The Wacky Dick Experience

It’s Glastonbury 2008, and after a gazillion year hiatus or something, The Verve, a down-to-earth troupe of everymen, are on stage, playing the coveted Sunday night slot.

Well, not all of The Verve.

The elongated intro of squalling feedback and extraneous noise is hiding the fact that Simon Jones, Nick McCabe and Peter Salisbury are the only band members on stage. Richard Ashcroft, the mercurial raisin-for-a-head frontman, is still en route, riding into Glasto-land astride his steed, a blacked-out Range Rover.

Of course, out front, nobody knows this. They think he’s waiting side-stage having a fag.

As the crowd start to wonder what the hell is going on, Dick finally emerges, and wow, what a crazy cat he is! When he’s not on his haunches hiding behind a monitor, crouched like a mid-turd tramp, he’s thumping his chest and blurting out a wacky funtime Special Dicky message! Huzzah kids! Huzzah!

It’s like those special madcap videos you see on Al Jazeera innit? They’re the rantings of madmen too.

By the way, I was the guy at the back with my hand up saying “Er, I actually quite like my job”.

Anyway, all of this wacky Dicky stuff is nothing compared to his latest video.

Under the pseudonym RPA – they’re his initials, but they could easily be an acronym for some medication or other – Ricky’s teamed up with the United Nations Of Sound and made this blathering hodgepodge of weirdness:
You’ll have to click here to watch it (embedding disabled by request, naturally), but it suffices to say that it’s a crazy zig-zag of random Facebook photos, exclusive footage of RPA packing a suitcase, and jibbering foreigners, augmented by the central narrative of a man in a green Adidas tracksuit kicking a football around a park.

Still, ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ was good, wasn’t it?