London Calling

RICHARD ASHCROFT'S ALONE WITH EVERYBODY

With a searing combo of beauty and belief, Richard Ashcroft, the former leader of the Verve and the most glorious rock star in decades, delivers the goods on his resplendent solo album, Alone with Everybody, out this month.

After their 1997 hit Urban Hymns, the Verve broke up, but Ashcroft, 28, never doubted he would carry on. He refused to "conform to people's ideas that I would come up with an acoustic guitar and sing a few ditties," he says. "I had learned so much during the making of Urban Hymns that people may be surprised this album sounds bigger than the last." The last, of course, included the mega-hit "Bitter Sweet Symphony," with its Rolling Stones sample and ensuing legal mess. The ubiquitous video of a sneering Ashcroft, stalking down a street in London's East End literally shoving people out of his way, ensured his status as a rebel idol.

Besotted with his wife of five years, Spiritualized's former keyboardist Kate Radley, and their infant son, Ashcroft is both fearful and confident about getting his music across. "Making music you believe in that has soul, and taking it to the level Kurt Cobain took it, is walking a tightrope," he says. "But there's a part of me that loves that we got in there; you give people an alternative."

Alternatives are important to this native of Wigan, a small town in northern England, who listened to the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Funkadelic, and the Stooges rather than accompany his contemporaries to raves. "I felt I was given a key to a different place. When I was 15, my friends and I would ring up America; we'd make up a number, hear a voice on the other side of the ocean, and think, 'they're there, they EXIST.'"LISA ROBINSON