Spiritualized
Back in orbit after a long hiatus, Jason Pierce explains the obsessive, solitary process of creating new LP And Nothing Hurt
The last time england found themselves in the semi-final of an international football tournament, Spiritualized were holed up in Bath’s Moles studio working on what became Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In
Space. That late June evening in 1996, england were knocked out on penalties by Germany. Last night, Jason Pierce went to his local pub in Spitalfields to watch Croatia ruin england’s chances of reaching the World Cup final. he wasn’t too upset. If nothing else, it meant he no longer had to listen to “Three Lions”, ubiquitous during england’s run in Russia. “Where I live, there’s a bar on every corner, so it’s nice not to have that song playing into the night, every night.”
Today, Pierce is in yet another East London bar – the sunny courtyard of the Strongroom in the heart of Shoreditch. He is late arriving – and although no apology is offered, there are some who would at least be relieved to see Pierce here at all. During the recording of the last two Spiritualized albums, 2008’s Songs In A&E and 2012’s Sweet Heart Sweet Light, he battled, separately, life-threatening pneumonia and liver disease.
Meanwhile, the exacting, obsessive nature of Pierce’s recording practices similarly cast a shadow over the new Spiritualized album, And Nothing Hurt. “I was praying for an illness halfway through this record, but only to give me a break, just to get the hell away from it,” he says, half-joking. He sees the funny side in most things, often at his own expense. But more seriously, Pierce has claimed this could be his last album.
Could this really be the case? “When I was saying about not making records, I was saying I don’t want to make albums any more,” he clarifies. “I was sincere, but I meant not making albums – I didn’t mean not making music. Making albums is the chore. It’s not the same as making a track or a few tracks. Part of it is, I don’t know if people want music like that any more.”
Pierce pauses and sips from a cup of tea. Wearing a white Cramps T-shirt (“from a guy in Japan”) under a light-blue cowboy shirt, blue jeans and his customary silver sneakers, Pierce does not look out of place in this outdoor bar with its music-industry clientele enjoying boozy meetings in the shade. In any case, he’s seldom recognised, he says, because he’s never chased that side of the business. Over the years he has recorded various elements of Spiritualized records upstairs in the Strongroom’s studios, while his new label Bella Union rents an office and studio in the building. Crucially, for Pierce, it’s also a short walk from his house.
Although he looks well enough – square-jawed and classically handsome with a mop of straggly brown hair – his complexion is slightly glassy and he has bags under his pale-blue eyes, the
indications that decades of indulgence have had an impact on his body. In the late 1980s his former group Spacemen 3 coined the phrase “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to” – and this applies equally to Spiritualized throughout their 28 years of space-rock exploration. “It’s a struggle sometimes,” he admits. “Touring is the perfect life. Everything is geared towards show time, so if I’m lying around all afternoon, I don’t have to think about what I’m doing or feel that I’m not doing enough. It makes things really easy. But I can really only do one thing a day. If too much information comes in, I can’t deal with it. This interview is about the only thing I’ll do today.
“I function pretty reasonably,” he says, flashing a smile.
IN the video for the latest Spiritualized single, “I’m Your Man”, a weathered Pierce cuts a lonely figure in his trusty old spacesuit – the same one he’s had since his Ladies And
Gentlemen… days – as he sets off on a road trip to pay tribute to Gram Parsons’ grave in Joshua Tree, California, taking with him a small suitcase of personal affects. Shot on grainy 35mm film, its prevailing message seems to be one of Pierce’s survival: how his stubbornness, lifestyle and enduring vision for his music have cemented his position as one of rock’s great dreamers, at whatever cost.
