The story of The Verve

Wigan beginnings

Richard Ashcroft was born on the eleventh of September 1971 at Billinge Hospital near Wigan. His father Frank was an office worker and his mother Louise was a hairdresser. As a small boy he was so shy that he was taken out of a school nativity play with stage fright. Then, in 1982, when Richard was eleven, his father died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. Richard later said he swallowed the grief and went to school the next day. He played the class clown, but inside he was asking big questions about life and death. His grandfather taught him about astronomy and the infinity of space, and his stepfather, a teacher drawn to mysticism, fed his hunger for meaning. Richard said the loss opened a door that would never close.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Before music, there was football. Richard was a talented junior player for Wigan Athletic and dreamed of turning professional. He played so hard that he broke his own nose several times, and once broke the ankle of a boy named Peter Salisbury, his future drummer. Music took over at thirteen. On a camping trip he watched the Jean Luc Godard film One Plus One, which shows the Rolling Stones building Sympathy for the Devil in the studio, and he decided that was how to spend a life. His family owned only three LPs, and two were by the Beatles. At Up Holland High School his friends included Simon Jones, Peter Salisbury and Simon Tong, and it was Tong who taught Richard and Simon Jones their first guitar chords.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1987 Richard enrolled at Winstanley College in Wigan to study theatre studies, philosophy and religion. A tutor remembered him as incredibly intelligent, but an underachiever because music came first. One day he heard someone playing guitar behind a closed practice room door. The sound was so strange and beautiful that he waited outside to meet the player. It was Nick McCabe, a quiet lad from Haydock, the son of a bus driver and a social worker. Nick had grown up on his older brothers' records, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and later Joy Division. He was a year ahead and teased that Richard had been into Curiosity Killed the Cat. Richard said Nick's playing sounded like a whole other universe. Their first little bands were called the Butterfly Effect and then Raingarden.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

With exams looming, Richard asked his old school friends Simon Jones on bass and Peter Salisbury on drums to join, and the four became Verve. Simon had moved to Wigan from Liverpool at thirteen. Nick, meanwhile, had started work as a quantity surveyor, a job he hated. He spent his days scribbling ideas for guitar sounds in his notepad. Richard talked the others into quitting their jobs and joining him on the dole to give the band everything. They jammed endlessly and recorded a demo at the house of Simon's parents. Their first gig was a friend's eighteenth birthday party at the Honeysuckle pub in Wigan, on the fifteenth of August 1990. Even in tiny rooms, people said, Richard performed as if he was playing Wembley.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Verve and A Storm in Heaven

A Virgin Records scout named Miles Leonard heard the Verve demo and travelled to Manchester to see them. In July 1991 he arranged for the band to play for Virgin's whole A and R department in London. Dave Boyd, who ran the Virgin offshoot Hut Records, was struck by the sight of Richard climbing the monitor rig at a London pub gig, giving everything to an audience of about twenty people. Verve signed to Hut in September 1991. Leonard later said that even when three people were watching, Richard treated the back room as if it were a stadium. The music press were fascinated too. Richard often played barefoot, spoke in cosmic riddles, and Melody Maker nicknamed him Mad Richard.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1992 Verve released three singles, All in the Mind in March, She's a Superstar in June and Gravity Grave in October. All three topped the UK independent chart. She's a Superstar was recorded overnight at the Manor studio in Oxfordshire with producer Barry Clempson, and its long companion track Feel was recorded inside an indoor swimming pool for the echo. For the cover, the designer Brian Cannon built a waterfall scene in Derbyshire, pouring blue food colouring into the stream above a neon Verve sign. The band toured with Ride and Spiritualized, and in December a Verve EP came out in America. The shoegaze label stuck to them, though they insisted they were something wilder and more soulful.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For their first album the band went to Sawmills Studios in Cornwall with producer John Leckie, famous for his work on the Stone Roses' debut. The studio sat in an old mill by the River Fowey, reachable only by boat or by walking along a railway line at low tide. Over seven weeks in December 1992 and January 1993 they jammed songs into life. The opening track Star Sail came together at four in the morning, when the band were stoned and didn't realise Leckie was recording. Its first strange guitar noise was Nick simply checking his tuning. Richard later admitted the band were often on LSD during the sessions. Nick said the album was really him discovering cheap pedals from a junk shop in St Helens and waiting for tunes to fall out.[1] [2] [3]

