The Verve release 'Forth' album

When JAM! asked Richard Ashcroft about a reunion with '90s billboard staple the Verve in 2006, he said the following: 'You're more likely to get all four Beatles on stage.' Read the full story here

"That was you?" Verve bassist Simon Jones chuckles over the phone from his home in the north of England.

"Richard saying there was a better chance of the Beatles getting back together," he says with a click of his tongue. "Well, that line was quoted many times. People must have lifted it from your interview."

It's been 11 years since the Britpop band released their last studio album, 1997's stirring "Urban Hymns," and the anthem "Bitter Sweet Symphony" became a hit the world over.

Uncharacteristically, at the height of their popularity, the band acrimoniously split in 1999 with lead singer Richard Ashcroft, who jumped into a solo career post-Verve, all but driving a nail into any possible reconciliation.

Since then, Ashcroft's had a change of heart. "Why?" Jones wonders aloud. "I don't know really. I guess it was the same for him as it was for the rest of us. There's just this deep yearning to make music with this band.

"It was never easy with us four; I think that's why we split up. But we're older and we're more mature and better able to deal with each other."

After reuniting for a series of U.K. shows last winter, the battle-scarred quartet - rounded out by guitarist Nick McCabe's buttery psychedelics and Pete Salisbury's hypnotic drumming - agreed to regroup and see if they could recapture their onstage magic in the studio.

"There wasn't any talk about 'Urban Hymns' or how we might beat that commercially," Jones says. "I think that would have been a non-starter. But the time off turned out to be great because we came back with a hunger that we wouldn't have had if we had gone on to make another record right away."

The 10 tracks that ended up on the recently-released "Forth" flit between wheezy, disco-floor shuffling ("Love is Noise"), cocktail-hour brooding ("Mama Soul") and lazy, midnight introspection ("Valium Sky").

"We broke up at the height of our careers," Jones reflects. "Looking back on it and wondering what kind of album we would have made after 'Urban Hymns,' it's impossible to imagine. But," he pauses, "I'm glad that we didn't make a record then.

"This is the record that we should have made right after it, but I don't think we would have done this in 1999. We write our best music when it isn't preconceived and after 'Urban Hymns' we were spent emotionally, musically, physically; something had reached its course at that point."

Closer in spirit to the band's 1993 debut "A Storm in Heaven," "Forth" gives Ashcroft's airy vocals a sweet aftertaste thanks to densely layered rhythmic arrangements that are a far cry from radio-friendly hits like "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and "Lucky Man."

"To me, this is our best record," Jones says. "It's got human errors on it; it's got songs being conceived. That initial spark, where a riff starts, we took those little nuggets of spontaneity and made them into something magical."

So with the band back together, seemingly for good, what did he make of Ashcroft's solo work?

"I couldn't listen to it," he says frankly. "I had lost my band and he went on to have a solo career and that was painful. When Richard played with Coldplay, I turned it off.

"I had to find a way to deal with the fact that this thing that was so precious to me was lost. My way to deal with that was to not listen to Richard's records. But I knew that I would rather have him at the top of the charts than some Pop Idol."

Although Ashcroft is contractually obligated to record another solo album, Jones thinks the band still has a lot to say.

"I've started in this band when I was 16, so a massive part of my life has been devoted to this. It means the world to me to do this. I'm not going to lie and say that everything's all of a sudden easy in this band. We still do have our disagreements about things, but we're a bit more mature and better able to deal with it.

"When the band first split up, it was easy to be flippant about it. I think we all thought we'd just end up in another band. But I don't think any of us would be that careless again.

"If we have a disagreement, we'll work through it. It won't be, 'F--- you, f--- you, f--- you and f--- you.'"

On the Net: