The Stool Pigeon

Glastonbury The Movie, which documents the 1993 festival, is a pretty boring film. Half an hour in, though, there’s a moment of heart-stopping drama, when footage of an unfunny comedian suddenly gives way to the strobe-lit chaos of a late-night Spiritualized set. There’s a maelstrom of noise and feedback ripping from the speakers, but its creators stand impassive and virtually motionless. There’s zero communication between them as the song’s driving momentum starts to build. Eyes shut and stonily calm, Jason Pierce leans into his microphone to sing: “We’ll put some love... deep in our veins.” It’s a line from a song reputed to be the first one Pierce ever composed, with his previous band Spacemen 3. Its title? ‘Things Will Never Be The Same’.

Fifteen years on, however, some things have stayed the same. ‘Soul on Fire’, the epic single with which Spiritualized recently broke a near-five-year silence, managed to find space for two of Pierce’s favourite words in its title and include in its lyrics a standard-issue narcotic allusion: “I got a hurricane inside my veins....” It’s easy to draw a line - or beat a track, if you will - from ‘Soul on Fire’ all the way back to ‘Things Will Never Be The Same’, just as it’s easy to connect Spiritualized’s new album Songs in A&E with all the rest of Jason Pierce’s works. The lyrics, for example, draw repeatedly from Pierce’s palette of favourite words: baby, angel, heaven, Lord, Jesus, soul, fire. That last word, particularly, recurs with obsessive-compulsive frequency.

Musically, Songs in A&E is likewise rooted in Spiritualized tradition, being split between wracked, tearful gospel songs and howling electric blues (though the split is weighted toward the former, these days). There are even direct quotations from earlier work. The wonderful ‘Baby I’m Just A Fool’ opens with the riff from Spacemen 3’s evergreen 1986 single ‘Walkin’ With Jesus’ and later finds room for the same string part that graced Spiritualized’s ‘All of My Tears’ (itself a rerecording of Spacemen 3’s ‘So Hot (Wash Away All Of My Tears)’).

In its artwork, Songs in A&E achieves a gratifying three-in-one combination of the medical, narcotic and religious imagery so favoured by Pierce. Its booklet is full of photos of the plastic catheters used to attach IV drips to veins. They’re shaped like crosses.

Artwork should reflect the specialness of the music inside, Pierce reckons, and he’s excelled at both over the years. Spiritualized’s dream-rock debut Lazer-Guided Melodies (1992) came with a black-and-white cover that depicted a devil caught in a psychedelic swirl. Experimental follow-up Pure Phase (1995), in which every track was underpinned by the same pulsating drone, came in glow-in-the-dark green box that temporarily rechristened the band Spiritualized Electric Mainline.

Steeped in soul, blues and jazz, Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997) was Spiritualized’s breakthrough record, and came beautifully packaged as a piece of medication, complete with usage instructions. The minimalist sleeve of Let It Come Down (2001) was a knowing counterpoint to the swaggering, bombastic music; and the bare outstretched arm that adorned Amazing Grace (2003) befitted a partly-improvised album loaded with chemical innuendo. One song was titled, brilliantly, ‘She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)’.

As the band’s only constant member, Jason Pierce is Spiritualized, and he won’t release a record until he’s sure it’s worthy of the Spiritualized name. Songs in A&E makes the grade easily. But that’s not to say it came easy.

Chapter II. Jason seaches for space.

Rugby-born and 42-years-old, Jason Pierce is a tall, tousled, handsome man with (ahem) piercing blue eyes and a distinctive crescent-moon chin. When I meet him at a gentrified east London boozer, he looks pretty much the same as he did in 1993. A little thinner and more frail, perhaps, but certainly not look like a man who only narrowly escaped death from double pneumonia three years ago. Of that, more later.

For now, Pierce is talking about Songs in A&E and how it fits with Spiritualized’s other records. “What’s good about them is that... they find their own space, and they fit, and they work,” he shrugs. “I try to make records that sound like somebody’s just stuck a microphone on a blues player in the Mississippi Delta, and sound like Phil Spector’s in the studio, and sound like the greatest doo-wop record, and sound like the greatest free-form jazz record... I try to make this music that satisfies all the musics that I love, and in an odd way it satisfies none of them, but it finds a space within that just seems right. I make albums, so when they start to link musically and thematically into an atmosphere that sort of works, then I know that it’s finished.”

To be clear: Pierce is not too keen on the theory that downloading has killed the humble album format. “I get a lot of people saying at the moment, ‘Why are you making albums when people just want to download a bit of the album?’ I’m saying, ‘Because that’s what I fucking do!’ You can read an excerpt from a novel in a magazine but you can’t deny that it’s from a novel... You don’t read it and say, ‘That’s all I need.’ Michelangelo’s two fingers touching on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling... You can buy that on a card as an excerpt, but you can’t deny what it’s from. And you can’t reduce things for people with low attention spans. I don’t say that accusingly, it’s just... You can download just the chorus, or just the opening few bars! Whatever! But what I do is make these things that just work together and [where] there’s some kind of thread.”

