Spiritualized - Grace Under Pressure

--------------------

“Is that your first question?”
It seemed sensible enough at the time, but Jason Pierce looks troubled. His eyes widen incredulously, one eyebrow raises slightly and he lets out a gentle laugh.

Acting on information received, your correspondent has just asked Pierce why he’s given up smoking and how a life free of nicotine is treating him. “I didn’t give up – I’m just full up,” he explains. Are you just pausing? “I think so.” Can you manage not smoking? “You mean, is it difficult? No, nothing’s too difficult. I just don’t like them, I guess. I didn’t even think about it. I can’t put cigarettes down my neck at the moment. I don’t know if you’ve met me before, but I smoked to the point of absurdity – y’know, I could do 100 cigarettes in a day, easy.” Bloody hell.

Jason Pierce is a walking – ok, lounging-on-a-sofa contradiction. Forfeiting the joys of what Dennis Potter famously called “those little tubes of delight” is about as contrary to the principles of rock’n’roll as one can get – Aerosmith’s wheatgrass shakes and Keith Richards’s daily shepherd’s pie notwithstanding – yet Pierce speaks of rock’n’roll with a conviction bordering on the evangelical.

His past in dronerock pioneers Spacemen 3, and his present as frontman and chief architect of Spiritualized’s widescreen gospel-tinged epics – the latest chapter of whose remarkable trip, the decidedly noisier Amazing Grace, is our reason for meeting – is littered with possibly over-documented tales of narcotic excess and temperamental hissy-fits, but nowadays the singer prefers to sit down on stage: “I play so much better sitting down,” he explains. “Most people will be sitting down in a studio situation, it’s where you get the best performance.” Even for singing? “Maybe not for singing, but it’s more comfortable obviously! I don’t have any issue with it – it’s about the music, obviously.”

Spiritualized’s live shows have long been trumpeted as the purest way to enjoy the experience to the full. I wonder, does the sedentary Pierce ever feel the need to put on a show? “I feel the need to play with as much energy and electricity as we can possibly put across, and I can do that from a seating position 20 times better than I can if I’m to use any effort to hold myself upright. It works.”

Incidentally, the word “electricity” seems to be a recurring Pierce trope: aside from being the name of a single from 1997’s rightly lauded Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space album, his original choice of venue for today’s interview was the Shoreditch Electricity Showroom, and he tells me he picked the Electric Ballroom for Spiritualized’s recent London dates purely on the basis of the Camden institution’s name.

On reflection, such attention to detail is really quite sweet, and gives an intriguing insight into Pierce’s all-consuming, almost childlike love affair with music, and the literally boundless possibilities the best music offers the willing listener. Pierce recently collaborated with occasional co-conspirators Spring Heel Jack and legendary free jazz musicians Paul Rutherford, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler and Han Bennink, and he admits their methods have had a liberating effect on Spiritualized 2003’s approach to their craft, especially when playing live.

“It’s about pushing huge amounts of air at the audience, and feeling it coming back off the back wall, this weird electricity,” he sort-of explains (using that “e” word again, you’ll notice). “It’s way more freeform live – it never resolves, it’s always getting better, so every show builds on what we did at the last show.” So the best performance to see is the one at the end of the tour? “The last thing we do! It’s always been like a rocket ship, we’ve just got better and better.” He’ll later correct my assertion that his career is a plottable arc, arguing that “it’s not an arc, it’s a straight line, going up.”

Pierce fired his band in 2000, to their understandable surprise and annoyance, but reappeared with a new group for 2001’s Let It Come Down; having retained their services for the new album, I ask if this latest incarnation of Spiritualized feels like a band after such a relatively short time together. “Everybody was new to this when we started Let It Come Down, and it just takes a while for people to realise how free it is to make music with Spiritualized. I’m never gonna tell anybody what they should and shouldn’t be doing with their lives, or how they play or what they do, and it just takes a while for that to all settle, and for it to really start taking off – and that’s kinda what’s happening now.”

