Richard Ashcroft may have been the face and voice of The Verve but Nick McCabe was the band's gifted guitar wizard and bassist Simon Jones their formidable engine room. After the most recent acrimonious Verve split in 2009, the pair formed Black Ships. After years of faffing and a name-change to Black Submarine, their debut album is imminent.
Yet for all McCabe’s wondrous ways, both he and Jones approach live work with seeming fear and loathing. There would be no Verve material but they tried to cover some crowd-pleasing bases: desperately glamorous co-singer Amelia Tucker added some desperately needed glamour; violinist and co-singer Davide Rossi tried to chat but his Italian accent hardly helped to dispel the awkwardness and McCabe’s daughter Elly added inaudible vocals to Lover.
At their best the quintet built a world of their own where, for all his reticence, McCabe shone; Rossi’s fiddling added spice and Tucker wailed where others might have just sang. Move Me A Mountain was standard fey indie but Heart First and This Is All You Feel rumbled in stately fashion. Best came last when Here So Rain added real — for want of a better word — verve, as it mutated from a ruminative opening into an all-guns-blazing wig-out. “Don’t get too excited,” Rossi had chided before that finale. Mercifully, he chided in vain.
