(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 15 March 2026 7:00, UK
“People are afraid to use the word spiritual,” ex-Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft said in 1998, shortly after his group’s third album, Urban Hymns, had shot them to international ‘it’ band status, adding, “I’m a firm believer in songs coming from an infinite pool, and you have to be in a certain state of mind to get them.”
As was often the case at the time, Ashcroft was speaking specifically about the origins of the song that, in retrospect, could be considered the final glorious moment of Britpop: the massive, transcendent mega-hit ‘Bittersweet Symphony’. Listeners who hadn’t been clued into the Verve beforehand, which included most of America, were dumbfounded at how a young band could emerge seemingly from out of nowhere with an anthemic song that instantly sounded like a classic, up there in the ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ territory.
If you bought Urban Hymns on CD and had a peek at its liner notes, the answer seemed to present itself: ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ was credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, suggesting it must have been some obscure Rolling Stones B-side that Ashcroft and his mates dusted off. That explanation made a lot more sense, but of course, as would be well documented over the ensuing years, it wasn’t true. The Verve had indeed used a small sample from an old orchestral cover of a Stones song (‘The Last Time’), but the song was otherwise a wholly original creation of the band, plucked out of the creative ether by Ashcroft during one of his legendary “visualisation” sessions.
The frontman personally defined visualisation as “being able to construct the future, to somehow have an influence over the future”.
It’s a concept that many athletes use to imagine themselves succeeding before entering into the field of competition, but it’s a slightly different process when the visualising moves from a physical manifestation into a creative or artistic one. In his youth, he had been heavily influenced by his stepfather, a former practising mystic in an ancient secular order known as the Rosicrucians. It sounds like an improvised backstory for a character in Spinal Tap, but indeed, Richard used to train with his stepdad, trying to use the power of the mind to heal football injuries or predict the future.
“I used to know when a song would be on the radio,” Ashcroft claimed, “I’d have the tape player lined up. It may not have been a song around at that moment; it might have been a song done five years earlier. But I seemed to have the knack to find it straightaway when it came on the radio.”
Eventually, when he was leading a rock band of his own, Ashcroft applied these old visualisation techniques as a way to breathe his own songs into existence. In the case of his biggest hit, there wasn’t a specific melody or lyric that got the ball rolling. ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ emerged by following a feeling; one that actually started somewhere closer to a Clint Eastwood movie.
“I wanted something that opened up into a prairie-music kind of sound,” he said, “a modern-day Ennio Morricone kind of thing. Then, after a while, the song started morphing into this wall of sound, a concise piece of incredible pop music.”
He suggested that the real skill behind writing a great song wasn’t necessarily a superior talent for craft or composition, but a willingness to enter the right frame of mind to find the songs that are already floating in space around you. “You don’t know why you’re in that state of mind,” he explained to Rolling Stone, “Sometimes it’s a dangerous state of mind. But I know where my influence comes from”.
He then put on an over-the-top cockney accent, declaring, “It comes from the universal mind, mate!”
