Richard Ashcroft

[Christa42]

 

I think his old thread has been buried with the old forum so I decided to create a new one for this amazing artist!

 

He is coming out with a new album and is on Twitter and Instagram now

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Mobile Link: https://twitter.com/richardashcroft/status/700631579333234688

 

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Mobile Link: https://twitter.com/richardashcroft/status/701694435684257793

[Christa42]

from Gigwise http://www.gigwise.com/news/105600/verves-richard-ashcroft-solo-uk-tour-shows-london-manchester-tickets

Dates!

Richard Ashcroft announces two huge UK shows - tickets

The Verve frontman is taking his new solo LP on the road

The Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft has announced that he'll be taking his new solo album These People on tour, announcing two huge UK shows. Full dates and ticket details are below.

 

Ashcroft announced These People yesterday, also unveiling the epic, Liam Gallagher-approved launch single 'This Is How It Feels'. The album will drop on 20 May, after he launches the record with two exclusive UK live shows in London and Manchester.

 

Richard Ashcroft's upcoming UK tour dates are below. Tickets are on sale from 9am on Friday 26 February, and are available here.

 

14 May - MANCHESTER, Albert Hall

16 May - LONDON, Roundhouse

the record was made with longtime collaborator Chris Potter and Wil Malone, who worked with Richard on the string arrangements for The Verve's A Northern Soul, Urban Hymns, and his acclaimed debut solo album, Alone with Everybody. As a result, lead single 'This Is How It Feels' flows with that inimitable Ashcroft soulful charm.

 

Tour dates are expected to be announced imminently.

 

The tracklist for These People is as follows:

1. Out Of My Body

2. This Is How It Feels

3. They Don’t Own Me

4. Hold On

5. These People

6. Everybody Needs Somebody To Hurt

7. Picture Of You

8. Black Lines

9. Ain’t The Future So Bright

10. Songs Of Experience

[Christa42]

Look who will be on the cover of NME?

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Mobile Link: https://twitter.com/NME/status/702734803947425793

 

This gif, omg

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Mobile Link: https://twitter.com/NME/status/702267390667657216

[beastwars]

Richard :awesome:

[stephen]

Just listened to the new single properly, it's catchy!

[Christa42]

Article from NME

10 Defining Moments In Richard Ashcroft’s Career

Read more at http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/10-defining-moments-in-richard-ashcroft-s-career?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social#lY3Xpr5lQ3qDx5oi.99

The big man is back: Richard Ashcroft has just announced details of a new solo album.

 

'These People' - the former Verve frontman's fourth solo LP - isn't out until May 20, but we're already excited about Ashcroft's first album since 2010's 'United Nations Of Sound', which tackles topics such as the war in Syria and the Arab Spring uprisings.

 

Richard Ashcroft has been part of the British musical landscape for almost a quarter of a century, and after six years of silence, it's more than good to have him back. Here's a quick timeline of his biggest moments. Welcome back, Dickie.

 

THE BIRTH OF ‘MAD RICHARD’, 1992

“I believe you can fly and I believe in astral travel,” Ashcroft told interviewers, without physically being able to prove it. Oddball reputation ensured.

 

OASIS' ‘CAST NO SHADOW’, 1995

Noel Gallagher wrote this 1995 Oasis song about the Verve frontman. "He always seemed to me to not be very happy about what was going on around him, almost trying too hard," Noel has said. "That's why it goes, 'He was bound with the weight of all the

 

words he tried to say.' I always felt he was born at the wrong place, and in the wrong place, and he was always trying to say the right things, but they came out wrong."

 

‘BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY’, 1997

Long before Chris Moyles's parody for Radio X, Ashcroft sauntered down the street with a wrecking ball intent in the ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ video, straight into rock’n’roll legend.

 

THE BRITS, 1998

Having refused to leave his table to collect any of the numerous NME Awards The Verve won in 1998, Ashcroft snubbed that year's Brit Awards, where they were up for Best British Band, to play a homeless charity gig in Brixton instead.

 

SONGWRITER OF THE YEAR, 1998

One awards ceremony Richard did decide to grace in 1998 was the Ivor Novello Awards, where he was named Songwriter of the Year.

 

ALONE WITH EVERYBODY, 2000

Ashcroft released his debut solo album, ‘Alone With Everybody’, in 2000, following the second split of the band in 1999. It went straight to the top of the UK album charts and NME gave it a 8/10 review, saying: “'Alone With Everybody' remains a beacon of light. Ashcroft's newly discovered stability has done nothing to blunt his powers of communication or reduce his belief in the apocalyptic potential of music.”