A Storm in Heaven came out on the twenty first of June 1993 and reached number twenty seven. Its cover shows a ghostly figure in Thor's Cave in Staffordshire, behind flaming metal letters spelling the band's name. For the inside sleeve the team bought an old Citroen from a Wigan scrapyard for fifty pounds and set it alight, and the band's former manager Dave Halliwell almost set himself on fire when the petrol exploded. There was legal fire too. In May 1993 PolyGram and Deutsche Grammophon sued in Los Angeles on behalf of the jazz label Verve Records. The band joked about calling themselves Verv. In the end they settled, became The Verve, and still had to pay twenty five thousand pounds.[1] [2] [3]

America nearly killed us

The Verve spent 1993 on the road. At Glastonbury their guitars were stolen from the tour van and they had to borrow gear. That summer they played Lollapalooza showcase dates in America, then toured Europe supporting the Smashing Pumpkins. Back home they picked a new support band for their winter tour. Noel Gallagher had given a demo to Brian Cannon, the band's designer, and Nick chose that tape from a pile of three because of an early version of a song called Columbia. The band were Oasis. Nick watched their soundcheck every night, and though both groups started out prickly and suspicious, they became close friends. Noel later said the Verve gave Oasis a leg up when nobody else would take them on tour.[1] [2] [3]

1994 began badly. Peter Salisbury broke his ankle when a picture frame fell on it, and he spent ten weeks in plaster, forcing the band to pull out of Glastonbury and cancel other dates. In May came No Come Down, a collection of B sides and outtakes, and the first record released under the name The Verve. Then they flew to America for the full Lollapalooza tour, playing the second stage from the seventh of July to the fifth of August alongside acts like the Flaming Lips. Richard disliked the small stage, often set up in car parks, but he took it as a challenge to win over strangers. The heat, the drink and the drugs were about to take their toll.[1] [2] [3]

On the eleventh of July 1994, in Kansas City, things fell apart. Peter Salisbury and a crew member were arrested after throwing about four hundred dollars' worth of hotel furniture out of a window, and were bailed two hours later. That afternoon Richard came off stage in blistering heat after a heavy night of drinking, having neither eaten nor drunk water. He began convulsing and was rushed to hospital, where doctors found he was badly dehydrated. He posed for photographers with a drip in his arm and was back on stage in Minneapolis the next day. Years later he put it simply. At the start it was an adventure, he said, but America nearly killed us.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The damage went beyond the tour. Towards the end of 1994 Richard's six year relationship ended when his girlfriend fell for one of the band's roadies, a man who was also one of his best friends. Richard fled to London and then the countryside without telling anyone, trying for months to win her back and wrecking himself physically and mentally along the way. Nick was splitting from his own girlfriend, who was pregnant, and Simon Jones struggled to settle back into life in Wigan. Meanwhile their friends Oasis had exploded, and Definitely Maybe had outsold A Storm in Heaven by a distance. Some observers thought the Verve were lucky Hut kept them at all. Out of all this heartbreak came a new kind of songwriting.[1] [2] [3]

A Northern Soul and the first split

For album two, Noel Gallagher suggested Owen Morris, the Welshman who had helped make Definitely Maybe. The band wrote in a dark rehearsal space in a Wigan warehouse that Richard called a black hole, then moved to Loco Studios in Wales. In three weeks they finished fifteen songs. Then the sessions became notorious. The band turned the studio into a club, and one account says Morris and the band took ecstasy every day for three weeks. A manager arrived to find Morris standing on the mixing desk, drink in hand, and watched him hurl the glass through a studio window. Richard disappeared for days. Nick, a new father, started working mornings while the others worked through the night, and grew miserable.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Richard came close to becoming a drug casualty, and later said he had a frightening vision of Syd Barrett. Yet the sessions produced his most direct songs. He walked around London for hours after his break up, then wrote History, borrowing the opening of William Blake's poem London until his own words took over. He said the whole song poured out of him in one take at three in the morning. The strings, arranged by Wil Malone, were recorded at Abbey Road, where friends added handclaps, and a gardener at the studio was drafted in to shake a matchbox. Morris said afterwards he had nearly had a nervous breakdown. Richard summed up the four months as good music, bad drugs and mixed emotions.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 1995 the Verve returned supporting Oasis in Southend and Paris. At the Bataclan in Paris, a bouncer refused Nick entry backstage because he had no pass, hit him in the face and kicked him down some stairs. Nick's finger was broken and a month of shows was cancelled. The first single This Is Music, Richard's angry song about class and privilege, reached number thirty five in May. The soulful ballad On Your Own did better, reaching number twenty eight in June. A Northern Soul came out on the third of July 1995 and reached number thirteen. That same year Richard quietly married Kate Radley, keyboard player in Spiritualized. The wedding was kept secret for years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The crisis came at T in the Park in August 1995. Richard seemed ill, stumbled around the stage, struck Peter Salisbury and threw parts of his drum kit about. Back on the tour bus he announced it was their last show. He also had a glandular virus, and later admitted he may not have been fit to make big decisions. The final single History reached number twenty four in September, its sleeve bearing the words all farewells should be sudden. Then Oasis released Morning Glory, with Cast No Shadow dedicated to Richard. Afterwards Nick sank into depression at his mother's house, breaking things when she went out. Richard was suffering from the aftereffects of drugs and a kind of psychosis, and for a while was afraid of the phone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Starting again without Nick

