Richard Ashcroft

If you start shaping everything you do trying to be in step with whatever is going on in the world, you're often out of step by the time people hear it. It's a bit like fashion.

I lost a good friend a few years ago, and it happened quite suddenly. Any event like that leaves you with questions. Would a phone call have made a difference? Did the person know that you were there for them?

I'm totally up for experimental music. I'm up for music that they don't play on the radio, and I take in all of it. But my thing, the thing that comes most natural to me, is making the stuff that has a melody; it has a soul to it, yet it's head music.

We'd lie on the floor, turn the lights out, put two speakers on either side of our ears, and try to blow our minds with music. I know that I want to make a record that does that yet a record that, if it was played on the radio at twelve in the afternoon, the guy making the wall - the guy cleaning the motorway - he's got a melody to hang on.

Of course, fatherhood fundamentally changes a lot of your life, but it enriches you, too.

My thing is, I've yet to meet a well person. The spectrum is unbelievably wide, the triggers for depression and manic depression.

Life's about ego. So for someone to talk about my ego, as they are writing their piece about my ego, I'm wondering what they're doing with their ego?

I want to entertain and inspire.

As a musician, I don't wanna put out political soundbites.

I've got a talent, and people enjoy my songs, people love my songs; why stop?

If you judge people by what they've done in the past, you're wrong.

I strongly disagree that you can't have a happy family life and a child as well as rock n' roll.

I'm never happy with any record, never truly been happy.

Obviously, aging has a certain amount of mellowing process because there's certain things you realise you were doing when you were younger that were plain ridiculous, stupid.

There's a track called 'Why Not Nothing' about how the world's turning so conservative and so religious at the same time. I think it's up to the songwriters to give another side to the coin, and my music does that.

Just because something's kinda indie and whatever and only a few people know it, it doesn't give it more authenticity over Rihanna's 'Work' work work.

Hearing 'This Is How It Feels' on the radio was an amazing feeling, like starting again. But I believe that, in the end, my name will be bigger then the Verve because of all those great tunes and the power of what I stand for.

I've had tons of incredible conversations with people who say they got married or buried relatives to my songs.

I don't believe in a new-age movement; I'm not a hippy.

If this world hasn't made you semi-mad, then you ain't living in it.