 

LIVE 8, 2005

“Here’s the best singer in the world,” said Chris Martin, introducing Ashcroft at Live 8 for their show-stealing version of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’. Ashcroft lived up to his billing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHWlB0Y1Dps

 

HUGE SOLO SHOW, 2006

Ashcroft headlined the Lancashire County Cricket Club in 2006, with support from Razorlight and The Feeling. He was also joined onstage by DJ Shadow for his UNKLE collaboration ‘Lonely Soul’.

 

GLASTONBURY, 2008

After reforming in 2007, The Verve headlined the Sunday of Glastonbury Festival, putting on a show-stopping set. “"A shout out for Jay-Z for putting in a good performance but tonight is rock'n'roll,” said Ashcroft, referencing the rapper’s appearance at the festival. The Verve split for the third and final time a few months later.

LIAM GALLAGHER GETS ON SIDE, 2016

Liam was outspoken in his support for Ashcroft’s comeback single, ‘This Is How It Feels’. “Richard Ashcroft good to hear your voice again new tune sounding good LG x” tweeted the former Oasis frontman.

[Christa42]

[Safy]

:awesome: :awesome:

[Christa42]

Seems like Jo Whiley will have RA on her show

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Mobile Link: https://twitter.com/jowhiley/status/719888929403576320

[Christa42]

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Mobile Link: https://twitter.com/richardashcroft/status/723506524522446848

[Christa42]

From The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/28/richard-ashcroft-i-wouldnt-trade-what-coldplay-have-achieved-for-any-of-my-songs

Richard Ashcroft: ‘I wouldn’t trade what Coldplay have achieved for any of my songs'

From careering around Wigan in his mate’s Mini to posing with a drip in his arm, the former Mad Richard has had a breakneck ride. He may now be living a quieter life but he still wants to be ‘bigger than the Verve’

 

 

he way we and our mates were living back then was crazy,” says Richard Ashcroft, remembering the days he was on the precipice of fame before the Verve’s third album, Urban Hymns, made them ubiquitous in 1997. “A scene in This is England brought it home. Shane Meadows faded in on this girl’s retina. It’s five in the morning, she’s watching some lads play a video game. She’s obviously wasted, and that shot just sums that period up. I feel lucky I got out alive.”

 

The Verve had blazed out of the north-west, a product of both rave culture and psychedelia. Ashcroft, wild-eyed and shaggy-haired, was a man prone to ridiculous pronouncements who inspired incredible loyalty. Noel Gallager wrote the Oasis song Cast No Shadow about him and Chris Martin introduced him at Live 8 as “the best singer in the world” while the music mags nicknamed him “Mad Richard” after he claimed he could fly. If there’s an image of Ashcroft fixed in the public mind, it comes from the video for the Verve’s breakthrough single, Bitter Sweet Symphony which featured Ashcroft walking down a street, while everyone else walks the other way, his eyes fixed on the camera refusing to be pushed from his path. “Try to make ends meet / You’re a slave to the money / Then you die,” he sang.

 

One last thing... Richard Ashcroft

Read more

It’s hard, now, to reconcile the cheerful, chatty, 44-year-old sipping water in a Richmond pub with the Ashcroft of two decades ago, the “Pete Townshend character, a northern soul, who could star in a musical, who’s still within me”. Richmond is where he has lived for the past 15 years, in unpsychedelic domesticity. “People wanted me to become this cliched Keith Richards, Iggy Pop character,” he says. “I wasn’t expected to marry a beautiful wife and have kids.”

 

Ashcroft has always sought to confound expectations. When he was a young man, while his peers went to work in factories or offices, he formed the Verve – and it is worth remembering how out of time a band they were, performing long, freeform jams when they began to make an impression in the early 90s. They released two albums before truly crossing over with Urban Hymns, which sold 10m copies worldwide and became the 17th bestselling album ever in the UK.

 

Yet Ashcroft walked away repeatedly, splitting the Verve three times. “I don’t want to be onstage when I feel like I’m cheating the audience,” he explains. He launched a solo career in 2000 with a hit album, Alone With Everybody, but began to falter with the 2002 followup Human Conditions. Then, while touring in 2010, he contracted pneumonia and felt himself mentally broken. He walked away from music again, seemingly for ever.

 

All those stabs in the back and ceilings that have been put on me started building up again, so I’ve come back fighting

 

Richard Ashcroft

“There’s no point writing a suicide note like Kurt Cobain,” he says. “If you haven’t got it, take a break.”