Within a few weeks Richard was playing again with Simon Jones and Peter Salisbury, but not with Nick. He and Kate moved to a flat in Bath, where he made demos of songs including Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Drugs Don't Work and Sonnet. His old friend Simon Tong joined on guitar and keyboards. Sessions at Real World Studios with John Leckie produced thirty two demo recordings, but none were finished, and a return to Owen Morris at Rockfield lasted two days. Richard insisted that without Nick they were not the Verve. Supporting Oasis alone at Madison Square Garden convinced him that he could not be a solo act. He needed a band around him.[1] [2] [3]

So the search for a guitarist began. Their managers suggested the best around, the ex Stone Roses guitarist John Squire and Bernard Butler, who had left Suede. Richard spotted Squire at a party but didn't approach him. Butler did come in, and jammed with the band on The Drugs Don't Work and Sonnet, but it lasted only days. Richard felt there was no chemistry with someone who wasn't a childhood friend, and Butler wanted to bring his own songs too. Then the band met Martin Glover, better known as Youth, the bassist from Killing Joke, at his studio in Brixton. Richard played him a brand new song called Lucky Man, and Youth was hooked.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By mid 1996 they were at Olympic Studios in London. Youth ran a tight ship, demanding everyone arrive by ten in the morning. The tapes were labelled Richard Ashcroft, not the Verve, and Youth kept writing the band's name on the boards until Richard corrected him. One track was known simply as Stones Song. It was built on a loop from an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones' The Last Time. Before Christmas 1996, Wil Malone recorded the strings with twenty four players, telling them to sound tough and determined rather than pretty. The new manager was Jazz Summers of Big Life, who had helped break Wham in America. Summers told Richard he could make them the biggest act on the planet.[1] [2] [3]

Something was still missing. After Youth stepped back and engineer Chris Potter took over, Virgin had spent around two million pounds, and Richard admitted the record did not sound like the Verve. In January 1997 he tracked Nick down, calling his flat, then his mother, and finally finding him at a friend's place. Nick said later that Richard ate humble pie to get him back. Virgin staff feared Nick would turn the album into krautrock. Instead he added his guitars, re-recording parts on Bitter Sweet Symphony and The Drugs Don't Work, and the band returned to jamming. Liam Gallagher dropped in and ended up screaming on the closing track Come On. Recording and mixing took nine months in all.[1] [2] [3]

Urban Hymns and the top of the world

Bitter Sweet Symphony was released on the sixteenth of June 1997. It entered the UK chart at number two, held off only by Puff Daddy's I'll Be Missing You, and stayed on the chart for three months. The video, directed by Walter Stern, shows Richard marching down Hoxton Street in east London, barging into passers by without breaking stride. It was a homage to Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy, and Richard said he was genuinely angry while filming. The clip became one of the most watched and parodied videos of the decade. In America it reached number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100 and later closed the film Cruel Intentions. But the song's triumph was already soured.[1] [2] [3]

