The Verve opened their U.S. tour on July 18 in San Francisco, their first

time back in the States since playing the second stage at Lollapalooza last

summer. They flew to America right after playing England's Phoenix Festival

(where our English correspondent Stuart Green said the best thing about the

festival was the vodka and the Verve!) on Saturday and it showed. Lead singer

Richard Ashcroft complained that he was losing his voice and rasped through

the hour and a half set. As for the rest of the band-- guitarist Nick McCabe,

bassist Simon Jones, and drummer Pete Salisbury--they plodded through the

thirteen song set, like sleepwalkers shambling through the night. Jet Lag

certainly took it's toll on this band. Ashford, in all his Jaggeresque

splendor--pouting lips and chiseled cheekbones--belongs to that Great

Northern Fraternity of lead singers who exude a brooding sensuality but

little showmanship. Considering Ashcroft's low key stage presence, his

models have to be Oasis' Liam Gallagher and Stone Roses' Ian Brown, who also

err on the side of shoe-gazing. But then Wigan, England, where The Verve hail

from is only a stone's throw from Manchester, leading one to believe that

there is something somnolent in the water. The difference with this one is he

insists on singing with his eyes shut throughout, and continually mouthed the

words to God-knows-what while the band dove into one of their infamous jams.

On the other hand, bassist Simon Jones was in rare spirits. Two years ago

almost to the day, he met his wife before the Verve's set in San Francisco

on their very first trip over here, so he was fondly reminiscing before the

night's show. If she would have seen a show like Tuesday's she might have

reconsidered. A shame really, since their recent Virgin release Northern

Soul, the follow-up to 1993's A Storm In Heavenis really stellar.

Songs like the spacey "Life Is An Ocean" ("I woke up with a scream/I was

buying some feelings from a vending machine") or "This Is Music," which

sounds like Iggy and the Stooges fed through a coarse strainer, made one

think that the English Invasion isn't quite over. "On Your Own," is poignant,

poetic and self-absorbed with this lyric: "Tell me what you've seen/Was it a

dream?/Was I in it." And "History," inspired by a William Blake poem, is

haunting. After listening to the CD we were more confused than ever, since we

had such high hopes for the show. Coming out of the North of England in the

early '90s, The Verve picked up a lot of Stone Roses fans who had defected

after their heroes went into seclusion. With their loud, guitar-drenched

psychedelic pop, and their existential ramblings, coupled with a savvy pop

sensibility, they're the natural bridge between the Roses, and their buddies

Oasis. With a claim to fame as Liam and Noel Gallagher's second favorite

band, how can you go wrong? (One guess as to who the little egotists' fave

is.) In fact it was in Paris opening up for Oasis, their northern

compatriots, that guitar player Nick McCabe got into a difference of opinion

with a security guard, that resulted in McCabe breaking a finger, and the

cancellation of The Verve's British tour. Famous for things like trashing

hotel rooms, collapsing in over-indulgent stupor's, and graphic hyperbole

about how they're destined to be the next big thing ("I think we'll be like

the English R.E.M., releasing album after album. It may be a slow process but

at some point it's going to go BANG! and we're going to be up there big

time," lead singer Richard Ashcroft recently told a reporter), we were

expecting the stars. What we got was a moon.