 

The big conundrum, he says, has been how to tame his old creative “desire to smash things up” to suit life as an adult with children. He’s spent the past six years “breaking myself down and building myself up again”, a process that he says has been painful. He stopped using the internet and threw away his mobile phone. Ashcroft isn’t known for humility, but says he asked himself: “Have I got anything to offer or am I just adding more shit to the pile?” Gradually, he regained the desire to make music. “All those stabs in the back and ceilings that have been put on me in my life started building up again, so I’ve come back fighting,” he says.

 

Ashcroft’s new album, These People, reunites him with the Urban Hymns’ strings arranger Wil Malone, and has what he calls an “ancient and modern” sound. Several of the songs reflect his fears about the way society is going: “Privacy. We’re all being divided, set upon each other. Fear is being pumped daily on news channels. Everyone’s on edge. I feel it just like everybody else.”

 

The album concludes with four songs influenced by the deaths of people including his long-time guitar tech, Rex, and his manager, Jazz Summers. “That was another reason for the long break. I didn’t want to put an album out while he was dying. I got very close to him in the end.”

 

Ashcroft’s best songs are the result of extremes of emotion. When his long-standing girlfriend ran off with his childhood friend, he wrote the Verve’s sublime, strings-soaked

“all in one go, this seven-minute outpouring with a bit of William Blake thrown in”. Around the time that the band first imploded, in 1995, he penned The Drugs Don’t Work as his wife’s father lay dying in hospital.

 

 

 

Some years ago, Ashcroft was diagnosed with depression and prescribed Prozac but he is scathing about the modern rush to diagnosis. “You have a few bad days and suddenly it’s a ‘condition’. It’s a multibillion business with the meds. But I’m fortunate that instead of brooding and going downhill, there is an outlet. It’s not primal-scream therapy but get in a room with a guitar and two chords, pour out the poisons and you’ll feel a whole lot better.”

 

When Ashcroft was 11 his father died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage, which he says, “opened a door that will never be closed”. When his own eldest son – now 16 – turned 11, it brought those memories home again. Ashcroft remembers being a young boy, sitting miserably in his metalwork class, thinking: “You’re not supposed to feel this bad as a kid.”

 

He threw his emotions into the Verve – formed in 1990 with friends from Winstanley sixth form college in Wigan – playing pubs as if they were stadiums and telling anyone who would listen that they would be massive by their third album. “It was portrayed as arrogance – Mad Richard! – but I was trying to get across how much power you need to smash that ceiling.”

 

After he collapsed from dehydrationon tour in Kansas City in 1994, he posed for photographers backstage with a drip in his arm, and he now speaks about the band’s tours like an army general recalling tactical errors in past campaigns.

 

You should have seen Haigh Hall, lads that didn’t have tickets ramming the fences down, reversing that cap-in-hand shit

 

Richard Ashcroft

“They were my lads, but a lot of the problem in this industry is we don’t look after our young people,” he says. “We don’t realise that six or seven weeks together in a chrome bus with people that have just about managed to keep it together in their home town is too much. We send them off to that environment and they don’t come back the same people.”

 

The rifts in the band deepened when Ashcroft began writing songs alone, forsaking

. They held it together to play a triumphant homecoming gig in 1998 to 33,000 people at Haigh Hall, their local stately home. “It was like the peasants had invaded the palace,” he says. “You should have seen it backstage, all the lads that didn’t have tickets ramming the fences down. It’s reversing that cap-in-hand shit. Yeah man, brilliant.”

 

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He’s particularly proud of Bitter Sweet Symphony but it still rankles that the song’s distinctive string hook cost him both the songwriting credit and all the royalties. The Verve had licensed a five-note sample from a version of the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, performed by the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra, with a string arrangement by David Whitaker. The Stones’ former manager, Allen Klein, who owned their pre-1970 catalogue, claimed the Verve had used more than they were permitted to and sued. He won, pocketing all the royalties from Bitter Sweet Symphony, while the songwriting was recredited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

 

Has Ashcroft ever bumped into Jagger around Richmond? “I’ve never seen him. I’ve seen Pete Townshend. He’s a great guy. He gave me an email of what the breakdown would be if we sampled one of his songs, the way it should be. That was really cool. I got a dollar for Bitter Sweet Symphony.” When the Verve received $175,000 for the song’s use in an advert, against their wishes, they gave the money to charity.

 

He’s hardly skint but making money made him a target for the tabloids. When he bought the 17th-century pile Taynton House in Gloucestershire, he says he was treated by the press like a “northern lottery winner. They even tried to get the local farmers to complain about my management of the building”.