Richard Ashcroft’s bizarre lasagna addiction once left him flat broke
The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft earned the nickname ‘Mad Richard’ quite early in his band’s existence, before the release of their debut album and long before the supernova breakout of ‘Bittersweet Symphony’.
The moniker referred to the young singer’s brutal honesty and almost maniacal overconfidence, but in retrospect, a lot of Ashcroft’s crazy visions actually came to pass; he was more of an oracle than a madman; that’s not to say that ‘Mad Richard’ always had the best judgment, however.
Along with routinely ruffling feathers and pissing people off in every other interview he did, Ashcroft didn’t quite know how to navigate the awkward time period between The Verve inking its first record deal and the day they would inevitably be hailed as rock and roll gods.
As Ashcroft acknowledged to New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press in 1993, The Verve had originally been formed “to do something creative while on the dole, because we didn’t have jobs”, and while everybody in the band agreed that they had the potential to do great things, nobody had any real world experience with what fame or success actually meant, let alone any sense of what to do with a sudden influx of cash.
The story of the young, green musician who gets signed to a recording contract and foolishly blows all his money on cars, drugs, and jewellery is as old as time, but that was never how Richard Ashcroft was gonna roll. You’d never know it to look at the guy, who has always appeared to weigh about eight stone soaking wet, but Richard’s vice was the same one that plagues Garfield the cat.
Immediately after Verve signed a record deal with the Virgin subsidiary Hut Records in 1991, the 20-year-old Ashcroft began “the most ridiculously indulgent and decadent” period of his young life. “I had lasagne delivered to my door every day for five months until I was broke again,” he told People in 1998, a confession that has to rank among the most bizarre in rock decadence history.
Ashcroft, presumably clad 24×7 in leather trousers, should have been blowing his money in the VIP rooms of trendy London nightclubs, cutting coke lines with his razor-sharp cheekbones, and not sitting around his flat pigging out on his daily lasagne delivery. This was the early 1990s, too, long before food-ordering apps, which means he shamelessly had to pick up the phone and call the local Italian joint daily to ask for ‘the usual’, and the same delivery boy, employed by the restaurant, had the task of handing the sogging styrofoam container to the frontman every single day.
However, rather than eating himself into cheesy irrelevance, Ashcroft only remained steadfast in his belief that he and his band were headed for legendary times, telling a reporter in ’93, “We will be the biggest group in the world”, even after The Verve’s first big single, ‘Blue’, topped out at a disappointing number 69 on the charts. “It’s only reasonable that we should be playing in front of 40,000 people. Minimum. When we play those little gigs now, I see some bloke kind of looking on indifferently. I think, ‘Just wait. In two years time, you’ll be boasting about how you saw Verve in a little club and you were freaking out down the front… History has a place for us. It may take three albums, but we’ll get there,” he sope starry-eyed.
And he was right in his prescient assessment, and they did in fact find a place in history, but it might be an overstatement to say that it was a steady ascent. “At the beginning of 1995,” Ashcroft told People, “I owed £3,000 in rent arrears,” referring to the same flat he’d used as his lasagne palace, adding, “I went Awol and returned to find my landlord had changed the locks and sold everything in it, records included.”
It’s not all pasta sheets and cheese on your way to the top.
