‘Four Horseman’: the psychedelic masterpiece that inspired The Verve
As the 1990s’ ‘Cool Britannia’ entered its weary hangover finale, Britpop staggered blearily from the decade’s dizzying knees-up jamboree and wandered into darker territory. While Oasis hadn’t got the memo—dropping the bloated and cocaine-blighted Be Here Now, desperate to prolong the party—Blur abandoned their music hall pastiches and embraced the alternative American rock sound they’d eschewed years prior, Pulp leaped into sombre art-rock over bouncy indie pop, and Radiohead—while always an outlier—scored the incoming iceberg of globalisation with a prescient sting through 1997’s OK Computer.
While Britpop at its peak was shaped by the nostalgic harkening back to 1960s’ swinging pop and rock, Wigan’s The Verve reached further into the wilderness of psych and acid rock for their shoegaze indie swagger. Less indebted to the glitter stomp and Chas & Dave rehashes that dominated the charts around them, frontman Richard Ashcroft was more drawn to German krautrock, mid-1980s Liverpool’s lysergic post-punk, and the dance-flecked groups that littered Manchester at the city’s MDMA heights. Following 1993’s A Storm in Heaven and 1995’s A Northern Soul, routine touring with Oasis yielded a friendship and resulting embrace of classic rock that would guide the direction of The Verve’s third LP and the band to rapid commercial heights.
Initially intending to record a solo album in the aftermath of The Verve’s first break-up, Ashcroft corralled the members together in London’s Olympic studio, including, crucially, guitarist and former college pal, Nick McCabe for his gargantuan yet heady solo chops. Dropped in 1997, Urban Hymns would stand as one of the definitive records of the era, bookending Britpop’s last hurrah and gifting the pop landscape with one of its enduring images—Ashcroft stridently stomping down Hoxton Street and barging into passers-by with steadfast purpose for lead single ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’s’ arresting video.
While never a single and only issued in the USA as a radio promo, ‘The Rolling People’ met acclaim as one of The Verve’s finest moments. McCabe’s guitar attack rips into a psychedelic bubble of upended indie swirling around Ashcroft’s lyrical schisms of yearning escape and unwavering loyalty. It’s a stunning cut which wears its influences on its sleeve. Harnessing everything from Led Zeppelin to P-funk, Ashcroft reached into the fringe corners of Greek prog for its electric crescendo.
Long before Blade Runner soundtracks and schlager Kafkan balladry for 1970s housewives, Vangelis and Demis Roussos, respectively, lent keys and bellowing vocals to prog outfit Aphrodite’s Child. Fleeing their native Greece after Georgios Papadopoulos’ 1967 military coup, Aphrodite’s Child hopped around Western Europe, cutting baroque pop psychedelia across their first two albums, End of the World and It’s Five O’Clock, and settled in London. Keen to pursue a grander conceptual arc, Vangelis recruited scriptwriter Costas Ferris to draft up a radical album exploring passages from the Book of Revelation, causing creative tensions within the band.
Released in 1972 after Aphrodite’s Child had already disbanded, 666‘s cumbersome tale of a countercultural circus’s surrealist vaudeville, while the real apocalypse awaits outside its tents, does lapse into moments of ponderous tests of patience, both thematically and compositionally. The narrative is nowhere near as interesting as its double-LP length, lacking the laser focus of their prog peers like King Crimson or Pink Floyd. But there’s magic to be found, and the parts when 666 strikes gold, Aphrodite’s Child delivers progressive rock with some of its most electrifying pieces.
Specifically referencing John of Patmos’ harbingers of armageddon, ‘The Four Horsemen’ lifts ‘Revelation 6’s’ description of The Last Judgement’s warrior form and paints a befitting slice of biblical end times, wrath ‘n’ roll possessed with enough energy to part the heavens above, any speaker it’s beamed from. Jumping between meditative disquiet and celestial ruin, Roussos earnestly sings over Vangelis’ stirring keys and fraught windchimes, adding a terrible stillness anxiously awaiting mankind’s last storm, before a gripping organ thump kicks off the holy danger, spiked with one of rock’s most epic solos, courtesy of Silver Koulouris. It’s an essential cut that stands as one of prog and psychedelic rock’s stand-out conjurings.
Such rousing energy was expertly plumbed by The Verve, lifting ‘The Rolling People’ to an extra height of indie wonder not even Ashcroft could have reached alone. Borrowing its key riff and “fa-fa-fa” backing refrain, greatness inspired greatness and saw two different musical worlds shake hands across the years and gift an unforgettable 1990s reimagining. From Athens through Wigan and hopefully beyond, Aphrodite’s Child’s ‘The Four Horsemen’, with luck, gallops indefinitely toward another future band intrepid enough to wield its awesome power.
