Hey, Mr. Spaceman

Spiritualized’s career arc might perfectly match a graph of one of their famously meandering spacerock arias. It begins with a drone inherited from Spacemen 3, becomes a pulse of light around about Lazer-Guided Melodies and Pure Phase, hits wormholes and whirlpools between the twin masterpieces Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and Live At The Royal Albert Hall, then subsides into passages of near calm before building to yet another crescendo on the new record Let It Come Down. A printout of the Irish album charts at the end of September could’ve confounded even the band’s long-time devotees: Spiritualized at number one? Are we all lucid dreaming?

As it transpires, Jason Pierce is more lucid than dreamer. Sucking on a Marlboro Light (“the first course,” he says, before getting around to the tea and toast delivered by room service), casually dressed and soft-spoken but very much all there, the bandleader expresses satisfaction that his marriage to the BMG machine seems to be working out.

Fair enough: Let It Come Down deserves its place on the top spot. Although the tonal tapestries of the record are as elaborate as anything in the Spiritualized back catalogue, the songwriting benefits from a new concision. Tunes like ‘Do It All Over Again’ and ‘Out Of Sight’ channel the extravagances of yore into immaculately realised melodies that bring to mind Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee and Burt Bacharach as much as Ornette Coleman or the Velvets. The closest thing to the five-mile brainstorms of those legendary 1997 shows in the CN Tower in Toronto and Carnegie Hall is the ten-minute ‘Won’t Get To Heaven (The State I’m In)’, and even that’s no ‘Cop Shoot Cop’.

This is a necessity as much as a luxury. Three key members of the touring ensemble departed under rather acrimonious circumstances after the last tour, meaning the near telepathic rapport of that line-up couldn’t be carried over into the new studio sessions. There would be no attempts to outdo the cosmic firework displays of the live album.

“That live record is a record of what we were doing at that time, studio records have got to push more boundaries,” Pierce declares. “But it’s kind of weird because that live show wasn’t necessarily the peak of the live shows we were doing at that point. It’s a bit like the CN Tower and all those kinds of shows, the mythology of it goes further than the actual reality of it.”

As it turns out, this is a pretty typical quote from a guy only too happy to debunk myths of every kind: myths about himself, his band, and the process of creating and performing music.

So, playing devil’s advocate, how about this one: Spiritualized are rambling avant garde musos, Wire fodder, Pink Floyd without the love handles . . .

“If you want to be perceived as avant garde or off kilter you only need to go slightly left of centre,” Pierce maintains, “and people will think, ‘This is so strange, what’s going on?’ The kind of stuff we talk about as avant garde now wouldn’t even get on the scale in the history of avant garde music. Most of the (Spiritualized) stuff that survives to record or continuing in shows is through a process of editing. It sounds weird, but I find that some tracks that are like, 10, 15 minutes have been through a process of huge editing.

“Even if it sounds like something that I love,” he adds, “I don’t see any purpose in hitting the same area as Don Cherry or Miles Davis or Al Green. And that dates way back to Spacemen 3. I guess at the time there was a lot of influences of R&B/Cramps type bands and there was a lot of faithful 60s garage band covers through Vox amps. But it was almost like we only did covers we could push somewhere else and claim as our own if you like.”

So, Pierce isn’t the most porous of artists. Nor, if I may mix textural metaphors, is he likely to get too woolly, steering clear of the myschtick zones inhabited by peers and mentors like Sun Ra, Doctor John and Lee Scratch Perry. And although the band’s name itself implies, in Barney Hoskyns’ words, “some strange process of discorporealisation”, much of the music is steeped in very traditional notions of sin and salvation that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Louvin Brothers record. There’s also the sardonicynicism of ‘I Think I’m In Love’, a dialogue of swooning soul and sarcastic self, or ‘The Twelve Steps’: “If Jesus is the straight path that saves/Then I’m condemned to live my whole life on the cusp”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Jason Pierce rejects outright the notion that the musician is some kind of transmitter for a higher power.

