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The 11 Best Richard Ashcroft Songs
Ranking the best Richard Ashcroft tracks ahead of his upcoming UK outdoor shows and festival dates this summer
Richard Ashcroft is not just the singer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. He’s a shaman officiating a spiritual experience, tapping into ancient energy from the ley lines beneath the stadium, taking his thousands-strong flock higher than ever before. Cool sunglasses, too.
It helps that Ashcroft presides over one of the greatest catalogues in symphonic indie-rock. Don’t forget, this Wigan-born icon started out in 1990 as frontman for The Verve, his mesmeric stage presence offsetting the cartoon cockneys of Britpop, his psych-soul anthems lifting us above the grind. “My job,” he once said, “is to make grown men cry, to blow people’s minds and elevate them, make them transcend and unlock emotions that have been repressed by life, their job, their situation. That’s what I do.”
Since splitting The Verve for the third time in 2009 Ashcroft hasn’t been shy of deploying the arena-quaking tunes from classic albums like A Northern Soul (1995) and Urban Hymns (1997), alongside his own hugely respected oeuvre. These are the 11 moments you can’t miss when he takes to UK stages this summer.
11. ‘A Song For The Lovers’
(Alone With Everybody, 2000)
You don’t dissolve a band like The Verve unless you’ve got an ace up your sleeve, and way back in April 2000, Ashcroft launched his solo career with the ballad he’d almost included on Urban Hymns. Don’t be fooled by the title: inspired by Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, this is no first-dance fodder, but the smoke-blackened tale of a small-hours hotel room coupling doomed to crash and burn.
10. ‘History’
(A Northern Soul, 1995)
Now more than ever in our throwaway age, this Northern Soul highlight feels so deep and vital it practically squeezes the air from your lungs. From the stately opening swoop of orchestral strings to the lyric half-based on William Blake’s ‘London’, ‘History’ is so beautiful it’d make you drop to your knees, if you weren’t in a sold-out arena, where dropping to your knees probably isn’t the best idea.
9. ‘Space And Time’
(Urban Hymns, 1997)
Buried at the midpoint of the Urban Hymns tracklisting, and eclipsed in 1997 by that record’s solid-gold run of singles, ‘Space And Time’ is a relative deep-cut that Ashcroft has returned to at intervals in his solo career. The verse is wistful and wounded, but it’s the tingling first line of the chorus that grabs you by the heartstrings (“Oh, can you just tell me it’s alright…”).
8. ‘Break The Night With Colour’
(Keys To The World, 2006)
Ashcroft has never written about bubblegum, and this Keys To The World ballad was inspired by the desperate letters the singer received from fans serving time in prison. Musically, it’s a distant cousin to the Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ – with more stormclouds on the horizon – while lyrically it chimes with anyone finding their way back to the light (“Nothing’s going right today/’Cos nothing ever does,” runs the pre-chorus).
7. ‘Music Is Power’
(Keys To The World, 2006)
Come to a Richard Ashcroft gig with a head full of cobwebs – and let him blow them away with this joyous, spring-heeled hit of vintage soul (it features a sample from the Curtis Mayfield-penned ‘It’s All Over’). “This epic version,” wrote the iPaper when the singer pulled it out on tour earlier this year, “would make a believer of anyone.”
6. ‘Lucky Man’
(Urban Hymns, 1997)
U2’s Bono once cited ‘Lucky Man’ as the song he wished he’d written – and with the Spotify streams cracking a quarter-billion, he’s surely not the only one. Sometimes, all you need to melt a stadium is a five-chord strum, with Ashcroft’s yearning vocal puncturing the song like an arrow as he sings of finding his place in a stormy world. “It was inspired by my relationship with my wife,” he explained, “and that moment when you get beyond the peacock dance that you have early on in a relationship.”
5. ‘C’Mon People (We’re Making It Now)’
(Alone With Everybody, 2000)
It’s testament to the ‘up-for-it’-ness of this early solo single that Ashcroft planned to retool it as an alternative England anthem for World Cup 2006. That never happened, but the singer did invite his old drinking partner Liam Gallagher to guest on the reboot for 2001’s Acoustic Hymns Vol 1. Seriously, can you imagine how ape the crowd will go this summer if the Oasis man turns up to snarl his part?
4. ‘Lover’
(Lovin’ You, 2025)
Always a protector of ‘real’ music, Ashcroft embraced the zeitgeist on 2025’s Lovin’ You, fusing beats and samples with trusty wood ‘n’ wire instruments. Opener ‘Lover’ is the gravity-defying peak of this new approach, underpinned by the addictive brass hook from Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love And Affection’. “I’ve always naturally homed in on the ‘moment’ in a song,” he told The Independent. “Those few seconds that sum it all up.”
3. ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’
(Urban Hymns, 1997)
Coming from a singer whose pharmaceutical exploits had earned him the nickname ‘Mad Richard’, the title of this No.1 hit suggested we were in for a rock-pig headbanger. Until, that is, you actually played ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ – and unearthed a bruised, beautiful acoustic ballad that Ashcroft wrote about the wrench of watching his dying father stop responding to treatment. When he pulls this out live, it’s always a moment.
2. ‘Sonnet’
(Urban Hymns, 1997)
Respect to Shakespeare, but the only ‘Sonnet’ that matters is this heavenly highlight of The Verve’s 1997 masterpiece. Even in demo form, Ashcroft suspected he’d caught a shard of magic, and the crowd reaction when he debuted the song confirmed it. “The concerts after the album came out, the way they sang the chorus was so powerful, so overwhelming, that I knew there was something special about it.”
1. ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’
(Urban Hymns, 1997)
What else? An instant classic back in 1997 – now picked up by the TikTok generation – ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ is a billion-streamed, full-body-shiver of a song, built from heaven-sent strings and a poetry-profound lyric urging us to shake off the crushing pressures of modern life. Coldplay’s Chris Martin has saluted it as “probably the best song ever written”, and if you experience it at Ashcroft’s summer shows, you’ll lose the ‘probably’.