Indeed, there are stories that have swirled around Pierce over the years – some true, some not. There’s the one about Spiritualized’s 1995 album Pure Phase, which was constructed from two separate mixes in each stereo channel, painstakingly spliced together by hand eight bars at a time: true (“Sometimes the work involved is almost more important than what you’re making”). Or the one about 2001 album Let It Come Down, which reportedly featured 155 session musicians: not true (“Too many, I think. There are rules for these things”). And let’s not forget the one about Ladies And Gentlemen… itself, where Pierce sacked the entire band after a show at London’s Royal Albert Hall: also true (“Their demands just became kind of… weird. But it was heartbreaking, it was a hard thing to do”). Pierce last appeared in the UK with the current lineup of Spiritualized in November 2016, at the Barbican, for two performances of Ladies And Gentleman… with orchestra and choir. Intended to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary, the shows were brought forward a year because Pierce thought his new record would surface in 2017 and didn’t want the anniversary shows to cannibalise publicity. “They were one year out,” he smiles. “It’s quite good for me to be early – I’m never early! That should be applauded.” He booked the shows, he says, because he needed money to mix And Nothing Hurt, and because he wanted to remind himself how it felt to play inside that colossal swirl of sound again. “I’d been singing all the new songs off the side of my bed,” he explains. “This new album had this feeling that it was being put together in somebody’s apartment. It wasn’t sounding like what I know it sounds like to be inside of that live show.” Having composed most of the new record in his home studio, fastidiously piecing together tracks from bits of recordings and then mixing each song using the maximum 260 channels available on Pro-Tools, he found that this prolonged solitary existence had its drawbacks. “There was always more fine-tuning to do,” he says, “but it was pathetic. It was like wilfully going into a kind of
“THERE WAS ALWAYS MORE FINE-TUNING. IT WAS PATHETIC” JASON PIERCE
OCD situation and instead of trying to correct it, you feed it. And it’s for nine pieces of music, it’s not changing the world, and so it became depressing. I’d have my engineer bring the milk and bread in in the morning and all I’d have to do is get out of bed and open the door, so it became even more unhealthy.
“When he left, I would start making lists of what to do the next day and we’d go through that and then the next day we’d make another list that would correct most of what we’d done the day before.” In Pierce’s mind, the songs he was working on for
And Nothing Hurt would conjure the widescreen melodrama and freeform fantasia of Ladies And
Gentlemen…, but the deeper he drilled into the material, the more he realised he was dealing with an entirely different record. “I envisaged it being a lot longer, a lot more testing, strange and initially impenetrable, and then it ended up being this really quite simple thing,” he says. “I had this idea that it was gonna be like a big Ray Charles recording, broadcast from a satellite. But the songs, when they were forced to go somewhere strange, it didn’t do any good, didn’t serve a purpose other than to say this is a bit stranger than you think. So I had to keep reeling it back.” There are striking parallels between And Nothing
Hurt and Ladies And Gentlemen…, in particular the way opener “A Perfect Miracle” sounds almost identical to the 1997 album’s title track. “‘Perfect Miracle’ was difficult as hell to make. The first verse was always fine, first chorus was OK, but because it’s the same chord shape all the way through, it was hard to get it to go the distance. You know what, it’s shockingly close to the title track from Ladies And
Gentlemen…, and I didn’t realise that.” How could you not? “Stupidity? I don’t know. I think when I make a record I forget everything I’ve ever learnt. If I play that song a tone and a half higher, it’s the same key and sounds exactly the same.”
ACCORDIng to Steve Mackey, the former Pulp bassist and producer who assisted Pierce during the final round of LP mixing this spring, “Jason makes records with a big landscape. In fact, everything he does has a big landscape. He’s got a great sense of when it feels right for how his music should be.”
Before this year, Mackey had not formally met Pierce despite the similar paths their respective bands had taken. Pulp and Spacemen 3 were both signed to Fire Records in the ’80s, while Spiritualized and Pulp plotted a seedier course through Britpop during the ’90s. “This record feels different,” says Mackey. “It has a soulful edge that Jason always has, but there’s a tenderness to his voice. He always exposes himself, and it’s great that’s still there. It seemed to me when we first listened to it that he’d attempted to make more of a concise record this time.”
