That seems like the hardest part of revealing as much of your pain, your past, your problems, as you have in your songs. You’re the one who has to climb up on that stage and deliver those songs, sing about your troubles, and only you know what they’re really about. Your audience just makes up some story in their mind. Maybe they can relate, maybe they can’t.
But you see, that’s the point—sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you find that your songs are much bigger than they were at the time that you wrote them. You almost have to grow into them, you know? I’m sure—maybe this is just because I’m looking down at Central Park, so I don’t want to give off airs like I’ve got some messianic complex or something. [Laughs] I’m not losing it man, I’m not out on the Internet thinking the Masons run the world or anything. But it’s that kind of thing, you know? The new album, what’s quite bizarre, I released [the single] “Break The Night With Colour” and I was getting these reports back in England. The rock stations are playing, the alternative stations are playing it, the standards are playing it, the biggest stations in the country are playing it, and the reason that America’s not playing it at the moment is that I’ve no longer got a trade name, man. We’re so addicted to labels and advertising, so bombarded with it. I sold two million albums in America, seven million albums around the world [with Urban Hymns], and that record was two, three weeks away from being my first solo album with the name “Urban Hymns, Richard Ashcroft,” underneath it. When you go to the tape store at EMI, the section is marked “Richard Ashcroft” and there’s the Urban Hymns album there. Now can you imagine carrying that weight, after that? People seeing the easy option, seeing me as, in Darwinian terms, this limpid elf. “Now he’s lost his trade name, it’s time to bring him down.” And I will not be brought down. I won’t, when that is the most beautiful thing to me: give me a challenge, bring on the next opponent. If I was a boxer, I wouldn’t duck anyone. I’d want to fight the best in the world.

Well, certainly after last year’s Live 8 appearance with Chris Martin and Coldplay—where he described “Bittersweet Symphony” as “the best song ever written, sung by the best singer in the world”—that would give you the confidence you’d need to carry on. That was one of the highlights of the show for me, and maybe, a sense for you that the things you’ve been singing about for all these years might still resonate with people.
You’re absolutely right, mate. It’s a cliché, but the greatest shows to me have always been those where you’re not getting paid in actual dough but people who’ve been working all week are going somewhere. That was different, that was about people being slaves to debt—they haven’t even got the money to be slaves to money. To have a lyric from a tune written seven years ago resonate so much with my people from my country, well … when I was in New York the other night, I got to meet Jay-Z, and to know that a white boy from Wigan can turn on the brothers from New York [laughs], all those things combined, is a huge thing. Ultimately, 15,000 years ago, that’s where we all came from, that’s how we all started: Africa, that’s where we all got it on. Some people walked from Africa to other places, some people were brought over on ships and made to be slaves. And it worked its way all the way to the ’60s, when some of the greatest musicians this country has ever produced were made to wait outside of cafes and restaurants. They couldn’t eat there but played some of the most beautiful soul, blues and gospel music the world’s ever heard. The Beatles, the Stones, they heard that message and were feeling pain, too. They were feeling a bit like how we’re all feeling now; a bit repressed. You can’t talk anymore, freedom of speech has been taken away. We need Lenny Bruce, we need Bill Hicks, and they’ve all been taken away. They’re gone. We need John Lennon and he’s gone. We need Martin Luther King and he’s gone. We need Malcolm X and he’s gone. We need JFK and he’s gone, too. All these guys. What they left is a fucking message: Love is the answer, and that’s it.

