours songs played from what was clearly a longer, full length gig- Star Sail, Slide Away, Virtual World and Blue. 

It is, and this isn't a word I like to use often, epic stuff, from the time of their first album, the psyche/ shoegaze/ indie masterpiece A Storm In Heaven. In the twenty minutes shown here the four men play from within a bubble of noise crated by Nick McCabe's guitar and pedals, an atmospheric and engulfing stormcloud of feedback, notes, distortion and melody. The drums, bass and Richard's vocals all come from within that, the four elements in some kind of perfect balance. 

After I posted Verve at Camden Town Hall I was gifted a bundle of early demos and recordings which included these two versions of Slide Away. The first was I think recorded in Wigan in 1990, very lo fi and with a peeling wail of feedback running through it as Simon Jones' bass rumbles away with that familiar undertow groove. 

Slide Away Demo #1

Slide Away Demo #2

The song eventually came out in September 1993, on 7" and 12" and CD single. The video has our intrepid starsailors lost in the wilderness a long way from home.