A loop. That is where it starts. Youth, the producer, builds the whole record around a few bars of strings lifted from a 1966 orchestral recording, an instrumental reading of a Rolling Stones song arranged for an album most people never heard. The Verve take that fragment and bury it under something far bigger: a new string arrangement by Wil Malone, 24 players, a swell that keeps rising and never quite lands. Recorded at Olympic Studios in London in 1997, the band fresh off a breakup they barely survived. They had split in 1995. Nick McCabe, the guitarist, came back in just before these sessions, and the tension in the room was real. None of it shows in the single. What shows is confidence: Richard Ashcroft, coat on, walking straight down Hoxton Street in the video, shouldering past strangers without breaking stride, a man who knows exactly what he has made.

And he had made a hit. Number two in the UK. Over a million copies sold. The song that turned Urban Hymns from a comeback into the biggest album of their lives. By every measure that a band dreams about, this was the one.

Here is the part nobody warns you about. Virgin had cleared the recording. They had not cleared the composition. That distinction, the gap between owning a master and owning a song, is where the whole story turns. Allen Klein’s ABKCO came calling, the publisher that controlled the Stones’ early catalogue, and they argued the sample did more than borrow. They argued it took. What followed is one of the strangest royalty stories in pop, and the numbers attached to it do not sound real until you see them written down. Ashcroft would later stand at the Ivor Novello Awards and tell the room how it ended. That ending took 22 years to arrive.

So you have a song built on a loop of a song, a fortune that went to the wrong names, and a man walking down a London street like he owns it, knowing, even then, that on paper he did not. Press play. Listen to how sure it sounds. Then surface what it cost him.