At first, Pierce approached Tony Visconti and John Cale with a view to producing the album. He also played the new songs with British improv stalwarts and frequent collaborators Charles Hayward and John Edwards in a bid to push the material to its limits. “Cale’s world was completely different,” he says. “He was so into American rap and hip-hop, and also he was quite encouraging, saying, ‘You make great records, why don’t you just make a great record?’
“Tony Visconti wound up being too expensive, and then he halved the money and by then the money wasn’t there anyway. And also, I’d love to commit to going to a studio and recording a three-week record and saying this is it, this is what we’re doing – and I love records that are made like that – but I also know I can’t just throw the money into one thing. I like to explore different options.”
Pierce’s problem is he finds it hard to let go. “I know what’s going on, but I just fall into it,” he sighs. “There’s this feeling of madness because you’re doing the same thing over and over again and you expect completely different results, but the results are the same. I’m not blind to that, I know that doesn’t work.”
Pierce also worked with the producer Youth on an early version of the album, in early 2015, which didn’t go well. “That was a disaster,” he admits. “I didn’t go to work with him, he offered to help me, and at that time I had five or six demos that were a bit out of time and he said he would help with that.” When they decided to record the tracks in full, Pierce baulked at the producer’s method, describing it as “chopped up and chunked together”, and like “paint it by numbers where you don’t look at the numbers of the paints, you just start filling in the holes. It was appalling.”
Then when Pierce cut short the recordings, he claims the tapes were held until the balance of payment for the sessions was settled. “I hadn’t done vocals on most of it, hadn’t done anything, so he sat on my tapes for about eight months trying to extort money and points on the record that wasn’t finished and I had no intention of using it. And I didn’t use any of it. I never used it again. It was this awful situation where I couldn’t get my hands on any of my ideas, and when it did come back it felt so tainted that the idea of using any of it ever again was the last thing. It put me into a place where I really had to start again.
“All I got back was the top layer, none of my takes, everything else was gone. Maybe that’s the ideal – if you destroy it, you can’t ever go backwards! There’s always a constant movement forwards, but only if you know what you’re doing, only if what you believe in is getting more beautiful.” Uncut contacted Youth’s representatives for comment but received no reply at time of press. After releasing the one album, Sweet Heart Sweet
Light, through Domino, Pierce signed to Bella Union in October 2013. The proposed album remained on the label’s schedule in 2014 and 2015, but by 2016 the label’s distributor had stopped asking about it, admits Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde. “He was determined to make this record the equal of Ladies
And Gentlemen…, which explains why it took so
long,” Raymonde explains. “He’s self-critical and can have a low opinion of himself. When you take a lot of drugs, you spend a long time focusing on the details in music. I remember listening to a kick drum for days in about 1988.”
THE YEAR 2018 sees the 30th anniversary of Spacemen 3’s classic Playing With Fire – though whether this will be celebrated in some form holds no interest to Pierce, who is in a longstanding legal dispute alongside former bandmate Pete Kember with Spacemen 3’s ex-manager Gerald Palmer over the rights to that band’s catalogue.
“We signed away our catalogue when we were young,” Pierce explains. “I thought I was signing for a loan to finish our record, but we signed away our rights to everything, to our old manager.”
Pierce recently turned down an offer of £2 million to reform Spacemen 3 for a run of shows. Why, he reasons, would he want to do something that’s inferior to Spiritualized? “It would only make sense if what we were doing now was so poor, so ill-conceived and clueless.”
In 2016, Will Carruthers – bassist with Spacemen 3 and the first incarnation of Spiritualized – wrote a memoir of his time in those bands and his friendships with Kember and Pierce. In Playing The
Bass With Three Left Hands, Carruthers recounts in remarkable detail the trio’s small-town hedonism and unswerving dedication to the ideals of rock’n’roll. Today, Carruthers recalls his time in Spiritualized fondly. “Back then it was fairly loose and joyful,” he says. “We’d spend a lot of time playing because we all enjoyed playing, and we were doing tiny gigs compared to the gigs we had been doing with Spacemen 3. But it was still fun, despite that, in a musical sense. We were all feeling good about it. He [Pierce] was a good leader in that he wasn’t a pain in the fucking arse.”
