Richard Ashcroft has always known the exact point in a song when the sky ought to open. The trouble starts when the sky opens every four minutes.
That may be the shortest way I can describe his solo work. I value him enormously. I like his voice, the way he carries a melody, that peculiar mixture of street-level Manchester, romanticism and a conviction that three chords might just be solving the problem of human existence. But I cannot trust him unconditionally. When I listen to The Verve, I feel that something I did not foresee is about to happen. With solo Ashcroft, I much more often know where the strings will enter, when the melody will begin to rise and at what point Richard will try to persuade me that we have just touched something ultimate.
We have not always touched it.
Sometimes the chorus has simply arrived.
The first step without McCabe
A Song for the Lovers was the perfect beginning to Ashcroft's solo life. Released in 2000, it reached number three on the UK singles chart, but the figures are the least interesting part. What matters far more is how quickly you can hear the proportions changing.
The melody is enormous. So are the strings. From almost the first second, the vocal carries itself like something fully aware of its own value. Everything has been placed exactly where it belongs in a great British song at the turn of the century. What is missing is Nick McCabe's characteristic unease, the guitar that, in The Verve, could slip between the melody and the listener and leave something strange, unpredictable, sometimes downright uncomfortable there.
Ashcroft was left alone with his greatest gift.
And that was when it became clear that the greatest gift can also be a limitation.
He really can write melodies you remember after one listen. He does not need to assemble them from tiny parts or patiently win the listener over. He finds a handful of notes that instantly sound like something we have known for years. It is a rare ability. The problem is that anyone with such a gift can begin to rely on it too often.
A Song for the Lovers still resists that danger. It is elegant, faintly cinematic, romantic without drowning entirely in romance. You can hear the part of Ashcroft that sincerely believes a good song can change the temperature of a room.
I believe him.
For now.
A man who very badly wants to say something important
Human Conditions brings the first serious crack. Check the Meaning is fascinating precisely because it contains nearly all Ashcroft's strengths and weaknesses at once. It stretches out, meditates, builds atmosphere and lets the strings and rhythm work well beyond the traditional shape of a single. At the same time, Richard occasionally behaves as if every sentence he utters ought to be carved in stone and installed outside the national library.
This is a very characteristic feature of his writing.
Ashcroft does not describe small feelings.
He usually talks to Life.
To Love.
To God.
To Man.
To the World.
Preferably at sunset.
In The Verve, that tendency was balanced by music that could remain dirty, psychedelic or simply unpleasant. On his own, we increasingly get situations where both the lyric and the arrangement announce at the same time that something very important has occurred.
Sometimes you wish one of the instruments would answer: easy, mate, it is only Tuesday.
And yet Check the Meaning works. So does Science of Silence. Not because every philosophical thought Ashcroft offers is original. It is not. They work because his voice can give an ordinary observation the weight of personal experience. Critics already noticed this tension around Human Conditions, an ambitious and monumental album, but one burdened by its author's habit of surrounding simple thoughts with almost metaphysical ceremony.
This is where I begin not to trust Ashcroft musically.
Not when he writes something simple.
When he tries too hard to prove that the simple thing is a revelation.
The chorus is good, so let us make it even bigger
Break the Night with Colour from 2006 may be the best example of Ashcroft in balance. The song has a clear direction, a splendid melody, just enough space and a chorus that can grow without swallowing the whole track. Like A Song for the Lovers, the single reached number three in the UK.
Its commercial appeal does not bother me here.
We should first decide what commercial even means. If it describes the ability to write a melody that thousands of people can sing after hearing one chorus, I wish most musicians a little more commercial appeal.
Ashcroft was never an avant-gardist accidentally trapped in the charts. Even in The Verve he was drawn to great melodies. Nick McCabe was the man who infected those melodies with something alien. He stretched the space, blurred the outlines and let a song forget for a moment that it was supposed to be a song.
Once Ashcroft left the band, that creative brake disappeared.
That is why Music Is Power leaves me more divided. The title alone gives away much of the problem. Ashcroft does not suggest, leave a gap or let us reach the conclusion ourselves. He writes the slogan in capital letters, then immediately organises a march beneath it.
Again, the melody is good.
The rhythm works.
The voice works.
Only everything works a little too hard.
Ashcroft sometimes treats his melodic instinct as the argument that ends the discussion. If the chorus is broad enough, why complicate matters?
That may be precisely why he needed McCabe so much.
The absence of friction
The most interesting difference between The Verve and Ashcroft's solo work is therefore not the quality of the melodies. They did not suddenly get worse.
