On the 9th of March Verve released their 1st single, 'All In The Mind', followed by 'She's A Supertar' and 'Gravity Grave' (9 and 8 minutes long), too long to be considered 'commercial'.

Richard: "So many groups are totally constrained by the 3 minutes format. The attraction of this band is the abandon. People feed off a band when they know they have no boundaries. They want to see how far you will go. And we're going all that way. People don't understand there's bigger things than charts. If I can move a person emotionally and take them to another place it would mean more to me than being on Top of the Pops or seeing us in the Top Ten.

In the meantime the musical papers nicknamed the singer 'Mad Richard out of Verve', for his onstage demenour and his strange quotes:
"Most of my dreams are about flying, about going away places. I believe in a few years' time I will be able to fly.".

Then he later declared:
" When I said I was expecting to fly I was only trying to explain what we do as a band, to explain that we can do anything and we're gonna go as far as possible. I mean, if I'm called Mad Richard just because I get involved in a gig, because I lose myself, how banal and boring does it make everything else? So call me Mad Richard if you like. In these days I consider it a compliment."


At the end of 1992 Verve began recording their debut album with legendary producer John Leckie.

Leckie : "They're probably the only band I've ever approached to produce. I saw them at a gig at the Falcon and I just thought they were incredible. They had sensitivity, power, everything. So we went down to Sawmills Studios in Cornwall to do their 'A Storm In Heaven' album. We had a sort of heartfelt connection, a telepathy between us where often we didn't even had to say things, everyone's on the same wavelength. I don't think I really captured the atmosphere of their early performances , though. Richard would never know what he was singing and he would never know when the chorus would come, they would have all these different sections and they'd make the changes by the nod. A band who really blew me away."

Richard: "There was a lot of smoking and good music. We'd put Funkadelic or Neil Young or Chris Bell upstairs and we'd want the stuff we were doing in the studio downstairs to match up to them. God knows what was going on, actually some pretty strange moments. Freaking out this girl we had playing the flute, by putting the flute through a wah-wah... playing a song for an hour and 20 minutes without stopping..."

In May 1993 they released a new single, 'Blue' and in June their debut album was finally out. The same year they released another single, 'Slide Away' and toured Europe and America.