A string loop that invoiced the singer
The strings do not enter. They are already walking, a loop with a limp, dignified and slightly cruel. Richard Ashcroft comes in behind them like a man who has agreed to be filmed not stopping. Bitter Sweet Symphony, the opening shot of Urban Hymns in 1997, is a hymn to the ordinary grind that refuses to sound ordinary. You’re a slave to money, then you die. The line would become a joke at his own expense. He did not know that yet. The groove is a march you cannot decline.
The loop was an Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording of the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, arranged by David Whitaker in the mid-sixties, a symphonic version the Verve licensed and then, in the eyes of Allen Klein’s ABKCO, used too freely. The band and producer Youth, Martin Glover, built the track at Olympic Studios in London, Ashcroft writing a vocal melody and a lyric that the sample had not contained. Nick McCabe’s guitar is almost a ghost here. The rhythm section, Simon Jones and Peter Salisbury, locks to the loop as if the orchestra were a drummer. When the single became a hit, the lawyers finished the arrangement. Publishing went to ABKCO. Jagger and Richards were credited. Ashcroft’s bitter line about the song being the best thing those two had written in twenty years was not a compliment. It was a wound with a punchline.
Walter Stern’s video is the song’s other composition. Ashcroft in Hoxton, shoulder barging the pavement, not breaking stride for anyone. It looked like arrogance and played as fate. Britain put the single at number two. America, which had ignored the Verve, suddenly had a face for the decade’s tired grandeur. On stage the loop was replayed by real strings or by the band’s own muscle, and Ashcroft sang it as if the street were still under him. The record stayed in films, adverts, sports, a piece of weather people used without reading the credits. The credits were the scandal.
The best song Jagger and Richards have written in twenty years.
(Richard Ashcroft, 1997, on the credit dispute)
In 2019 Jagger and Richards signed their share back. The gesture did not rewrite 1997. It only admitted that a sample is not a song, and that the vocal, the lyric and the walk belonged to the man who had been told they did not. Urban Hymns became the Verve’s monument and their ending. This track is the monument’s door, ornate and legalled, still humming. Listen without the story and you hear a man trying to describe a life that will not consult him. Listen with the story and the strings sound like a bill.
What remains is the limp in that orchestra, the bit of Whitaker’s arrangement that would not sit straight, and Ashcroft’s voice refusing to sit with it. Bitter Sweet Symphony is sweet in the tune and bitter in the paperwork. The pavement in the video has been repaved. The walk has not. Some songs are stolen and fade. This one was taxed, and kept going anyway.