Would Carruthers get involved in a Spacemen 3 reunion? “I have a special set of demands,” he says, presumably having mulled it over many times. “I will only do one show and I don’t want paying for it. I will only do it on the demolished luxury apartments that were built on the pub where Spacemen 3 played their last gig in Rugby. That’s the only way I’m doing it.”
Pierce admits he read some of Carruthers’ book. “It’s like looking at a group photograph and trying to ignore your part in it, so it’s hard to read without thinking, ‘Why didn’t you ask?’ He left incredibly acrimoniously and it seemed a tiny bit of talking about things would have cleared up a lot of stuff.
“I’ve got five boxes of all of the junk to do with Spacemen 3,” he adds. “I didn’t particularly keep them as mementos; I was doing the management, so it all gets thrown into a box. In an odd way, a ninevolt battery receipt says more about the mechanics of a band than the wild dreams you have as a kid.”
While Pierce is principled enough to turn down big offers for this kind of exercise in nostalgia – “battle reenactments”, he calls them – he loves staging the grand Ladies And Gentlemen… shows, not least because he believes this latest band is a vast improvement on previous incarnations. “We couldn’t play that at the time, it wasn’t in our remit, and it is an astonishing album to play,” he says. “Nearly two-thirds of it is freeform squall and quite testing for an audience, but it’s got the right pointers in there to allow you to sit down and listen for one-and-a-half hours.”
But playing shows with a 15-piece orchestra and a gospel choir does not come cheap. Not long ago Pierce signed with new management to help him take control of his finances. “I was hugely in debt from doing my shows. I couldn’t bear the idea that this band I’d been running for so long was going to go down for tax reasons and debts. The shows are too big for the returns, and I needed help with that and he [Dave
Bianchi of Various Management] sorted that out, which is amazing. I was determined to not let it go down. Bankruptcy would be a desolate end to something so beautiful.” There must be a straightforward solution to this? “Yeah,” he smiles. “Stop me making decisions.”
“IT’S STILL LIKE BEING A CHILD WITH EVERYTHING I DO” JASON PIERCE
PIERCE turns 53 in November. Accordingly, he explains, he feels great responsibility putting out And Nothing Hurt. “When rock’n’roll is full of the stupidity and arrogance of youth, it’s effortless,” he says. “When people try to get too wordy or clever with their talent it ceases to be rock’n’roll. Rock’n’roll is this heartbeat, and everything suggests you shouldn’t be able to do that as you get older without trying to copy the moves and voice and language that you had when you were younger, and I don’t think that’s unjustified.”
At the same time, he wouldn’t have made And Nothing Hurt without conviction. “I had enough songs to feel like I had one really good album in me. That’s the key, isn’t it, to know you’ve got an album rather than ‘We need an album’. You can always throw an album out, but I felt I had a good enough album.
“That thing about age, I’ve still got that fire,” he says. “It’s still being like a child with everything I do. I think my kids think I’m like a big kid. Quite nice to feel more grown up than your parent.”
Pierce separated amicably from his partner and mother of his children. They live close to each other and share parental duties. “We’re kind of more together than we were,” he says. “We were just going to be better apart than we were together.”
What music do his children listen to? “They’re not that bothered. My little boy is quite hip actually, into all the grime, and some of it’s amazing. I was obsessed with Stormzy’s ‘Blinded By Your Grace’, have you heard that? It’s not produced with lots of talk before the song comes in, it’s just thrown down, like an old gospel song.”
Assuming, then, that And Nothing Hurts really is the final Spiritualized album, what would Pierce do with all this spare time on his hands? “Somebody said I was a flâneur, a lovely French word. I think that’s what I’d do professionally. London is a good city for aimless walking. I know all the funny little bits of backstreets. I don’t do the tube – I don’t like the noise. I’ll walk anywhere.
“Point me in the direction and I’ll go.” And Nothing Hurt is released by Bella Union on September 7