Spiritualized (Interview)

by Jon Gardner on 12.01.10

1997 was a hell of a year for British music. ‘Blur’ by Blur and ‘Be Here Now’ by Oasis went head-to-head while the bands themselves went tooth-to-throat in the headlines. ‘OK Computer’ saw complaint-rockers Radiohead reach what many have since argued was their creative peak. ‘Urban Hymns’ by The Verve and the associated single ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ cemented the Wigan rockers’ place in history in a way they never managed to live up to. The Prodigy kicked and bit at the eardrums of the country’s youth with their powerhouse release ‘Fat Of The Land’ and the mega-singles ‘Firestarter’, ‘Breathe’ and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.

Elton John released ‘Candle In The Wind 1997’. Oh yes. Quite a year.

But the NME award for Album of the Year ignored all of the hype associated with these releases, and their reason for doing so was the simple fact that, of all of the acts releasing new albums in 1997, only one band was making music that would truthfully stand the test of time and one day pass into legend. Only one album was clearly, transparently shot through with undiluted, undeniable genius. The band was Spiritualized. The album was ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’.

If you have never heard ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ put this magazine down right now, go and buy or download the album immediately and spend the rest of the day listening to it. You will be astonished by its intricacy, battered by its beauty; it will exhilarate you and it will break your heart. It will irreversibly rock your fucking world and reorganize your top ten favourite albums of all time. It’s that good. The hairs on the back of your neck may never go down.

So, when 4Q Magazine learned that Spiritualized were not only re-issuing ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ this year as 3-disc Special Edition, but would also be playing the album live in it’s entirety at Manchester’s Apollo in December, we leapt at the chance to talk to the band’s founding father, Jason Pearce, aka J. Spaceman, and look back over the release The Independent called “a defining concoction of emotional and physical euphoria”.

It was a chance suggestion made at high altitude that brought about the notion of the re-issue.

“I did some shows with Nick Cave in Australia, the ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ shows with Barry and Deborah Hogan,” says Jason, “and they do these shows [called Don’t Look Back] where bands perform albums in their entirety. They had me up at the top of Mount Buller in Melbourne, up at altitude, at the end of a long, long night. The sun was coming up when I was asked ‘So… what would you do?’”

The seminal ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ was the only answer. The decision was made to perform the album live in as complete a way as possible. This meant doing it properly, with a huge choir, string and brass section, in order to have even a shot at capturing the essence of the album in a live show.

“Off the back of that was the suggestion to put the record out, and then I found a load of other stuff that it made sense to include with a reissue: some of the mechanics of the tracks and demos and early recordings.”

The “mechanics” Pearce refer to are just that; oddments and fragments of stripped-away tracks, A Capella lines from various songs snatched out and separated from the orchestration. A lengthy burst of strings from the title track stands alone as a thing of beauty. This is a chance to listen to not only the demos, but the process itself, laid out and dissected. We can examine Pearce’s dogged pursuit of perfection for ourselves. And he really is a perfectionist; seemingly not completely happy with the final product even yet.

“When you’re making a record, it’s obviously so important to get it right; to make something worth releasing. But time allows a different insight into that; the demos and the workings behind the tracks became the greatest of treasures. The record is established as the ‘Big Deal’, y’know? That’s what it is, but even after twelve, thirteen years or so, it still sounds like something that just… shouldn’t be heard! It’s still so far from being right…”

To hear him say it, it’s obviously not Pearce being disingenuous. Here is a man who, seemingly, will forever be in pursuit of perfection and the first to offer up the suggestion that he is far from attaining it. Most Spiritualized fans would disagree with him on this point, particularly where ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ is concerned. To many of the band’s followers, it is a favourite. Many music enthusiasts who are otherwise unfamiliar with Pearce’s work still know of ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ Add to that the NME award in ’97, a year where the competition was certainly more considerable than in most, and it’s clear that the album has a special place in a lot of hearts; even the devotees. Is it Jason’s favourite of his albums?

“Probably not!” he laughs, sounding incredulous at the notion of having a favourite of his own works at all. “I mean, it’s great that the NME voted for it as a favourite of that year, but it’s more down to luck, I think. It’s as much about the very small number of people who made that vote, y’know? So, I don’t hold much by those kind of polls, really, or even polls with bigger audiences. I think albums become special to people in a very weird and unique way. People will relate to it on their own terms.”