The friction disappeared.
In the band, you could hear four people pulling the music in different directions. Simon Jones on bass and Peter Salisbury on drums could anchor a track; Ashcroft steered it towards an anthem; McCabe regularly tested whether that anthem could be dissolved in reverb.
Solo Ashcroft no longer has to negotiate with anyone.
So we get more Richard.
And sometimes it turns out that less Richard gave us more music.
That is not an accusation against his talent. Quite the opposite. It is a fascinating example of the way constraint can stimulate creativity. When someone beside you challenges the obvious answer, the writer has to find a second one, then a third. Sometimes only the fourth is truly good.
Ashcroft argues with himself far less often.
When simplicity begins to work
That is why I like the moments when he stops flexing his muscles.
This Is How It Feels from These People does not need to prove its own greatness. The melody unfolds more calmly, the voice sounds more mature and the arrangement does not immediately try to turn every emotion into a monument. On the same album, Black Lines shows another possibility, more restrained and therefore more interesting. The 2016 album deliberately moved closer to the symphonic language associated with late-period The Verve, as reviewers at the time also noted.
Two years later, Natural Rebel smoothed the edges even more clearly. Acoustic guitars, classic rock structures, melodies designed more for a long drive than for exploring the cosmos. You can laugh at that. You can also admit that Surprised by the Joy is simply a very skilfully written song. Even cooler reviews observed that, for all his limited appetite for musical risk, Ashcroft could still defend himself with melody alone.
And here comes the paradox.
The less I try to hear him as the former leader of psychedelic The Verve, the more I can enjoy his solo records.
Perhaps the problem was not him.
Perhaps for years we expected a songwriter to remain a member of a band that was no longer standing beside him.
Cashing in, or knowing your own catalogue
The easiest thing to say is that Ashcroft eventually began cashing in on the past.
I am tempted to say it myself sometimes.
Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1 from 2021 consisted of twelve new recordings drawn from both his solo work and The Verve's catalogue. Instead of pretending the past did not exist, Ashcroft simply placed it beside the present and began treating the entire catalogue as one story.
You can call that exploiting a legend.
You can also call it accepting that his audience does not divide his life into a The Verve folder and a Richard Ashcroft folder.
The artist himself appears to have stopped doing so as well.
On Lovin' You, released in 2025 as his seventh studio album of new material, that fondness for cultural memory becomes even more explicit. Lover interpolates Joan Armatrading's Love and Affection, while the title track draws on the recognisable theme from Mason Williams's Classical Gas.
Is that cashing in?
A little.
But it is not only that.
Ashcroft was never obsessed with originality understood as an obligation to invent a new language. What interested him was a song's ability to communicate with a great many people. He recently described the great songwriting ideal in precisely those terms, as music capable of reaching very different listeners.
That explains almost his entire solo career.
I do not trust him. That is exactly why I listen
Richard Ashcroft is a better melodist than an experimenter.
A better singer than a philosopher.
A better author of emotions than a commentator on them.
And decidedly a better artist when someone or something restrains his appetite for monumentality.
That does not make his solo career a failed footnote to The Verve. That would be absurdly easy. A Song for the Lovers, Check the Meaning, Break the Night with Colour, This Is How It Feels and Surprised by the Joy are enough to dismantle that claim.
Nor do I believe the simple story that he sold out.
Ashcroft's commercial instinct does not look like an accountant's decision to me.
It looks like his natural language.
He simply likes big songs.
He likes choruses people can sing together.
He likes strings.
He likes Feelings with a capital letter.
He likes the moment when several thousand people believe in exactly the same thing for four minutes.
Sometimes it is beautiful.
Sometimes unbearably pretentious.
Most often, a little of both.
A few days ago, at the end of July 2026, he released the first live album of his career, Live Vol 1. Across its thirteen tracks, Sonnet, A Song for the Lovers, The Drugs Don't Work, Break the Night with Colour, Lucky Man, Music Is Power and Bitter Sweet Symphony stand side by side. The boundary between The Verve and Richard Ashcroft all but disappears.
And perhaps that is how he should be heard today.
Not as the man who escaped The Verve.
Not as the man forever trying to rebuild The Verve.
More as a writer who, for over thirty years, has been writing the same great song about freedom, love, loneliness and the need to break out towards somewhere else, sometimes landing on something true, sometimes merely landing on a well-placed string section.
I trust Ashcroft when he begins a melody.
I do not always trust him when he tries to explain how great that melody has just become.
And perhaps it is precisely that distrust that keeps me listening.
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