We\u2019re lucky J Spaceman still floats among us. Not just because the image of him wandering the Mojave desert wastes in a space-suit like a forlorn Major Tom in the recent video for I\u2019m Your Man suggests he\u2019s aching to get the hell off this planet as soon as his Musk Mars Mission ticket arrives. Not just because he\u2019s relatively fresh from a course of experimental chemotherapy to tackle liver disease from hepatitis C (\u201cI managed to get myself on a medical trial and I was pretty confident that it was gonna work, and it did\u201d). And not just because, back in 2005, a bout of double-pneumonia filled his lungs with liquid, plunged his weight to six-and-a-half stone, stopped his heart twice and had his alt.rock peers arriving to pay their respects.
\n\u201cBobby [Gillespie] came down to see me,\u201d Jason Pierce recalls, a little life-worn
\nbut fundamentally healthy, twisting an e-cigarette in his fingers in a beer garden in Shoreditch, London. \u201cHe said he walked out of there saying he knew I wasn\u2019t going to go because my\u00a0handshake was functioning too well. Everybody else in that room died \u2013 that was the biggest shock. You always see in movies, people are in those wards on their own, but you\u2019re not, you\u2019re sharing it with everybody else who\u2019s in that situation. I remember thinking, \u2018Somebody\u2019s got to get out of here, otherwise people are going to stop believing in this hospital.\u2019 The\u00a0tiny bit
\nof lung that lives above your collar bone was active in\u00a0both my lungs, so I was breathing
\na breath a second for weeks\u2026 My girlfriend saw bereavement counsellors \u2013 they thought it was all over. But it didn\u2019t change me like I\u2019d read that people are changed from these things. I felt like I was the same disappointing person I was when I went in.\u201d
\nNo, we\u2019re lucky to have Pierce \u2013 master architect of stately space-rock, grandiose spirituals, noise and sweeping Golden Age balladry \u2013 because the genius behind such otherworldly masterpieces as Lazer Guided Melodies (1992), Pure Phase (1995), Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (1997) and Let It Come Down (2001) is struggling to see a place for himself in the panoramic vista of musical legends. And seriously considering hanging up his zero-gravity moonboots for good.
\n\u201cWhen I was younger I could play all
\nthe music that I love and it would inspire me, it\u2019d show me different ways to go,\u201d Pierce explains, having previously suggested that 2012\u2019s seventh Spiritualized album Sweet Heart Sweet Light might be his last. \u201cNow when I play the same records or other records that I love, I\u2019m filled with this feeling of, \u2018What\u2019s the point? Everything\u2019s been said so beautifully and eloquently in the past, what\u2019s the point of me contributing to that?\u2019 With that in mind I feel this massive weight of responsibility, that if I\u2019m going to do something, it has to be as beautiful, or it has to come from a different angle. I slip into the same obsession about that, that it shouldn\u2019t be entered into lightly, that it has to be this huge undertaking.\u201d
\nHe fiddles at the sleeve of his jacket.
\n\u201cI love music,\u201d he says. \u201cI love what music does to people. I love everything about it. But the action of making an album ruins all the enjoyment for me. It\u2019s wilfully going into this place where I almost don\u2019t recognise myself or, if I do recognise myself, it\u2019s someone I don\u2019t want to be.\u201d
\nFacing the abyss once more at the end of the Sweet Heart Sweet Light cycle, Pierce did what any struggling artist with a song called The Twelve Steps in their repertoire would do: he sought help from higher powers.
\n\u201cI felt that if I could just get somebody
\nto help me I wouldn\u2019t fall into all the pitfalls and traps and holes that I always fall into,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I could find a way to get help with that I could attempt it.\u201d
\nHe reached out to Bowie producer Tony Visconti and to The Velvet Underground\u2019s John Cale, but neither conversation came to anything. \u201cBecause none of that worked out
\nI then found myself with a fully-realised concept of making another album but without that guidance and help I wanted. So I ended up holing up and almost protecting it being infected by anything, saying, \u2018I\u2019m on this alone again.\u2019\u201d
\nHaving made early attempts at improvisational free jazz and \u201ca number of other experiments\u201d, by the time he started eighth album, And Nothing Hurt, in earnest, he\u2019d run out of money.
