The Verve

The Verve from Wigan were simultaneously Britpop's most cosmic outliers and its most tragic story. Richard Ashcroft's voice was the most naturally gifted in the movement, and Urban Hymns in 1997 arrived just as Britpop was collapsing — producing Bittersweet Symphony and The Drugs Don't Work, two of the decade's defining singles. The Bittersweet Symphony sample dispute with the Rolling Stones publishing resulted in the band losing all royalties from their biggest song. Nick McCabe's guitar work on A Northern Soul remains some of the most inventive playing in 1990s British rock. The band fell apart and reformed with an exhausting regularity that matched Ashcroft's own volatility.