The loop came from the Andrew Oldham Orchestra's 1965 recording of The Last Time. Virgin had cleared the recording with Decca, but not the song itself, which belonged to Allen Klein's company ABKCO. Klein, the Stones' former manager and a fierce opponent of sampling, argued the Verve had used more than agreed. After a lawsuit settled out of court, ABKCO took all the publishing and the writing credit went to Jagger and Richards. Richard received one thousand dollars. He joked that it was the best song Jagger and Richards had written in twenty years. Andrew Loog Oldham himself wrote to the band calling it a fair cop, then sued ABKCO in 1999 over his own royalties.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The second single, The Drugs Don't Work, came out on the first of September 1997, the day after Princess Diana was killed in Paris. The sombre ballad matched the nation's mood and gave the Verve their first number one. A week later it was replaced at the top by Elton John's Candle in the Wind 1997, his tribute to Diana. Later that month the Verve supported Oasis for three nights at Earls Court, to around twenty thousand people a night. Urban Hymns followed on the twenty ninth of September. It sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first week, became the fifth fastest selling album in UK history at the time, and knocked Oasis's Be Here Now off number one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lucky Man, inspired by Richard's marriage, reached number seven in November 1997. Then Hut asked for a fourth single, and the band agreed to release Sonnet only as a pack of four twelve inch records, limited to five thousand copies, which made it ineligible for the chart. In February 1998 they won Best British Group and Best British Album at the Brit Awards, choosing to play a homelessness benefit instead of performing. In March they were on the cover of Rolling Stone. When Nike used Bitter Sweet Symphony in an advert, American sales doubled. Urban Hymns has sold more than three point three million copies in the UK and around ten million worldwide.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Falling apart at the top

On the twenty fourth of May 1998 the Verve came home. They played the grounds of Haigh Hall, a stately home just outside Wigan, with Beck and the folk guitarist John Martyn in support. The tickets sold out within an hour. Richard later described it as the peasants invading the palace, with lads who had no tickets ramming down the fences backstage. It was the high point, and it came just as the band was cracking. Nick no longer wanted to tour. A doctor told him he had glandular fever and advised two months off, but the others talked him into carrying on. At a show in France Richard threw a bottle at him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventh of June 1998, after a show at the Philips Halle in Dusseldorf, a fight broke out that left Nick with a broken hand and Richard with a sore jaw. Days later the band walked out of their German tour. The official reason was that Simon Jones had collapsed with a viral infection. They also missed the Tibetan Freedom Concert in New York and a string of European festivals. The press filled with rumours that the management was keeping band members apart. One tale claimed Nick and Simon had come to blows, which the band's press office denied. Richard had said many times that the Verve could not exist without Nick.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventh of July 1998 it was announced that Nick would not tour for the rest of the year, citing stress. Kate Radley suggested the pedal steel player B J Cole as a replacement, and Nick's guitar parts were also sampled and triggered on stage. The next day Massive Attack pulled out of the American tour, and several venues were downsized. On the Late Show with David Letterman, the band refused to cut The Drugs Don't Work in half, so the show's credits rolled over them. Two poorly reviewed V Festival headline sets followed. The last show was at Slane Castle in Ireland on the twenty ninth of August 1998. Richard said later he knew it would be their last, and was close to a breakdown.[1] [2] [3]

On the twenty seventh of April 1999 the band's management announced that the Verve had split. Richard said the decision caused him great distress and that he would have carried on had circumstances not made it impossible. Nick said nobody told him directly. A relative heard it on the radio and passed the news on. There was one more sting. In February 1999 Bitter Sweet Symphony was nominated for the Grammy for Best Rock Song, but with Jagger and Richards on the ballot alongside Ashcroft. It lost to Alanis Morissette's Uninvited. Keith Richards, asked if the Verve had been treated fairly, said it was a matter for the lawyers, adding that if they wrote a better song they could keep the money.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Solo years and scattered members

