Richard Ashcroft shoulders his way onto my computer screen like it’s another irritating obstacle on his cocksure swagger through life. “Who put a gun to your head to have to do this interview?” he asks, his tone one of combative nonchalance, his background one of sitting-room chandeliers and classically curtained windows. I’ve caught him “languishing in my well-worn ballad rut”, he says, wryly paraphrasing my two-star review of his 2018 album Natural Rebel, which prompted the characteristically defiant former Verve singer to set fire to a copy of our last interview for NME in a video shared to Instagram.
“It actually stimulated a beautiful piece of art,” he says. “It was a statement, in the sense of there’s a delusion with some people that they have an influence over my [life].”
By the time I’ve picked up the scent of beef, the 54-year-old has already talked himself round to a more amiable position. “I do like that about us as well, though,” he says. “There’s still a bit of freedom of opinion, and I think that’s a good thing.” He claims he’s barely done any interviews since vowing never to speak to NME again in the wake of the review. “So I thank you for that,” he says, now beaming. “You gave me six years off!”
It’s understandable that this totemic indie-rock figurehead – a living symbol of the Nineties scene’s brash attitude and hedonistic abandon in his years as The Verve’s frontman and chief songwriter on 1997’s 10 million-selling, decade-defining Urban Hymns – is more interested in loving than fighting today. All summer, he’s been drenched in goodwill as the main support act on the much-celebrated Oasis reunion tour. More than that, he became a crucial part of the thrill of the event, teeing up Oasis’s arrival with his own triumphal hits from the era – “Sonnet”, “The Drugs Don’t Work” and “Bitter Sweet Symphony” – and cementing the status of the comeback with his very presence.
“It was perfect that the last note of ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ fades, and then, right, it’s 30 minutes to this thing you’ve been waiting for,” Ashcroft says, still basking in the glow of the shows. “I’m the perfect dude to make the perfect pass for the person to do the slam dunk, but in the long run, people go, ‘That was a really beautiful pass.’”
Ashcroft has several slam-dunks of his own lined up. Following the remaining Oasis tour dates in Asia, Australia and South America, he will embark on a 2026 tour for his new, seventh solo album – fittingly titled Lovin’ You – which will find him re-ascended to the nation’s biggest arenas, very much back at his solo peak. Being in the eye of this new storm of Oasis-mania has utterly rejuvenated him.
“The energy of this summer, I’ll probably never experience anything like it again,” he admits. “On stage, it was great. The reaction from the crowd was just incredible. For someone like me, as a songwriter or a performer, your camel hump gets drained and you don’t know where you’re gonna find any sustenance. And then something happens like this and you think, actually, I’ve got new energy. Even just the art of writing a tune, refocusing on that, it’s inspiring.”
Heading out to watch some shows from among the crowd, “right in the thick of it”, Ashcroft has been struck by Oasis’s simple glories. “It really brought home to me, wow, Noel, what a songwriter, undeniable. Liam, wow, what a force, what a power, what a voice, what a dude.” As a fan, he says, he was uncomfortable with the antagonism between the Gallaghers: “It’s a bit like if there’s stuff going on within your family.” And backstage today? “The beautiful thing about it is, Liam’s discipline is amazing. I don’t think he’s allowing himself to be in any situations where he can go off track or whatnot. Noel seems to be in a really good space. The whole band seems to be. They’re blown away by it, I reckon, without having had too many massive conversations about it. In life, stories generally don’t [have] this incredible coda.”
In which spirit, Lovin’ You is Ashcroft’s own jaw-dropping comeback. Shunning any sort of rut, it’s a staggeringly varied record, taking in hazy soul, electronic rock, falsetto disco and orchestral trip-hop, with virtually every track inhabiting its own sonic space – an exploratory approach that resulted from its starting out as a sample-based, pre-Covid electronic record (“I intended to make something without any quote-unquote real instruments”) but later being peppered with more recently written, organic, hope-filled material on guitar and piano. “[I wanted] to give it a bit more of a broader emotional palette,” Ashcroft says, “because you just have to look outside: we know what the last few years have been like, and looking ahead doesn’t look incredible either. So it could have been a doomy reflection on life, [but] I wanted it to be a bit broader.”
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Primal Scream’s groundbreaking dance crossover album Screamadelica was a touchstone. “It was like a modern-day Sgt Pepper in a way,” Ashcroft recalls of its 1991 release. “It was so extreme. You’re going from something The Orb have put together to a ballad that’s kinda traditional, and then you’re off on another trip. When Screamadelica came out, it was like, ‘Wow, you can do this?’” Sampling, he says, has become too expensive these days – and this is coming from someone whose entire royalty share for “Bitter Sweet Symphony” was taken by sample originators The Rolling Stones between 1997 and 2019. “The record companies inevitably want $20,000, $30,000 up front,” he grumbles, “rather than seeing it as ‘Oh, this guy’s gonna now promote this dormant-ish track somewhere on Spotify that someone’s not really listening to, and there’ll be some interest that will come through that.’”
