It has been two decades since the colossal success of the pop band The Verve’s era-defining Urban Hymns, and it remains one of the biggest selling British albums of all time. It was released by HUT Records on 29 September 1997, and featured hits, The Drugs Don’t Work, Lucky Man, and Bittersweet Symphony – the song that won the band a Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Song. The Verve is a fascinating memoir from the photographer Chris Floyd, released to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the seminal album.
After an initial assignment in 1994, photographer Chris Floyd was embedded with the band in late 1996 and 1997 and documented the recording, touring and promoting of the album in the UK, Ireland and the USA – the only photographer to have such access. The photographer toured with the band at the height of their fame following the release of Urban Hymns, documenting their meteoric rise from British indie band to global superstars. In 1994 the band were playing to crowds of hundreds, four years later they sold out a 33,000 gig at Haigh Hall in their hometown of Wigan.
This body of work is a celebration of a band that, momentarily, looked like they were set to become one of the biggest rock and roll bands in the world. As Floyd reflects: “For a while it felt like being at the center of the universe… We were in a brief golden era, when it looked like the world was unshackling itself and beginning to develop a more advanced and progressive attitude. We seemed to be in a decade that had taken a holiday from history. I am grateful and thankful that I got to live out my twenties in such a fertile, peaceful and creative period.”
The photographs vividly depict this period in time – before the explosion of the internet, smartphones and social media. As journalist Michael Holden, who toured America with the band, says in his foreword: “Those years, it turns out, were the twilight of analogue consciousness and certain seeming certainties about the world at large. Whatever we are now, we were not then. This isn’t just the everyday past we’re looking at, but another planet.” Thoughtfully, Floyd has included in the book a section devoted to people’s nostalgic musings and memories from 1997. The majority of these images have never been seen before.
Chris Floyd, The Verve Photographs
Reel Art Press
£29.95 / $39.95