Richard went solo almost immediately. His first single, A Song for the Lovers, reached number three in April 2000, and the album Alone with Everybody went straight to number one in June. Several of its songs dated from the Urban Hymns sessions. Peter Salisbury played drums, as he would on Richard's first three solo records, and Kate played keyboards. Their first son was born that year. The follow up, Human Conditions, arrived in 2002 and reached number three. It even featured the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson on backing vocals. But some reviews were brutal, and Richard stepped back for a couple of years to raise his children, joking that people imagined him in an ivory tower like Lennon, baking bread.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The others scattered. Simon Jones and Simon Tong joined a band that began as John Squire's Skunkworks and became The Shining, releasing one album, True Skies, in 2002. Tong then played guitar live with Blur after Graham Coxon left, joined Gorillaz on stage, and became a member of Damon Albarn's The Good, the Bad and the Queen. Peter Salisbury filled in for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in 2002 and ran a drum shop called Drummin in Stockport. Nick McCabe kept a low profile. He played on John Martyn's song Walking Home, and on tracks for Faultline, and said in his only interview after the split that Urban Hymns was not really a music fan's record.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the second of July 2005, at Live 8 in Hyde Park, Coldplay brought Richard on stage to sing Bitter Sweet Symphony after a single rehearsal. Chris Martin introduced it as probably the best song ever written, sung by the best singer in the world. The moment revived Richard's career. His third album, Keys to the World, reached number two in January 2006, and he supported Coldplay across North America. That year he also spoke about taking Prozac for depression, which he said had not helped, and it emerged he had once been arrested after walking into a Wiltshire youth centre and demanding to work there. Asked about a reunion, he said you were more likely to see all four Beatles on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Reunion and Forth

The reunion began with the drummer. Richard heard that Peter Salisbury had been talking to Nick about a side project, and used it as an excuse to call Nick himself. He made peace with Nick and Simon Jones, and on the twenty sixth of June 2007 Jo Whiley announced on BBC Radio One that the original four were back. Simon Tong was not asked, to keep the band's delicate chemistry as simple as possible, and Simon Jones thanked him publicly anyway. Tickets for six shows in November sold out in under twenty minutes, starting in Glasgow on the second of November. A bigger December arena tour followed, and at the Q Awards Urban Hymns won the first ever Classic Album prize.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2008 the Verve played Coachella, and on the twenty ninth of June they headlined the Sunday night on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, closing with a new song, Love Is Noise. Built from a vocoder loop Richard stumbled on while the band jammed, it reworked lines from William Blake's Jerusalem into a jab at shopping malls and cheap trainers. It reached number four, their first top ten hit since Lucky Man. The album Forth, recorded in Richmond with Chris Potter and electric violinist Davide Rossi, came out on the twenty fifth of August 2008 and went to number one. Critics were split. One called it a battle with Richard's ego, others heard the old psychedelic magic return.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the scenes it was unravelling again. According to reports, the management held a crisis meeting in 2008 and ordered Nick to stop drinking. He cleaned up, but the goodwill had gone. The second single, Rather Be, peaked at only number fifty six in November, and its video, shot on May Hill in Gloucestershire and directed by Richard, featured nobody but Richard. It turned out to be the band's final single. By April 2009 Nick was writing that the Verve seemed to be on holiday. In August The Guardian reported the third split, citing a claim that Nick and Simon felt Richard had used the reunion to relaunch his solo career. Richard said only that they had done what they set out to do.[1] [2] [3]

Nick and Simon had already moved on. In November 2008 they met Davide Rossi and drummer Mig Schillace in Copenhagen to start a new band, The Black Ships. They released an EP called Kurofune in 2011, then became Black Submarine after an American duo trademarked their name, and put out an album, New Shores, in 2014. Nick later revealed there had been offers of Verve dates in Australia and New Zealand. He was keen, but word came back through Jazz Summers that Richard could not think of anything he would rather not do. Richard, for his part, has said he knows the truth about the break up and has chosen not to tell it, because it would hurt real people.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bitter sweet endings

