“Shit happened”: Why ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ still pains Richard Ashcroft
One can only imagine the absolute rager that happened the night Richard Ashcroft secured the Oasis tour.
Quite possibly the most sought-after support slot in the history of British rock, and it went to him out of The Verve. As much as this was a blatant case of “jobs for the boys”, one can’t deny that he had the songs for it. Or at the very least, one album of his does. All he has to do is give the big hits from Urban Hymns enough welly and he’ll have done his part, and fair play to the lad, they are a generational bunch of singles.
Of course, the big one is ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony‘ (yes, it’s written with those spaces), but I don’t think it’s actually the best. The Rolling Stones lawyered up on the strength of “that song is nothing without the sample”, and as the last 30 years have proved, they weren’t wrong about that. Instead, the actual best song from Urban Hymns is its second single, the genuinely affecting string-swept ballad ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’.
There are rumours abound about the song. For years, there was a school of thought that the song was about Ashcroft losing someone he loved to illness, and how the drugs the doctors were giving them weren’t helping. It’s an affecting story. One that has followed the song for a good reason that pretty much all of us can relate to. Yet this may not actually be the case. Obviously, there’s only one thing we actually think of when a rock star talks about drugs, and there’s reason to believe that Occam’s razor is completely true here.
There’s another strong school of thought that the drugs of the title are recreational. An interview Ashcroft gave to Select Magazine at the time supports this interpretation as well. He said, “There’s a new track I’ve just written which goes, ‘The drugs don’t work, they just make me worse, and I know I’ll see your face again’ and that’s how I’m feeling at the moment. They make me worse, man. But I still take ’em. Out of boredom and frustration, you turn to something else to escape.”
What does ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ mean to Richard Ashcroft?
It’s quite telling that the interview he gave to Select was pretty much the last time that Ashcroft was that open about what a song means. It was given a few years before the song was released, for one. While I’m sure he knew it would be a hit as The Verve were due a real hit and the song’s great, there’s no way he could have known what a career-defining smash it would go on to be. Ever since it became that level of a hit, Ashcroft has changed his tune a little.
Instead, he’s backed away from ever attributing it to one meaning, insisting that since the song belongs to everyone that it doesn’t matter what directly inspired it. In a 2018 interview with Songfacts, he doubled down on this, saying that “What I’ve found with lyrics is sometimes people’s own interpretations are on another level to mine, certainly with things like, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’.” If I underline with a big marker pen, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ equals whatever, then I’m killing it for people.”
It’s clearly a song on his mind in the interview. He brings it up unprompted when asked about the nature of fame as an example of a song he’s spent a lot of time singing. He speaks about how singing the song today is not the same thing as singing it in 1997. As he puts it, “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 that’s why Richard Ashcroft is so keen to leave the so-called “real” meaning of the song up to the people. It sounds like he views it not as something that he made but something that, like us, he’s lived with for nearly three decades now. He’s moved on from that haunted soul chained to his addictions because he couldn’t deal with his feelings any other way, and thus, the song has moved with him. Long may it continue moving us all.
