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Virgin Records
Released: February 25, 2003 |
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Richard Ashcroft
“History has a place for us,” said Richard Ashcroft in 1993, “it may take three albums, but we’ll be there.” Four years later, history proved him right.
Richard Ashcroft fronted The Verve, who ultimately proved to be the last great English rock & roll band of the 20th Century. The band came together in the northern industrial town of Wigan during the late-Eighties. In addition to Ashcroft, The Verve also featured Nick McCabe on guitars, Simon Jones on bass and Pete Salisbury on drums.
Having grown up together, The Verve were one of the tightest knit, yet ultimately volatile bands in history. Their early music came from hours of dope and speed-fuelled jams and demonstrated a groove, ambition and intensity that stood them aside from their peers.
One word that always became associated with The Verve was belief. Whether it was the people who worked with them, the journalists who wrote about them, the fans that followed them, people always talked about this band with absolute conviction. Those who were 'on the bus' never had any doubt that The Verve would be massive - however and whatever it took.
Richard Ashcroft more than anyone involved personified this belief. The records were fantastic, the live performances emphatic and in public he'd tell anyone and everyone that his band were going to be huge. Thus his early remark about the Verve’s place in history. It was made at the time when The Verve had just released their debut album, A Storm in Heaven.
As it happens, he was spot on. Although the band’s second album 1995's A Northern Soul was a classic, full of turmoil, ferocity and emotion, it somehow failed to connect with a wider audience, and in the aftermath of that disappointment, the band split for the first time.
On A Northern Soul, there are two songs (On Your Own and History) that began to showcase Ashcroft's emerging confidence and ability as a songwriter. For the first time, the singer was writing songs away from the comfort zone of the band, and it was a collection of these self-penned tracks that formed the basis of Urban Hymns.
The band re-convened to complete work on their third album that, as Ashcroft promised, catapulted them into rock's Premier League. That very success, however, and the ensuing pressures of Urban Hymns caused the band to split for the final time in April 1999. But what a glorious, magnificent success.
The first two singles, Bitter Sweet Symphony and The Drugs Don’t Work, were both extraordinary landmarks in English rock music, propelling the album to global status with seven million sales. Urban Hymns stayed on the UK chart for a straight year, becoming the ubiquitous soundtrack for the late-Nineties.
It was to be the swansong for a band that had finally delivered the success their startling music had always promised.
For Ashcroft, the music never stopped. He was already in the studio working on songs for his debut solo album when the split was officially announced. For someone who had always been part of a classic band, the decision to go it alone can as a surprise to many, but for Ashcroft it made total sense. Urban Hymns had been the album on which Richard Ashcroft, the songwriter, had come of age. In addition to Bitter Sweet Symphony and The Drugs Don’t Work, the album contained Sonnet, Space & Time, Weeping Willow, One Day, This Time, Velvet Morning and Lucky Man – all of them Ashcroft compositions.
Richard Ashcroft made his solo debut on 3rd April 2000 with the release of A Song for the Lovers, a single that reached number three in the charts. It was the prelude to Alone with Everybody, Ashcroft’s first album, which entered the UK chart at number one in July that year.
In addition to his solo work, Ashcroft also worked with James Lavelle and DJ Shadow on their U.N.K.L.E. project, contributing a song called Lonely Soul to the resulting Psyence Fiction album in 1998.
Ashcroft’s collaborations continued in 2001, when he contributed a track called The Test to the Chemical Brothers’ Come With Us album, released in January 2002.
But perhaps the most intriguing collaboration came in the Spring of 2002, when Richard Ashcroft invited Beach Boys’ founder and genius Brian Wilson to add harmony vocals on a song called Nature is the Law. The track is one of the cornerstones of the new Richard Ashcroft album, Human Conditions, to be released in October 2002.
The album features ten new Richard Ashcroft songs. In addition to Wilson, the album also features Chuck Leavell, the keyboards player whose recording credits include work with such luminaries as Aretha Franklin and The Rolling Stones; former Verve drummer Pete Salisbury, who also worked with Ashcroft on Alone with Everybody; and the Mercury Music Prize-winning Talvin Singh on tablas.
The album was co-produced by Ashcroft in partnership with longtime studio collaborator, Chris Potter. The string arrangements are by Wil Malone.
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