Following A Northern Soul, Nick McCabe left the band, Richard Ashcroft brought in Simon Tong on guitar to cover, recorded an album’s worth of material and realized he needed McCabe to make it all work and so brought him back to rerecord a fair amount of it. It all seemed like a recipe for disaster and certainly the lineup didn’t last but with Urban Hymns the Verve suddenly became one of the biggest bands of the late 1990s, thanks to the Rolling Stones-biting anthem “Bittersweet Symphony” and the overwrought but still stirring ballad “The Drugs Don’t Work.”