In 2010 Richard launched a new project, RPA and the United Nations of Sound, with the hip hop producer No I D. While touring he caught pneumonia and felt mentally broken, and he walked away from music for years. He threw away his mobile phone and stopped using the internet. His manager Jazz Summers was dying of lung cancer, and Richard did not want to release anything while he was ill. Summers died on the fourteenth of August 2015. The album These People followed in 2016, with songs shaped by that loss and by the death of his longtime guitar technician Rex. Peter Salisbury, meanwhile, had joined the Charlatans in 2010, covering for drummer Jon Brookes during his treatment for a brain tumour. Brookes died in 2013, and Salisbury stayed on.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2017 a twentieth anniversary box set of Urban Hymns appeared, though Richard vetoed a disc of unreleased material. Nick and Simon did the interviews, and Nick said he had not heard back from Richard after trying to call about the anniversary. In 2018 Richard released Natural Rebel, supported the Rolling Stones on some European dates and toured with Liam Gallagher. Then, early in 2019, his new managers Steve Kutner and John Kennedy approached Allen Klein's son Jody, who pointed them to the Stones' manager Joyce Smyth. In April Jagger and Richards agreed to hand over their share and remove their names from the credits. Billboard estimated the song had earned nearly five million dollars in publishing.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Richard announced the news on the twenty third of May 2019, as he received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. He called it a kind and magnanimous gesture, and said he had never had a personal beef with the Stones. The Rolling Stones said in a statement that they recognised the emotional price of surrendering one of your own songs. Richard told the BBC there was an unexpected bonus. Bitter Sweet Symphony is often played before England football matches, and now, he said, he could finally sit back and enjoy the moment. His manager called it absolute affirmation that the song was wholly Richard's work. The publishing company, ABKCO, kept its publishing rights.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Richard's Acoustic Hymns Vol 1 reached number two in 2021, with Liam Gallagher guesting on one track, and his new recording of Sonnet soundtracked the 2024 John Lewis Christmas advert. In 2025 he was chosen as special guest on the UK and Ireland dates of the Oasis reunion tour, saying the perfection of Live Forever had forced him to try to write his own. His single Lover, built on a Joan Armatrading sample, came in May 2025, and the album Lovin' You followed in October. Nick releases music on Bandcamp, including a 2022 EP with Peter Salisbury. As of 2026 there is no sign of another Verve reunion, but their four albums still sound like nobody else.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around The Verve

Richard Ashcroft and Nick McCabe. They met at Winstanley College when Richard heard Nick playing behind a closed door. Richard was the singer in his own movie, Nick the shy guitarist making sounds nobody else could. Their tension was the band's engine and its undoing. Richard split the band in 1995, begged Nick back in 1997, and saw him leave the tour in 1998 after a fight in Dusseldorf. They reunited in 2007 and parted again by 2009. Nick has said he made his peace, but they have not spoken in years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Richard Ashcroft and Kate Radley. Kate Radley, the keyboard player in Spiritualized, married Richard in 1995, and it was years before the wedding became public. She appears in the Bitter Sweet Symphony video, suggested B J Cole as Nick's stand in in 1998, and has played keyboards on Richard's solo albums. They have two sons and live between Richmond and Gloucestershire. Richard has said Lucky Man was inspired by their marriage, and Sonnet is among the songs she inspired.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Kate Radley and Jason Pierce. Before Richard, Kate was the girlfriend of Spiritualized leader Jason Pierce, who brought her into the band on keyboards. She played on their first three albums. Her secret marriage to Richard in 1995 made the break up a talking point, and many heard Spiritualized's 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space as a response. Pierce says much of it was written earlier. Kate left Spiritualized in 1997.[1] [2] [3]

Richard Ashcroft and Noel Gallagher. The Verve took an unknown Oasis on tour in 1993, and Noel never forgot it. He called Richard a genius and Captain Rock, and dedicated Cast No Shadow to him on Morning Glory, while Richard dedicated A Northern Soul to Noel. Noel suggested Owen Morris as producer, and Oasis returned the favour with the Earls Court support slots in 1997. In 2025 Richard supported the reunited Oasis, saying Live Forever had pushed him to write.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Richard Ashcroft and Liam Gallagher. Liam turned up at the Urban Hymns sessions, played a John Squire tape fifteen times in a row, then screamed and smashed a tambourine at the end of Come On. Richard sang backing vocals on Oasis's All Around the World. Their friendship outlasted Oasis's split. Richard toured North America with Liam in 2018, and Liam sang on Richard's reworked C'mon People for Acoustic Hymns in 2021.[1] [2] [3]

Richard Ashcroft and Allen Klein. Allen Klein, former manager of the Rolling Stones and head of ABKCO, owned the song behind the Bitter Sweet Symphony loop. He hated sampling, refused to clear it on the band's terms, and after a lawsuit took all the publishing, leaving Richard with one thousand dollars. Richard said for years that someone had stolen millions from him. Klein died in 2009, and it was his son Jody who opened the door to a settlement a decade later.[1] [2] [3]

Richard Ashcroft and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. For twenty two years the two Stones were credited as writers of a song they had nothing to do with. Richard mocked it as the best song they had written in twenty years, and Keith shrugged that the Verve could keep the money if they wrote a better song. Yet Richard always said he had no personal beef with them. In 2019 they gave up their share and their credit, which he called kind and magnanimous.[1] [2] [3]

