‘The Drugs Don’t Work’: The Verve song Richard Ashcroft couldn’t escape
The idea of sharing personal reflections with an audience can be overwhelming. When The Verve shot to fame, it was ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ that paved the way, forcing Richard Ashcroft to grapple with how to separate himself from the aspects that defined him. Yet, as time passed, he came to understand that attempting to detach from his art was futile—being a musician and expressing those parts of himself were inseparable.
It was clear from the moment they encountered their breakthrough that Ashcroft was unlike anyone else on the scene at the time. While others were busy crafting songs about the usual, like love, sex, drugs, loss, grief, and so on, Ashcroft took the more nuanced and complicated facets of those themes and holistically reframed them, delivering lines that reflected the broader impact of such heartache and loss of self rather than focussing on specific events or occurrences.
‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ epitomised this by taking melancholy arrangements a step further and presenting life as an ambiguous whirlwind of bad and good, boiling down to a simple state of acceptance that basically said, “This is life, take it or leave it”. The track also had an aura of confrontation that appeared traditionally rock with a sprinkling of the burgeoning indie rock movement: it was classic and refreshing, but in a way that differed from other Britpop artists at the time.
The follow-up single, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, continued the band’s success as ringleaders in downbeat odes to life and loss, though this time Ashcroft’s personal struggles shone through more prominently as he sang about loss, despair, passion, and, unexpectedly, hope. It’s incredibly touching, heartwrenching, even, but immensely relatable and endearing in a way that feels confusingly upbeat.
Penning the song, Ashcroft unintentionally brought together an entire generation of disillusioned British music fans, despite only focussing on matters of the heart at the time, not the feelings of all of those around him. As he explained during an early introduction of the track, “There’s a new track I’ve just written. That’s how I’m feeling at the moment. The [drugs] make me worse, man. But I still take ’em. Out of boredom and frustration, you turn to something else to escape.”
However, despite Ashcroft’s own struggles, including the death of his father at a young age, a gloomy cloud had hit the nation only the day before following the passing of Princess Diana, giving it a certain well-timed energy that everybody seemed to need at the time. Still, it forced Ashcroft into a strange emotional state where he felt forever attached to the track’s sentiment, even when he attempted to remove himself from it during live performances.
“[The song is] just that sense of how it’s very difficult to be an artistic person in a business like this,” he explained to Songfacts. “When I perform, it’s not a theatrical production and it’s not your normal rendition of songs. I wrote ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ and the thing is, shit happened in the last 20 years, so when I sing ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ I can’t remove myself from that song, so things take on an extra intensity.”
Perhaps his inability to extract himself from his art was a silver lining, no matter how difficult it might have seemed. Leaning into something that caused him pain likely caused a confusing swirl of ambivalence when the song first gained traction, but over time, it seems he more willingly accepted this unwarranted position. After all, he soon stepped into his role as an artist who could deliver personal and heartfelt art and not have to shy away from what it all meant when the crowd went home, and all that was left were the ghosts of his past.
