High And Mighty

Jason Pierce spent the past year taking copious amounts of drugs and creating a glorious rock album. Sounds familiar? Well, this time the pills were prescribed and beneficial to his health. The joke’s not lost on an artist who has made a career out of going interstellar whilst still on solid ground.

“The big irony is that I’ve filled my body with drugs all my life and suddenly I had to be properly sober and take proper medicine.” Pierce lets out a knowing cackle. “With no redeeming qualities at all I’m afraid! Well, at the end of it, a lot better for me, and I’ve gotten rid of the problem. I had a liver disease which meant taking a year’s worth of treatment. And it’s pretty horrendous treatment. I put myself on a new medical programme, taking drugs that they hadn’t tested yet, to try and shorten that time. I figured I’d make the record while I was on it. It was such a chore to do it this time. But part of me kept thinking – and it was to do with Brian Wilson a bit – ‘it’s always easier to make an unfinished record than it is to make a finished one’. That kept me going.”
The world should rejoice that he did, because Sweet Heart Sweet Light is a peach of an LP, sounding like a summation of everything that has made Spiritualized great over their two decade existence. The way Pierce tells it, however, recording is a real pain, and on stage is where he truly feels alive. “I really, really dislike making records, but they’re the only way to get back on the road. When you play live, it’s like being in an avalanche, it’s all around you. When you’re trying to capture it in the studio though, there’s thousands of decisions over what you keep and what you lose.”
It was an effort worth making. Now 46, he confesses that he’s been fixated on the idea of keeping rock ‘n’ roll alive, stretching out the lineage of cool discordance and messed-up pop he fell in love with as a teen. “I love this stuff, absolutely love it,” Jason beams with honest passion. “It’s been such a big part of my life. But I understand the reality of it – with each generation you get away from something, it makes harder to relate to.”
But he’s not clinging on to memories of the glory days. Quite the opposite in fact. He wants to push things forward. “What’s really got me down of late,” he sighs, “is the wholesale ‘looking backwards’ at the moment. Not just bands, but the press and the fans, they’re all looking back at music like it’s over. Like: ‘This is our great record from ten years ago’ or, ‘We’re going to reform the band and do what we did 20 years ago.’ I felt a great melancholy about that. Like anything that you live and breathe, even though it’s doomed to become part of history, you don’t want it to be. The only way to allay that happening is to make new great records.”
So news of The Stone Roses hitting the nostalgia circuit made his eyes roll? “It’s more a sadness, if anything. But not really relating to anybody else, because I don’t mind what anybody else wants to do. I’m not judging anybody, I just realised it’s not for me. We did five or six Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space shows and as ecstatic and euphoric as those were, I felt a bit like, ‘I never joined this to be in the catering industry.’ Where everybody knows exactly what they’re going to get. They came with this shadow of, ‘Don’t get locked into this, don’t get tricked into thinking it’s what I should be doing'"
So that would be the reason he declined an invitation to perform with old band Spacemen 3 then? The relationship between Pierce and his former bandmates have been famously strained for years. “Did they do that?” he asks. “I hadn’t noticed.” It was in London, two summers back, and Kevin Shields popped along. “Oh, I did see that! I think sometimes it smacks of… not even reliving the music, but people reliving their youth. And there’s something really distasteful about that. I don’t think about Spacemen 3, it’s almost like… how often would you think about a school reunion? There’s something distasteful about saying, ‘Weren’t we great when we were kids?’ Rock ‘n’ roll sometimes seems like it ages disgracefully.”
Mortality’s been on Pierce’s mind in recent years. But the media interest around his brush with death some seven years back bothers him even more. In 2005, suffering from pneumonia, his weight plunged to seven stone and he technically died twice. Two years later, we got Songs In A + E and links were made in every review and interview between his new songs and the brink he’d just come back from. Trouble was, the songs had been written prior to his ill health, and Pierce got understandably prickly about being probed. “There always has to be a story with music,” he sighs. “Whereas with painting or writing you just go away and do your work. The whole cornerstone that rock was built on was the ‘fact’ that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. Give me a break! Not that I’m against it, I’m as big a believer in the myths of rock ‘n’ roll as anyone. I subscribe to the Robert Johnson story, I just don’t find it that interesting when I’m the protagonist.”
He might not welcome people tying his personal life to his music, but he is surprisingly open when asked how that traumatic experience has affected his life as a whole. “I’m disappointingly the same,” he smiles. “You always read about people re-evaluating what’s important after something like that. But in an odd way, I’ve never really had that much self-confidence and maybe it made me a bit more scared, y’know? I just wanted to get back to music. The first thing I did when I got out of hospital was get myself a pint of wine and go to see The Stooges play. Just to see that everything was still there and that I was still the same person.”
He’s not one for making long-term plans, but some years back he signalled an interest in being the first band to play in space. Is he still on course for that? “I don’t know if I’ll be the one doing it! I think I’m always looking for good places. But I always hold Jim Dickinson’s thing where he says that, because music is all about pushing air around, the places where the air is at its thickest is where you get the best music. So I think the higher you go, the less molecules there are to push around.”
And this from the man who once gigged at the top of the CN Tower just so he could say he played “the highest gig ever”, euphemism intended. Jason Pierce can argue the contrary, but that’s real change right there.

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is out now on Double Six Records.