Richard Ashcroft and Chris Martin. Coldplay's singer is one of Richard's loudest champions. He defended Human Conditions when critics savaged it, invited Richard to sing Bitter Sweet Symphony with Coldplay at Live 8 in 2005, and introduced him as the best singer in the world. Coldplay then took him on tour as support in 2006. In a Q poll of songwriters, Martin picked Bitter Sweet Symphony, calling it as perfect a song as there is.[1] [2] [3]

Richard Ashcroft and Jazz Summers. The former Wham co manager took over the Verve during the Urban Hymns sessions and told Richard he could make them the biggest band on the planet. He negotiated the Nike deal, carried messages between Richard and Nick during the reunion, and stayed Richard's manager for years. When Summers was dying of lung cancer, Richard held back his album, saying he grew very close to him at the end. Summers died in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Richard Ashcroft and Simon Jones. School friends from Up Holland, they learned their first guitar chords together from Simon Tong. Simon Jones stood by Richard through the 1995 split, but Richard later said there were serious problems between them too. Jones said the band's move towards strings and ballads was not where he came from, loving loud guitars. After the 2009 split Nick said Simon and Richard held grievances they would never sort out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nick McCabe and Owen Morris. The producer of A Northern Soul called Nick without a shadow of a doubt the most gifted musician he had ever worked with, and also a complete nightmare, because Nick would never play the same thing twice. Nick didn't get on with him during the chaotic Loco sessions, yet later praised Morris as the producer who came closest to capturing the band's live sound.[1] [2] [3]

Simon Tong and Damon Albarn. The Verve's second guitarist found a second career with Blur's frontman. Tong played guitar on Blur's Think Tank tour after Graham Coxon left, contributed to Gorillaz albums and live shows, and was a member of Albarn's The Good, the Bad and the Queen alongside Paul Simonon and Tony Allen. He also played on Albarn's 2021 solo album.[1]

