Richard Ashcroft
Alone With Everybody

Being named Richard Ashcroft and creating a convincing solo debut is not as simple as it seems.
His name has been for a long time linked to the Verve, a band capable, in four years, of rising to the role of a meteor with excellent and not completely expressed artistic qualities.

Ashcroft was the singer and masterful mind of that group, elevated to a new figure of British rock by critics and admirers, only to find himself, at the end of the game, "Alone With Everybody" with understandable uncertainties about his solo future and blamed by those who saw in his strong ego the cause of the breakup.

After this fundamental milestone of his life, the artist from Wigan creates a work that paradoxically he never would have crafted with his former adventure companions.
Confidential and sincere, armed with an acoustic guitar and supported by excellent string arrangements, Ashcroft presents us with 11 slow ballads that draw vital essence from the past experience strongly marked by an incompatibility with those around him and in the present by the newfound and engaging love for his wife Kate, formerly of Spiritualized.

For perfect lovers, the very sweet "Song For The Lovers", "Slow Was My Heart", and the Rolling Stones-inspired "You On My Mind" (which bears no little resemblance to "Wild Horses") more for fans of '70s American rock "New York", "Money To Burn", and "C'mon" in which blues guitars between slide and wah-wah effects of West Coast memory weave their plots.

Listening to this album is like welcoming the sincere confidences of a good friend in the heart of the night and realizing that it's not entirely impossible, having overcome the negative period and found a new love, to return to doing with passion what one once believed incapable of doing.