“Yeah, way back,” he says. “’Cos everyone says they’re like conduits. Music placed in the air, and you catch it. It’s almost born of ego, that kind of line. It’s very romantic. And I know a lot of people say it, I know Van Morrison says it, and Keith Richards says it . . . it’s not science is it? It’s a little bit like the line when people say they have a vision in their head of the sound they wanna put on tape. They say, ‘I can hear the whole complete thing and I gotta get it down’, and it negates everybody else’s part in it for a start. It also doesn’t allow for any mistakes or any of the things that happen along the way. It almost goes against the way the human brain works. And I think this (new album) is more that I had some kind of idea of what I wanted to do but I couldn’t hear this music in my head before we started it, I just knew that I wanted to orchestrate.”

And how. There are up to 100 musicians on Let It Come Down, something Pierce himself now regards as somewhat extravagant. At the same time, it makes all the difference that songs like ‘I Didn’t Mean To Hurt You’ and ‘Stop Your Crying’ were scored from the ground up, rather than strings being Pro-Tooled in after the fact.

“I was trying to write an album where the orchestrations would be integral to the music,” he confirms. “It’s kind of weird to use words like ‘economy’ when you’ve got 100 people in the band, but it really was, it was trying to make music with harmonics within the music. Pretty much you could argue that the last record dealt with sonics, and with this one it was almost like . . . I was talking to John (Coxon) who co-produced it: it’s almost like the way that jazz and classical music gets exciting and keeps progressing is they change the harmonics, they change the notes used, and that’s pretty much all they change, they don’t treat the piano to make it sound like anything like a piano, or use reverbs or echoes.”

Which means that Let It Come Down shares the same sense of sonic space and/or natural compression as Gil Evans’ soundtracks with Miles Davis, or Spector’s fabled walls of sound, recordings where the drummer sounds like he was at the back of the room precisely because he was at the back of the room.

“With Gil Evans you really do get this sense of space,” Pierce enthuses. “And it was also informed by a lot of conversations I had with Jim Dickinson when I was in Memphis doing song mixes for the last album. He was talking about music being about ‘pushing air around a room’.”

You can judge a band by the company it keeps. Jim Dickinson. Dr John. Alexander Balanescu. Or Jim Jarmusch, who expressed an interest in filming the band’s American tour the same time he was working on his documentary of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The link doesn’t end there; Young’s long-time manager Elliot Roberts also looks after Spiritualized.

“The interesting thing about Crazy Horse is they’re not a great band,” avers Pierce. “If Neil Young wanted a great band he’d always play with Booker T, you almost can’t get a better band than the Stax house band. But it’s not about ability, it’s not about how many notes you can squeeze into a bar – although the orchestrations on our album work ’cos we got fantastic musicians, but they came in as operatives. That’s partly why the sessions got so big, because I wanted the sound of French horns, (not) the expression of that instrument, which is different. A 30-piece string section is totally different from working with Alexander Balanescu who is one of those rare, gifted musicians where they really do express themselves through their instrument. You can make the same kind of feelings as a 30-piece string section on a single guitar if you play it the right way.”

Despite very plainly knowing what he wants, Jason Pierce denies that his is a dictatorial set-up, claiming he never tells a musician what to play, but rather lets them find their own way through the music. However, his former bandmates have told a different story, especially with regard to business practices. Sean Cook, Damon Reece and Mike Mooney went public with their grievances about Pierce upon leaving Spiritualized to form Lupine Howl a couple of years ago. Among their complaints (which, conveniently enough, coincided with the release of their debut album) were noises of dissatisfaction about gig fees, wages, royalties and touring schedules.

“That was kind of disappointing,” Pierce admits. “I kind of think that their story was blown up a bit ’cos they used it as a press release. So if that’s the basis of your press release, you’ve got to kind of overblow stories and make them a bit more comic or ludicrous or whatever. My way has always been how much you can pay people and not how little. For me the whole reason to be in a band is tour, it’s where you do exactly what you wanna do…

“I’ve said right from the top it was about playing live, and the records, to be honest, are a means to get back on the road, ’cos the money runs out, and obviously when you’ve got a record out the record company will support your tours. For a time anyway.”

Plus, Spiritualized records have long lives but high overheads, meaning they take an age to recoup. If they recoup at all.

“That’s not really a concern of mine as long as we can do what we’re meant to do,” Pierce reasons. “And the thing that was disappointing with the last line-up is they didn’t want to tour, they just wanted money. And the two don’t sit well next to each other, they just don’t. But also the figures were twisted. Without getting hold of the accountant’s number and opening the books out for public inspection, the whole thing was shifted to make it look . . . you know somebody was telling me about the bailiffs kicking their doors down and stuff like that, and it’s a great image, but it’s got this kind of . . .”