Rare facts about The Verve

• As a teenager, Richard Ashcroft broke the ankle of Peter Salisbury, his future drummer, while playing football. Richard was a fierce junior footballer who played for Wigan Athletic's youth side. His all out style broke his own nose several times, and on one occasion Peter Salisbury's ankle.[1] [2]
• As a small child Richard was so shy he had to be replaced in a school nativity play because of stage fright. The man later nicknamed Mad Richard for his wild stage presence started out painfully shy, losing his nativity role to stage fright.[1]
• Before the Verve, Nick McCabe worked as a quantity surveyor, a job he hated. After college Nick trained as a quantity surveyor. He said he spent all day scribbling ideas for guitar sounds in his notepad, then quit to join the band.[1]
• Before they were Verve, Richard and Nick's first bands were called the Butterfly Effect and Raingarden. Once Richard's mother bought him a guitar, he started a group with Nick and a friend on bass. They went through two names before Simon Jones and Peter Salisbury joined and they became Verve.[1]
• The Verve's B side Feel was recorded inside an indoor swimming pool. During the She's a Superstar sessions at the Manor studio, the band recorded Feel in a swimming pool for its echo. Sessions ran from midnight to ten in the morning.[1]
• The waterfall on the She's a Superstar sleeve is six feet tall but made to look like thirty. Designer Brian Cannon tipped blue food colouring into the stream at Snake Pass in Derbyshire, and the band stood far away as tiny dots, communicating by sign language.[1]
• The studio where A Storm in Heaven was made could only be reached by boat or along a railway line at low tide. Sawmills Studios in Cornwall sits in an old mill by the River Fowey. If gear missed the boat, the band could wait twelve hours for the tide.[1]
• The first noise on Star Sail is Nick McCabe checking his tuning, unaware the tape was rolling. John Leckie started recording while the band were stoned at four in the morning. The jam that followed became the album's opening track.[1] [2]
• During their name dispute with Verve Records, the band joked about becoming Verv, so the album could be called Dropping an E for America. They settled instead by adding The, and still had to pay twenty five thousand pounds to the jazz label.[1]
• The live EP Voyager 1 was an official release made to look like a bootleg. Only a thousand blue vinyl copies were pressed in 1993, and three hundred were ruined in transit to America. Designer Brian Cannon hid his thumbprint on the sleeve.[1]
• Nick McCabe chose Oasis as a support band from a pile of three demo tapes. Nick said what grabbed him was an early version of Columbia. He then watched Oasis soundcheck every night, to their initial suspicion.[1]
• Noel Gallagher once called the Verve the second best band in Britain, a bunch of space cadets led by Captain Rock. Captain Rock stuck as Noel's nickname for Richard, and Richard later used it as the title of an iTunes bonus track.[1] [2]
• A studio gardener shaking a matchbox plays percussion on History. After History poured out of Richard at three in the morning, he spotted the gardener at six and recruited him to shake the box.[1]
• The riff on This Is Music was played on a three string aluminium guitar that was out of tune. Nick used a cast aluminium guitar from the early eighties, which gave the riff its harsh metallic sound.[1]
• Some green vinyl copies of On Your Own were misprinted with a song by another band. A few carried Friends by Daryll Ann. Nearly all were destroyed, making survivors highly collectable.[1]
• The On Your Own video was directed by Jake Scott, son of Ridley Scott. It shows the band performing on a foggy street, for the second single from A Northern Soul.[1]
• During the Urban Hymns sessions the tapes were labelled Richard Ashcroft, not the Verve. Richard considered it fraud to use the band name without Nick, comparing it to the Doors without Jim Morrison. He only relented once Nick returned.[1]
• Bitter Sweet Symphony was originally known in the studio as Stones Song. Producer Youth pushed Richard to keep working on it and was the first to see its potential as a single.[1]
• Early Urban Hymns session recordings leaked onto the internet in 1997, when file trading was still rare. The band were baffled to find the Olympic Studios recordings online before the album was even finished.[1]
• The dog playing with the band in the Urban Hymns sleeve was Richard's black Labrador, Charlie. The relaxed photos were a deliberate contrast to the staged, mythic artwork of A Storm in Heaven.[1]
• David Letterman's show rolled its credits over the Verve after they refused to cut The Drugs Don't Work in half. On the third of August 1998 the band ignored the request to halve the song, so the broadcast ended mid performance.[1]
• A row with ITV's The Chart Show over captions led it to play a Portishead video instead of the Verve. The band wanted their video shown without on screen captions, and when their manager withheld the tape, the show gave more airtime to Portishead.[1]
• Richard Ashcroft does not print his lyrics in his record sleeves. He feels the words are personal to him and prefers listeners to find their own meaning.[1]
• Simon Tong ranked fortieth in a BBC poll of the greatest guitarists of the previous thirty years. The Verve's second guitarist, who taught Richard his first chords, went on to play with Blur, Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad and the Queen.[1]
• After the Verve, drummer Peter Salisbury ran a drum shop called Drummin in Stockport. He also stood in for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on a 2002 tour when their drummer could not get a visa.[1]
• Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys sang backing vocals on Richard's song Nature Is the Law. He also arranged the backing vocals on the closing track of Human Conditions in 2002.[1]
• Richard sang on UNKLE's Lonely Soul in 1998 and performed it with DJ Shadow in Manchester in 2006. DJ Shadow joined him on stage for the encore of his biggest solo show at Lancashire County Cricket Club.[1] [2]
• Mover, a Verve song first played live in 1994, was only properly recorded during the 2008 reunion. It was offered as a free download on the band's website for just one week.[1] [2]
• The Gravity Grave video car, a Dodge Charger, was destroyed in a banger race in 2015. The video follows the band driving through rural Hartlepool, much of which has since been redeveloped.[1]
• Nick McCabe and Simon Jones's Black Ships became Black Submarine after an American duo trademarked the name. The new band started rehearsing in Copenhagen in November 2008, and renamed itself in 2012.[1] [2]
• The Fat Les video for Vindaloo parodied the Bitter Sweet Symphony video on the very same Hoxton pavement. Comedian Paul Kaye played Richard. A 2015 Radio X parody starring Chris Moyles drew one hundred and six complaints.[1]
• Richard says he can finally enjoy England football matches, where Bitter Sweet Symphony is often played. Once the royalties were returned in 2019, he told the BBC he could sit back and just enjoy the moment.[1]
• A songwriters' poll in Q in 2007 put Bitter Sweet Symphony among the ten greatest tracks ever. It sat alongside Hallelujah, Strawberry Fields Forever and Sympathy for the Devil, the Stones song Richard watched being made as a boy.[1] [2]
• The Rather Be video features only Richard, walking through a grove on May Hill in Gloucestershire. He directed it himself. It was the band's last single before the third split.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.