JOHN MURRY
Death-dicing Mississippi voice hails Spiritualized’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.
“IT FELT LIKE A DRUG I HADN’T TAKEN BEFORE.”
I’d just gotten out of fundamentalist Christian rehab in Memphis. I was 17. You couldn’t listen to music in there. I listened to a couple of Bob Dylan’s gospel records but they clamped down, it was insane. I got Ladies And Gentlemen… from a guy in Oxford, Mississippi. When I saw the cover, it looked like an epic record – I saw the title and I said, “We are!” The first time I listened to it was on Houston Levee Road, near Collierville, Tennessee, in a car with a guy named Scott Patterson and a guy named Travis Hayes. It was so quiet and so dark on those backroads. We were still at that age when you have friends that you trust, like a gang or something. So we just drove around listening to it, and I remember it felt very much like a drug I hadn’t taken before. Lots of things I listened to were not attempts to create something great, they were hopes, but this is an actual attempt. It’s incredibly accessible in a weird way, and familiar: Jason Pierce is referencing John Prine [in Cop Shoot Cop…] and the title song goes into Can’t Help Falling In Love. I’ve realised that stuff I grew up on, people like Junior Kimbrough, Dr. John, all of that hill country blues, a lot of it is what informs Ladies And Gentlemen…. The entire record had a very antiquated kind of gospel/baroque sound, with this British psychedelia, and incredible string arrangements, with a cinematic scope. It had brilliant mistakes as well. There’s a childishness to that, and looking back, I realise how young I was, too. It kind of made me wonder, too. Was he kind of back and forth on and off of drugs? What was it that made it have as much depth as it does? I’ve wondered if he was able to create it on heroin. What him and Mark Linkous [Sparklehorse] have in common is they have a willingness to go places they realise other people may not follow them into, but they’re trusting their ability to come up with a song that connects with people. I think it has what music is missing, you know? It’s all real. He’s saying, “I have an idea and I’m getting it done, hell or high water,” and it’s beautiful. It’s the record that gave me the space to think sonically in that way. I indirectly use it as a template. It really did have a profound effect on me.