\n\u201cI\u2019m not very good at handling my own money anyway, so the idea of saying, \u2018Okay, keep some by to do a string quartet at the end,\u2019 it\u2019s never gonna happen\u2026 I\u2019ve only just got a hold on that now because I owed so much money and I didn\u2019t want the band to go down because of that. It seemed like a really tragic end to something so beautiful.\u201d
\nHis solution sounds like a job for the space-rock Ethan Hunt. Besides the drums, he would set about making an album entirely on a laptop in his bedroom, even going so far as to strum along to classical records to find the right string chord to sample and piece together into an orchestral backing.
\nThe finished product is every bit as monolithic, expansive and staggering as Spiritualized records tend to be, marking a quantum leap in home recording, in which all limits evaporate and everything is proved possible. But Pierce is adamant that it was the mental torment of making the record, rather than the technical restraints, that drove him crazy.
\n\u201cMy aim wasn\u2019t to con the listener by going, \u2018Hey, where do you think this was recorded?\u2019\u201d he says. He does, however, have
\na few laptop hang-ups. \u201cI felt like I used
\nan enormous amount of my talent just making it sound adequate, where I wanted to use my talent to make it sound extraordinary.\u201d
\nHe sighs. \u201cSo it was always hung with this vague feeling of disappointment: \u2018Why am I doing this, what am I saving this from?\u2019 I still feel like there\u2019s somebody out there, if they\u2019ve got enough patience and charity, they will help me and I can find this thing really easy to do again.\u201d
\nMusic certainly came easier for the teenage Pierce. Brought up on his mother\u2019s Seekers records, the very first record he bought, mesmerising him from the rack of albums in Rugby\u2019s Boots, was The Stooges\u2019 Raw Power.
\n\u201cI hadn\u2019t heard about Iggy,\u201d he admits. \u201cOn the front of the rack was Iggy in his silver pants and the flip has the wild-cat picture and the weird image of him looking into the mirror with the details on it, and I was infatuated, absolutely sold on whatever this was. When I got it home I immediately felt that I\u2019d found something precious, that was mine, totally mine.\u201d
\nAt Rugby Art College and on the local band circuit, Pierce fell in with a crew of like-minded sonic adventurers \u2013 Pete Kember, Pete Bain, Natty Brooker \u2013 who shared their discoveries of The Cramps, Suicide, The Gun Club, Tav Falco, T Rex, The Troggs, The Monks, Captain Beefheart, Nuggets and The Staple Singers. They\u2019d make road trips to London, Manchester, Birmingham and Coventry to see Big Star\u2019s Alex Chilton. Pierce\u2019s tastes worked their way backwards, following the threads from The Stooges
\nand MC5 to Sun Ra, psychedelia and Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
\nWhen Pierce and Kember (aka Sonic Boom) formed Spacemen 3 in 1982, they revelled in their rawness.
\n\u201cWe were borne of inability,\u201d Pierce says. \u201cNobody wanted to be better on guitar, nobody wanted to learn how to play faster riffs. Once you strap an electric guitar over your neck they almost play themselves, they start squealing before you even hit the thing, and when you make this chord, if you hit that chord long enough, it becomes the most important thing in the world. I still maintain that\u2019s the way you play great guitar. It\u2019s wild already and all you\u2019ve got to do is hold that down. Once we started making music, it was really effortless. It wasn\u2019t laboured over, it felt like this was something else.\u201d
\nSetting themselves apart from supposed peers such as The Jesus And Mary Chain and The Cocteau Twins by dint of their disinterest in anything contemporary, Spacemen 3 produced a brace of hypnotic modern psychedelic albums (1987\u2019s The Perfect Prescription, 1989\u2019s Playing With Fire) and played anti-gigs: either sitting down or with their backs to half-empty venues, all 20-minute drones based on single chords and the band lost amid kaleidoscopic backdrops.
