Red & Clear Colour

Tracklist:

LP 1

1. This Is Music
2. Slide Away
3. Lucky Man
4. History
5. She’s A Superstar
6. On Your Own
7. Blue
8. Sonnet

LP 2

1. All In The Mind
2. The Drugs Don’t Work
3. Gravity Grave
4. Bitter Sweet Symphony
5. Love Is Noise
6. Rather Be

This is Music: The Singles, is a compilation album by English alternative rock band The Verve: Richard Ashcroft (vocals), Pete Salisbury (drums), Simon Jones (bass) and Nick McCabe (guitar).

Originally released in November 2004 it featured two non-singles, tracks pulled from the sessions for their third album Urban Hymns, This Could Be My Moment and Monte Carlo.

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of an album that has never been pressed on vinyl and, under the groups direction, this long overdue reissue replaces the bonus tracks with the powerful singles from the bands 2008 reunion album, Forth Love is Noise and Rather Be as well as including their second single Shes A Superstar (1992) in its original, full-length, eight-and-a-half-minute form (rather than the five-minute edit). As such, the album now represents the complete story of The Verves singles.

Named after the bands sixth single, the first issued from their second album, A Northern Soul, it brilliantly documents the potency of The Verves relatively short but epoch-making journey through the musical cosmos.

On their emergence (when they were known simply as Verve), they were frequently referred to as purveyors of the shoegaze sound, although their output was more expansive, cinematic and genuinely psychedelic than that description implies, as evidenced by their first three non-album singles/EPs, all of which reached the summit of the UK indie charts.

After splitting up for the first time in 1995, they reconvened (with the addition of guitarist and keyboard player Simon Tong) to reach their commercial peak in 1997 with the hugely successful Urban Hymns, which was centred around a brilliantly accomplished suite of songs written by Ashcroft, including the worldwide smash Bitter Sweet Symphony, the UK number one The Drugs Dont Work and the beautiful and evocative Lucky Man.

Combustible, intense and highly influential, this stellar journey is finally available on wax, where, in its definitive form, it easily stands comparison with any other singles collection from the last three decades.