Ah, it’s all tittle-tattle. As anybody with even a vague working knowledge of band politics knows, it’s always a case of you say potayto I say potahto.

Okay, let’s junk this subject and move on to something less touchy. Like drugs. Over the last few years Spiritualized have, erroneously or otherwise, come to be synonymous with smack. Nodding out music. Songs to take drugs to music to take drugs to. Most markedly, Pure Phase and Ladies And Gentlemen… seemed to exist in a chemical void between the Stones and Suicide, solipsistic scenarios involving basement rooms and needles and spoons that were a marked contrast to the 90s drug experience, which was by and large a social experiment that had more in common with Man United than The Man With The Golden Arm.

Yet, even in a Stones’ song like ‘Dead Flowers’ or Marianne’s ‘Sister Morphine’, the drug itself is not so important as the fact that the author is coming clean about his or her state of disrepair. Such tunes find their mirror image in Spiritualized’s ‘Home Of The Brave’ with lines like, “Sometimes I have my breakfast right off of the mirror”.

“It’s a sort of intimacy,” Pierce says. “They are almost like one-on-one records and I think that’s what keeps it soulful. I want to say confessional, but that’s not really the right word. Right from the top it’s not about, ‘Look what a state I’m in’ as a kind of, ‘This is so unfair’. It’s more like rejoicing the highest highs and lowest lows, rejoicing the whole, because that’s what makes life exciting. That’s the whole meaning behind the title Let It Come Down: it doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s the best or the worst thing for me, I’ll deal with it all. So it’s not complaining, it’s just saying, ‘this happens’.”

Which raises the question of the rehab lottery. In recent times Pierce has voiced his distaste for the phenomenon of The Recovering Addict Interview (Dave Gahan springs to mind here), celebrities’ need to atone using the press box as their confessional. To his chagrin, in recent rounds of interviews he was faced with journos intent on playing catch-out. To wit: if Let It Come Down is not The Rehab Album, then it must be the I’m Still Fucked Up Album.

“Unfortunate state of affairs, isn’t it?!” he smirks, giving no more away.

It also got the singer’s goat when Sean Cook told Q magazine that Pierce began smoking heroin from 1995 onwards, the year his ex-girlfriend and former Spiritualized keyboardist Kate Radley married The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft. Consequently Ladies And Gentlemen . . . was dubbed his divorce album, largely due to the NME cover story from May 1997, which cast a hitherto low-key pair of musicians as a kind of spacerockin’ Posh ‘n’ Becks gone wrong. Pierce’s riposte is that nobody started digging in the Righteous Brothers’ dustbins when they released ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’.

“And it’s not even to write a song – to make any piece of art it’s not about anything specific,” he protests. “It’s not like I’m writing country songs where it’s like, ‘Oh this is a story about a friend of mine and whatever misfortune happened upon him’. You have to get objective. It’s like Patsy Cline singing, ‘I go out walking after midnight’. It’s not like, ‘What time is it? Ten to twelve. I better get my shoes on to get involved in this!’ It’s a metaphor and everyone understands that. To actually truthfully bare your soul you don’t use those kinda words. If you’re feeling fucked up you just say, ‘I’m fucked up’. When you’re genuinely in love, all you really wanna say is, ‘I’m in love’ to anybody who’ll listen. And you don’t even really want to be saying that, you want to be talking the smallest of talk with the object of your love. But then, ‘I’m in love’ doesn’t make for the greatest lyric in the world.”

Well then, what about ‘I Think I’m In Love’?

“That lyric is so obviously not just a stream of consciousness,” he responds, “it’s a dialogue that comes out of even that state. And that’s what was always misperceived by the press, at least with the last album. It’s also born of that line that people who make music use: ‘I’m baring my soul with this one. This one really does go deep.’ And that sounds fantastic, it sounds authentic.”

But he thinks its bull.

Still, I don’t buy any of Jason Pierce’s evasiveness. The stock response of any writer is to deny the autobiographical, even when it’s blatantly obvious that the raw material has its source in real experience. But that’s the artist’s prerogative: once the work is out there, it belongs to the audience. Pierce knows this of course – the only thing fuzzy about J Spaceman is his guitar sound.

And in the end, that’s all that really matters.

Let It Come Down is out now on BMG