One sample that thankfully did make the record, in Ashcroft’s most inspired piece of remodelling since “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, is the snippet of Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” that loops through its striking opener “Lover”. “I’ve always naturally homed in on the moment in a song,” Ashcroft says. “Those few seconds that sum it all up, the energy of the one tune. I’ve always thought, if I had the time, I’d love to be a remixer for people who maybe don’t recognise, even in their own [music], where it’s at.”
He recalls sitting in a flat in Bath with a Dansette record player, replaying over and over the few seconds from The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s version of The Stones’ “The Last Time” that he’d rework into “Bitter Sweet Symphony”. “All I could do was keep putting the needle back,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be insane, can’t wait to get in the studio.’ John [Leckie, producer] looped it up for me, and it went on for about two years from there.”
Coming from something of a cosmic (northern) soul prone to taking a universal view of the human condition, Lovin’ You naturally contains a lot of love. The title track follows Ashcroft’s adoration of his wife Kate Radley (formerly of Spiritualized) around the globe from the Trevi Fountain to Tokyo; the Parisian “Oh L’amour” concerns the evolutions of romance with age, as Ashcroft’s marriage enters its 31st year.
“I can’t even believe it’s been that long,” he says, staggered by his good fortune. “Learning to grow up a little bit with someone, it’s an amazing thing. I wouldn’t still be here [without her], I just know that. I’ve too much of an addictive, self-destructive inbuilt thing within me that if I hadn’t had that, God only knows.” He cites fatherhood as another lifesaver. “I can’t believe some of the things we did, like flying to Japan, kids crying, jet lag, walking on stage like I’m walking through treacle. Sonny [his elder son] was in New York at four weeks old, there on my knee in a restaurant. [But] that responsibility was good for me, because if I didn’t have that, I’d be at certain crossroads [where] I would probably have gone down the more dangerous road.”
There’s still a song on the album titled “I’m a Rebel” – but, he argues, rebellion looks a lot different on a modern digital battlefield (in the mid-2010s, for instance, he spent four years without a smartphone). “Being a rebel is probably more about being a peacemaker than it is about being at war, or challenging people all the time,” he says. “To be a rebel is to try and bring people together. That’s one of the most dangerous places to be, because you will be exalted in this current climate if you are someone who divides people. You will.” He rails against the rising authoritarian tone of the age, the harvesting of our online information to “create a kind of Minority Report future”, and the risk of becoming a “useful idiot” for any number of society’s splintered factions. “[Rebellion is] trying not to play a part in this society where you are fuelling any of these fires to the detriment of yourself and your fellow man,” he says.
Political pronouncements, Ashcroft feels, are best presented on-record. Hence the new album’s “Heavy News”, about how the crushing news cycle (“heavy weapons, armageddon”), alongside our obsession with keeping up with it, threatens to tip us over the edge. What news, I ask, does he find the heaviest? “There’s so much horror,” says Ashcroft. “I’ve tried to disassociate myself a little bit, because it’s one of those periods where we’re being so desensitised. It’s not just the endless wars, it’s not just the massacres – it’s the way people are being fractured.”
There’s also a curious and celebratory element to the song; the notion of having what he describes as “box seats to some of the most momentous moments in history”. As a self-declared “futurist”, Ashcroft is both fascinated and frightened by the prospect of the AI revolution. “We’re on the verge of a transformation, or so they say. An exponential curve into a place we’ve never been. If it’s an exponential line, it becomes more and more difficult to project into the future. That’s what’s kind of unsettling for us – no one really knows. When you’re told that the very people developing this don’t know, it’s a bit like when they tested the atom bomb and didn’t know whether it was gonna cause an apocalypse.” He shakes his head at our foolhardy rush towards super-intelligence. “We’re sat on this ball in infinity, and we’ll take those gambles – ‘We don’t really know, it’s gonna be amazing, don’t worry about it, billions of people are gonna be unemployed but we’ll sort you out.’”
One line from “Heavy News” could be the planet screaming: “All you want is some peace and control and relief.” Which brings us full circle to the Oasis tour, I suggest. “Definitely,” he says, without a hint of maybe. “I know it’s a cliché word, ‘cathartic’, but there was such a release of emotion. For the older fans, they’d forgotten what they used to get out of those gigs. There’s a lot of pain and a lot of loss along the way, and also the dreams that you had when you were younger, and where are you now?” The Oasis reunion, he thinks, condensed all those emotions into one. He felt it too. “After all that time, everything came into clearer focus and context, because [until then] I was in the bubble of my own band and my own world… It was the first time people had been together and just left it all behind.”
After an amenable hour, Ashcroft and I follow suit, all made up and wishing each other well. Perhaps it exemplifies the unifying vision of this man who stoutly refuses to fade away. His trademark raised fist, he feels, is currently punching straight through the limitations traditionally placed on the ageing rocker. “You get to however old I am now – I don’t even know how old I am – and there’s a cliché that your best days are behind you,” he says. “We look at Van Morrison, or Neil Young, or Johnny Cash at the end of his career: they smash that glass ceiling of ‘No, you’re finished, you are just a nostalgia thing.’ It’s up to the individual to break those chains that are put on you.” Long may Ashcroft brightly burn.
‘Lovin’ You’, the new album from Richard Ashcroft, is out now