\n\u201cPeople wrote about our band because they loved it or they found it,\u201d Pierce says. \u201cWhen Spacemen played in Coventry we played to one person, and we knew that person. So being a figurehead of something… we recognised that we had something really special, that there was something we\u2019d tapped into that was really unique, but nobody was interested. Just as things started to pick up \u2013 we were first on the bill at Reading, or second \u2013 that\u2019s when the band stopped. It\u2019s almost like nobody saw it.\u201d
\nThe band stopped because Kember and Pierce had become bitterly estranged over songwriting credits, studio practices and Pierce\u2019s relationship with Kate Radley, which Kember felt was impacting on Pierce\u2019s band work. Meetings would erupt into violent arguments, and they\u2019d travel to gigs and record separately; such was their hostility that, for their final album, Recurring (1991), Kember and Pierce took one side each.
\n\u201cWe just stopped getting on,\u201d Pierce reflects. \u201cWhen you argue about things it just becomes dysfunctional. I was having to argue to try and do different things in the studio. Pete was very much of the mindset that we shouldn\u2019t do anything in the studio that you couldn\u2019t perform as a four-piece band. By that time, I was listening to Brian Wilson and I knew how The Beatles had put themselves in a position where they couldn\u2019t play their studio recordings live. It never bothered me, and I found myself getting into more arguments about what we should be doing
\nin the studio rather than just doing it and seeing. I still loathe that thing where people will discuss an idea rather than just try it,
\nand if it sounds great it sounds great. I see bands now that hang together because there\u2019s a financial incentive, or they\u2019ve been offered one to re-form. I never want to do that.
\nI loathe the business of music, I\u2019ve never made music for a financial gain.\u201d
\nWhen Spacemen 3 split, they walked away from a multi-million-dollar five-album deal with a major US label (\u201cWe walked away with some of that money, which made it palatable\u201d), and Pierce recently turned down \u00a32 million to re-form the band.
\n\u201cRock\u2019n\u2019roll is the only art form where
\nI can quite seriously be asked repeatedly why I don\u2019t want to do what I was doing when
\nI was 20 years old,\u201d he vents. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t ask a painter, \u2018Can you do something more like you did when you were in your teens?\u2019\u201d
\nWith Spacemen 3 disintegrating around him, Pierce reluctantly launched his Spiritualized escape pod in 1991.
\n\u201cI didn\u2019t want to,\u201d he reveals. \u201cI\u2019m not confident. It was so easy in that band because Pete had every bit of confidence I lack. It wasn\u2019t an easy thing to do. [But] it was an absolute dream scenario for me, because now
\nI get to try stuff and nobody\u2019s questioning it with, \u2018This is going to be impossible.\u2019 Let\u2019s make it as impossible as we can and then try to scale that when we get there.\u201d
\nVindication was swift. Spiritualized\u2019s phase-washed debut album Lazer Guided Melodies, merging ambient electronica drawn from Laurie Anderson and Kraftwerk with Pierce\u2019s hallucinatory space-rock, was lauded as an instant classic, an album drifting in a universe all its own.
\n\u201cWhich is nice, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Pierce grins.
\n\u201cIt didn\u2019t sound like anyone else\u2019s record.
\nIt raised the bar, and when you do that you think, \u2018Where can you go?\u2019 Throughout the whole of Spiritualized there\u2019s been this attempt to continually raise the bar.\u201d
\nIndeed, the celebrated, quasi-symphonic Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space was such an achievement that Pierce feels it overshadows equally worthy albums, such as Pure Phase and 2001\u2019s opulent orchestral opus Let It Come Down. In fact, he is keen to emphasise that its prominence in his canon is largely down to marketing.
\nMuch was made circa Ladies And Gentlemen\u2026, and its damaged, melancholy tone, of Kate Radley leaving Pierce for The Verve\u2019s Richard Ashcroft. Considering the acclaimed status of the record, and the family life he\u2019s enjoyed since, does he look back at the split as a positive?
