The Verve — Oxegen Festival, 2008

Full live concert of The Verve at the Oxegen Festival in Punchestown, Ireland, on 12 July 2008. This filmed full concert captures the band’s reunion tour, with the classic line-up back together — Richard Ashcroft on vocals, Nick McCabe on guitar, Simon Jones on bass and Peter Salisbury on drums — around the album Forth, released that same year. On stage the Wigan group alternates new material with landmarks from Urban Hymns and A Northern Soul, from the soaring Sonnet to the hypnotic The Rolling People, alongside The Drugs Don’t Work, Lucky Man and the unavoidable Bitter Sweet Symphony. This live concert showcases the trademark tension between Ashcroft’s lyricism and McCabe’s psychedelic guitar textures. A large-scale festival performance, representative of the brief but intense 2008 chapter before the band split again. An essential document for anyone who follows British rock and Britpop live, filmed in full and preserving the atmosphere of one of Ireland’s biggest festivals of the decade.