It’s funny how sometimes it takes an Englishman to point out what a shameful history we have in this country when it comes to race relations. We’re nowhere near as far along as we should be, especially given all the lives that were sacrificed in the name of progress.
Yeah, but you also have this incredible energy, when people were released from captivity, they moved out quickly. Sam Cooke was the first guy to bring church music to popularity, and then Cooke was castigated in his own church because they thought he’d taken the music to the devil. But these guys walked the line; it wasn’t about taking music to the devil, it was about showing that a so-called second-class citizen could be king of the world. That’s a piece of art that will live forever, and that pain, it’s something we should all share, but we should also embrace all the great art that’s come from that pain. All the books, all the great American writers, all the people who saw it so clearly and lived amongst it but had to live through it. Who saw it all get lost in the ’70s … the arrogance of the ’80s … which led us to the ’90s, and what I was writing about then was that a bunch of people all thought we were living in Rome and the bubble was never going to burst, you know? And obviously on 9/11, for a lot of people collectively on TV, the bubble did burst. But the bubble burst for me, in that way, a long time ago. Over the past five to six years, I’ve spent that time learning how to rebuild my life again. I don’t mean to be narcissistic about it—I wasn’t in New York, I don’t live there, I didn’t lose anyone—but the world really lost a bit of freedom that day, and the decisions that were made in the days that followed were going to change the lives of our generation, or our children’s lives, forever. I knew that then. After that day, things were going to change so profoundly and I was looking at a new century with a one-year-old child and a beautiful wife, sitting outside with a table all laid out for my 30th birthday, and someone said that my father-in-law had rung, and put me on with him, and he said, “Put the TV on, Richard.” You know what I mean? I hope you get enough space to print every word of this. But please don’t edit my rants, though. [Laughs] They only make sense this way. In England, in the NME, that’s what they do to me, they take snippets out, turn it around and say, “I feel like Jesus Christ.” And believe me, I don’t feel like Jesus Christ. I haven’t got some messianic complex, maybe when I was 19 I had a slight touch of narcissism, but that’s because I lost my father when I was 11 and needed some hole to be filled. Now, I don’t need that hole to be filled.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised, after all the legal hassles associated with the sampling of the Stones’ “The Last Time” on “Bittersweet Symphony,” to see you sampling Curtis Mayfield on this album (“Music Is Power”). What made you confident enough to try it again?
I just made damn sure that we got the publishing all sorted out this time! It’s a 50/50 split, whereas “Bittersweet Symphony” I don’t earn a penny from, and never have. When “Symphony” was played on a Nike ad—which I’d never agreed to, if I’d had any power over that decision, which I didn’t—we gave the $500,000 to a homeless shelter in London, and I asked (Stones manager) Allen Klein and his organization to do the same, which they didn’t. But that’s their decision. They’ll have to live with the vibrations from that decision, and I can live with mine. What I’m after is something intangible; I’ve already sold seven million albums, I’ve done whatever, I can shake Jay-Z’s hand and know I’ve created a piece of music that can rank up there with anything. It’s all right, man; I’ve got a beautiful wife, two beautiful children, and I’ve managed through music to be able to buy a property where I can take my child, go sit down by a stream, and maybe build a hut. [Laughs]

How hard is it to be a rock n’ roll dad? (Ashcroft has two sons, Sonny and Cassius, from his marriage to former Spiritualized keyboardist Kate Radley.)
Well, it’s an incredible responsibility and can be overwhelming sometimes. For me, that’s why I’m taking it back to things like “Check The Meaning” from Human Conditions. I listened to that song for the first time since I’d recorded it just last night. And I felt good, I was like, “Yeah, I’m not crazy, I was right”—not right, I don’t need to be Nostradamus, but I was connected to what was going on at a time when people wanted something else. (At the time of the release of) Human Conditions, everyone was pretending they were all at CBGB’s in 1977 or something.

Well, of course, that’s even more ironic considering that CBGB is about to be no more.
Is that true? That kind of shit happens all over the world, mate. You know what that’s called, right? The Vegas Effect! It’s when people don’t realize what they have. I remember watching them blow up one of the oldest casinos in Vegas, live on TV. How Vegas is that? Sinatra and the boys used to play there, some of the biggest gangsters the world’s ever seen probably all played the tables there, and someone’s got the bright idea that we should blow it up to make something newer.

You’re from Wigan (a suburb of Manchester). What’s it like to have the Wigan Lattics in the (English soccer) Premiership now?
Well, it’s fantastic, but we were always a rugby town, which is why I supported Manchester United when I was a young boy. Man U’s grounds are only a 30-minute drive away from where I was born; Liverpool’s only a 30-minute drive, too. That’s the beauty of where I lived. I lived right in the middle, the axis between Liverpool and Manchester. It’s very difficult to describe that sort of tribal difference to anybody who hasn’t experienced it. If you went to see a Manchester United/Liverpool match, then maybe you’d probably understand. There’s a deep understanding between the two cities on a musical level. When the Stone Roses (from Manchester) went to see the La’s (from Liverpool) at Weston Park in Liverpool, that’s when they had their moment. The La’s were going a long time before the Roses. The Stone Roses’ first album wouldn’t have even come about if a group of lads from Manchester didn’t know a group of boys from Liverpool and hadn’t been invited to come see this band who were influenced by … well, that guy, Lee Mathers, he was connected to something pretty powerful when he wrote those songs.

Do you feel some sort of conflict—torn between pulling for Wigan and Man U?
Well, I used to play for Wigan’s youth team when I was 11 years old!

Aren’t you playing in a charity football match? I thought I saw something about that—England vs. Germany, former athletes and some musicians, too?
We’ll have to see what kind of physical condition my body’s in for that situation. I’d love to stand up, sing the national anthem, maybe run on the pitch for the last couple of minutes or something. [Laughs]