Does the band have any creative input, or are you still very much in charge, as your perfectionist reputation would have us believe? “Live, it doesn’t really require any conversation – it just happens. The songs were written for Amazing Grace, and that’s what we’re doing live at the moment.” Recent album reviews talk of a harder, more unreconstructed garage rock edge, but I think that’s been overstated. “Yeah, don’t believe anything you read! How can I respond to that? I think that’s just how journalism works – people don’t actually do a lot of their own free thinking. For a lot of music journalism, it’s not really about music anymore; it’s about people, it’s about characters and celebrity – some dumb tabloid thing.” Later, I ask him if he feels famous, and his disgust at the “what’s your favourite colour, what’s your inside leg, what d’you think about the war?” cult of celebrity is nigh-on palpable.

“I miss people like Lester Bangs who say things like, ‘I would sell my mother to own this record’, and the first thing you want to do is own the record.” Do you even read your reviews? “If they’re stuck in front of me I’ll read them. I know what I say, I know what I’m trying to put across, and I don’t need to read people getting it…slightly off the mark.” However, it seems the current music press fixation with all things grimy and AC/DC-flavoured hasn’t passed Pierce by entirely. “I think this garage rock thing is exciting. The thing about garage music is that it comes with absolutely no talent – it’s basically all attitude, you can do this, anybody can do this, just say how it is from where you stand.”

Then Pierce’s keen ear for the shock of the new takes over his musing. “But in saying that, I’m not as excited about that as I am about Dizzee Rascal, which really does sound like it’s dropped out of another planet. You can draw a line: it sounds a bit like Red Rat, a little bit like Beenie Man; I think it sounds a lot like Devo, and a lot like Laurie Anderson, but I know those records are nothing to do with where he sits.” Later, he’ll neatly bring the two poles of East London hip-hop and Rugby-sourced spacerock together, enthusing that “some of the greatest moments in rock’n’roll are the mistakes, or when people get it so hopelessly wrong – like Dizzee Rascal, like…Elvis, like anybody where you kinda see what they’re trying to do, but they get it so wrong – that’s what makes excitement, that’s what makes truly great moments.”

“I think you have to go forward, that’s the key. Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t sit in Sun Studios at the piano and say, ‘Well, this is about as good as it gets for me’, he was like, ‘Where’s my fucking car? Where’s the dancing girls? Let’s go! Let’s get on the aeroplane!’” Surely when you reach the point where you can say, 'Right, I’ve done all I want to do', you may as well stop? “That’s kinda how I feel. The only pressure is from myself. I don’t want to be, if I push this button I’m gonna get this result – I want to say, if I push this button, I don’t know what the hell is gonna happen.”

The new album is a case in point. Pierce insisted that he “record the song on the first day the band were given the song. What you’re hearing on Amazing Grace is a drummer playing to a bassline and words and guitars that he’s never heard in his life before. Even on playback [in the studio] it was like hearing The Magic Band for the first time, or Miles – nobody knew any of the parts, so you’re kind of going, ‘Jesus, is that us playing?’”

Pierce momentarily loses his thread, distracted by Sigur Ros’s Ágætis Byrjun
playing on the jukebox (“That’s nice, isn’t it? It’s a really lovely loop…”). But then he’s back. “Just when you think you’ve got it all down, and you think you’ve heard everything that’s ever gonna move you, somebody’ll drop a Jimmy Scott record in your lap, or some weird Ray Charles demo you’ve never heard.” The man’s enthusiasm is unquenchable.

I ask Pierce if he thinks he’ll ever fall out of love with music. “I doubt it. I don’t think you can cover it in a lifetime.” Do you ever wake up thinking, I know I’m gonna die having not heard all the music I want to hear? “No,” he smiles sympathetically, “I’m not that bad. It ain’t a race…”