Richard Ashcroft had written Bitter Sweet Symphony around a sample of Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral version of the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, and the first demo I heard of it was Richard just singing over the sample loop into a cassette.

It was very lo-fi but I immediately thought, ‘That should be an iconic, classic record’.

When I was first asked to produce, The Verve had split up and it was actually supposed to be a Richard Ashcroft solo ...