\n\u201cYeah,\u201d he ventures, guardedly,
\n\u201cbut I\u2019ve got a relative story. I saw Kris Kristofferson play on his birthday about three weeks ago. He\u2019s singing all these songs and the whole audience \u2013 there must\u2019ve been 2,500 people \u2013 are singing every word back to him. I realised those songs didn\u2019t belong to Kris Kristofferson, they belonged to the audience. Everybody in that audience had fallen in and out of love to those songs. They become part of your life and, more importantly than that, they become part of your personality, so every time you fall in love, you have these twinkles of Patsy Kline and Little Jimmy Scott or all the things that make up love in a musical way for you.\u201d
\nWhen I tell Pierce that Soul On Fire from 2008\u2019s Songs In A&E was the first dance at my wedding, he\u2019s visibly affected.
\n\u201cWonderful. Brilliant. Amazing. Thank you. That\u2019s really moved me, that has,\u201d he says, something in his eye. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing that songs become part of people\u2019s lives in a really special way.\u201d
\nFull-album extravaganzas at London\u2019s Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican, not to mention prestigious venues nationwide and internationally. Composing scores for art installations. Collaborating with free jazz groups and Yoko Ono. Ladies And Gentlemen\u2026 elevated Spiritualized to a position above indie rock, brushing high art. Pierce, however, remembers barely changing at all.
\nLet It Come Down, though, seemed to be Pierce\u2019s rehab album \u2013 or rather, a celebration of failing to clean up \u2013 with its songs about diving off the wagon and 12-step techniques, after which there was a distinct tapering off
\nof Pierce\u2019s lyrical drug references. Had he left the hedonistic life behind?
\n\u201cNo, not really,\u201d he replies, revealingly. \u201cWhen I was making Let It Come Down I was being told by my girlfriend that if I didn\u2019t do something about falling out of bed every single night, she would kick me out. My way of dealing with that was I went and bought a mattress that would catch my fall and stop me getting beaten up every time I fell out. I had a car that I left at Abbey Road \u2013 I forgot about it. I left it at Abbey Road from the recording
\nof that album for four years because I just wasn\u2019t in a fit state to get it home. I thought, in the end, it would become part of the graffiti of the Abbey Road wall. I lost another one later at the Strongroom [London studio] under the same conditions. I just wasn\u2019t ever fit enough to get them.\u201d
\nOver the course of Amazing Grace (2003), Songs In A&E and Sweet Heart Sweet Light, Pierce\u2019s lyrical concerns broadened, exploring mortality and morality, erratic romances, insecurity, revenge and redemption. It\u2019s a journey that culminates with And Nothing Hurt. It\u2019s his best, and most consistent, set of retro-futurist epics since Let It Come Down, and has a euphoric sense of the freedoms and inconsistencies of growing old, from the carefree, country-flecked new single, Here It Comes (The Road) Let\u2019s Go, to the fireside hug of Let\u2019s Dance and the idyllic ode to fading love, A Perfect Miracle, which is essentially Rodgers And Hammerstein We Are Floating In Space.
\n\u201cA kind of nostalgia, but with no regrets,\u201d is how Pierce describes it. \u201cI wanted to make a record that befitted my age.\u201d And yet dare to emphasise Pierce\u2019s significance \u2013 his status as a visionary godfather of avant-rock to rank alongside Kevin Shields, Wayne Coyne and Bobby Gillespie \u2013 and his old fears and insecurities kick back in.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t think I should be having this conversation, because it sounds sort of egotistical,\u201d he winces. \u201cWhen I play the stuff that I love, that really makes me feel like I should be trying to do stuff, it\u2019s always people that I\u2019ve got too much regard for, like Sam Cooke. It\u2019s so far out of my realm, his voice is unbelievable. I\u2019d like to sit alongside the stuff that I love, but that\u2019s almost impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spiritualized\u2019s And Nothing Hurt is out
\nnow on Bella Union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019re lucky J Spaceman still floats among us. Not just because the image of him wandering the Mojave desert wastes in a space-suit like a forlorn Major Tom in the recent video for I\u2019m Your Man suggests he\u2019s aching to get the hell off this planet as soon as his Musk Mars Mission ticket arrives. Not just because he\u2019s relatively fresh from a c\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9950,"featured_media":195028,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-195027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n