Relating to the album shouldn’t be difficult for anyone who has lived anything less than a blessed life. The themes of soaring love, devastating loss and the lack of control a person has over their emotional and spiritual path through life, often needing help or better yet, an escape, be it through drugs or prayer, fast living or despair, reach deep into the listener and stay there. For some there will be relief in the realisation that such deep sadness isn’t unique to them (‘Broken Heart’ and ‘Stay With Me’); others will enthusiastically scream along with the exhilarating walls of noise that define the passion for life only a risk taker could feel (‘Electricity’, ‘Come Together’). For yet others, there is calm respite in the beauty of ‘Cool Waves’ or the soothing, screeching swathe of ‘The Individual’. It’s impossible not to let such intimate, honest work in. Couple this wide-open approach with a well rounded, confident grounding in the musical styles that have influenced every Spiritualized album (blues, high energy rock, free jazz, gospel, psychedelic soundscapes and more) and the word ‘masterpiece’ starts to rear it’s head, even to journalists who are reticent to use it.

“I really wanted to make something that was really, really special,” says Pearce, “Something that covered all ground; all the kind of music that I love. People don’t necessarily follow the threads, y’know? But the threads are there. [My influences] are threaded and they make sense. In the modern game of selling music, people are too interested in fashion. Sell lots of records to lots of people! I’ve never been interested in [that]; I’m interested in the way music gets to you as an individual.”

This approach has often seen Pearce spend more time and effort on a single song than most of the Top 50 chart artists would spend on a whole album. His is not a pursuit of the dollar; rather the unending quest to capture a piece of music, outwardly, with instrumentation and song, and express it as perfectly as it would express itself, if only it could. “Great albums work like films,” he says, “They capture more than just that sense of how long it took to make in the studio. They capture that space and time, much more than that. But it’s weird, y’know, talking about this record I made 13 years ago. It’s almost as if it’s not my record any more. It means so much to other people, it’s almost as if you should be talking to them. Once it’s left me… it’s kinda gone; that’s the end of it for me. That’s why it’s so important to get it right; to make it something worth pursuing. There’s no point saying ‘Right that’s half way there, that’ll do.’ You push as far as you can.”

This attitude of course sees the needs of the music change from release to release. Over 120 musicians are credited on the 2001 album ‘Let It Come Down’. Last year saw Spiritualized play Manchester Academy with a three-person gospel choir and a five-piece rock band. It’s hard to know what you’re in for when attending a Spiritualized live show. How has he found this new idea; taking a whole album out as such a huge live show?

“These [recent shows] have been difficult, because we were just dropped straight into it, with no other way to do it. I can’t afford to take this on tour, and the thing I really love about music is taking it out on tour, where you learn real highs and how to hold onto them; the beautiful bits you carry forward into the next show. It’s kind of strange to be just dropped straight into a one-off performance. It’s been hard to get my head around that. The shows have been great, but very weird. After the show, there’s a real sense of… What do we do now? But it was phenomenal. We got everyone together before the shows, to rehearse, and once we got everyone in the room we realized you can’t really rehearse these things; it’s not about that [approach]. For me, one of the greatest things about Spiritualized is, it’s free-form, you don’t really know where it’s going to go, they don’t necessarily sound the same every time, so it was an amazing thing to do, to bring so many people into it and have them realize that they weren’t just there to read the dots; to have them understand what we’re trying to do. The girls [of the choir] were saying that they felt as if they could have sung two octaves higher than their range; they were feeling so high on stage. It felt good to get that kind of feedback from the band.”

This free-form refusal to conform to “reading the dots” is well-documented. Jason professes not to be able to write music in the traditional sense at all, and to only be able to read it “very, very slowly”. But this is unimportant to him, where the unique needs of any given piece of music are concerned.

“No, I don’t think that matters. I think what’s important is the way you play. So much is made of people’s ‘talent’; the ability to use your voice in a particular way, or playing complicated chord shapes or being really fast on a fret board… None of that is important.”

“If you try, you can get anything done, if you just allow yourself the time to get there.”

Spiritualized began recording a new album earlier this year which, according to the Spaceman, is sounding “pretty special already, which is quite rare in my case” and which should be released in 2010.

There are four more of the ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ shows left to play at the time of writing. For details of the Manchester Apollo show, contact 0844 4777677 or visit www.gigandtours.com

The re-issue of ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’ will be available in shops from November 30th.

www.spiritualized.com

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