This is as close as Pierce comes to a rant. Generally, he’s soft-spoken and dryly good-humoured. He’s also far more articulate than you might deduce from his relatively narrow lyrical concerns. However, sometimes he resorts to vagueness or simply tails off, seemingly anxious not to give too much away. At least three forces are surely at work here. One: he doesn’t want to limit the reach of his music by connecting it too closely to his own life history. Two: he lays his emotions bare in his songwriting and isn’t prepared to cede any more privacy in interviews. Three: consciously or not, Pierce enjoys shrouding himself in old-fashioned mystique. Certainly, it was striking that when Pierce toured acoustically under the ‘Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines’ banner, he reined in the format’s natural intimacy by wearing huge black aviator shades. He’s careful, always, to guard his space (a word he uses repeatedly).

Many interviewers down the years have sought to engage Pierce on the subject of heroin, references to which abound in his lyrics. Most have met with a brick wall of polite obfuscation. I decide to ask Pierce about something else to which he constantly alludes in his songs: namely God.

Are you a religious person? “Not really... I just don’t have belief. I think if you have belief, that’s fine - you can believe in anything. You can believe that the earth is the centre of the universe, if you want to believe it. Well, not if you want to; if you do believe it, you believe it. I just don’t have that, but I love the music. I love music that comes from a place of truth. I love it when you get a sense that these people make this music regardless of whether anybody’s recording it, that this music exists because this is what they want to do to say, ‘Here I am, this is where I stand and this is the kind of sound I want to make.’ And I love gospel music for that. Somebody kind of levelled this charge at me recently, where they said, ‘Maybe the logic in your brain won’t allow you to believe, but your heart and your body produces this music - it’s believing.’ I said, ‘Listen man, it’s not God’s fucking music. It wasn’t made by God. It’s made by people who believe in God. It hasn’t come from my soul reacting against my brain.’ But I do love it. Churches work [as venues] because they’re acoustically great. There’s something about playing into heavens, so to speak...”

When I bring up Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, Pierce offers a revealing take: “It’s not as good as the The Extended Phenotype, which is just a different thing altogether... but kind of the same. It’s said within that [book], whereas I don’t even think the word God is mentioned.”

Pierce, clearly, appreciates an opportunity to read between the lines. As with the religious references, the heroin references shouldn’t, one suspects, be taken at face value. While past bandmates of Pierce’s have spoken about his episodic dalliances with the drug, he appears to be a highly functional family man these days. Songs in A&E is quite the family affair, in fact: the sleeve includes a photo credit for his wife Juliette Larthe and a backing-vocals credit for their daughter, named Poppy.

Chapter III. Jason becomes ill.

In 2005, Jason Pierce very nearly took his final bow. His joust with the reaper came after he contracted ‘periorbital cellulitis with bilateral pneumonia’, a condition that landed him in intensive care for ‘type 1 respiratory failure’. The first the wider world knew of it was when his wife posted on Spiritualized’s forum: “After nearly dying twice in the last two and a half weeks, Jason has ... made an alarming and brilliant recovery and is due home today. He is still fragile and really weak, weighing in at maybe 8 stone ... but love and happiness are on his side.”

Songs in A&E, which concludes with a repetition of the words “funeral home”, is dedicated to the staff of The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, London. One of its songs, ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’, seems like a straightforward rumination on Pierce’s ordeal (complete with the sucking sounds of a respirator), but Pierce insists that he wrote it before his illness, and that the song simply makes the philosophical point that life would be meaningless if death didn’t exist. “It was harrowing when I listened to it and went back to it, but I don’t think it was prophetic,” he says. “It can mean anything, and it’ll mean lots of things before it’s time is done.”

The time spent listening to the beeping of his life-support machine gave Pierce an idea. “I thought that when I came out what I really wanted to make was... something that dealt with the low-level energy that you get in places like hospitals. It’s not specific to hospitals, but you do sense it in those places where there’s a lot of really fucking important stuff going on and if people were given the time to really react to it they’d all run around screaming. It’s held down, though, so you get this amazing low energy... Then I figured only recently - only last week - that maybe I’ve already done that. Maybe that’s what happened with Harmony’s film...”

It was director Harmony Korine who coaxed a newly healthy Pierce back to music, with a commission to produce music for his film Mister Lonely. “It was just being in a studio on my own and working with sound, and it was hugely liberating,” recalls Pierce. “Then I started recording my album in a parallel to that. There are bits of my album in the soundtrack; there are bits of the soundtrack in the album... What the soundtrack did that was so important for the album was it gave it that atmosphere that sounds filmic - that sounds unique to Songs in A&E. It doesn’t sound like a collection of songs, which is where it was before I went back to it. It was 11 songs [then]. Worst of all, it was 11 songs that didn’t sound contemporary when I came out... It’s like, ‘Why the fuck do I want to work on something that’s this old?’ It was amazing meeting somebody like Harmony Korine. His project was a film, but his film has incidental music that is quite literally incidental. My whole thing is music - this tiny little bit - so it was like: if this crazy guy can do this, I sure as hell can find a way back into finishing the record.”

Chapter IV: Jason sits on fire.

As reviewers have been quick to point out, three tracks on Songs in A&E include the word ‘fire’ in their title: ‘I Gotta Fire’, ‘Soul on Fire’ and ‘Sitting on Fire’. Pierce brings this up before I can. “There’s three ‘fire’ songs on this record for no reason that I can defend, except that I never found it within myself to try and change the lyrics, or I could never change them in a way that made any more sense,” he explains wistfully. “And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, they all lined up next to each other on the running order! And you’re like, ‘Fuck, how did that happen?!’”

Was there a temptation to push them apart?

“I tried every single combination... Don’t think I haven’t thought about it! But when you run an album, you can’t just listen to the way that track 2 runs into track 3. Every time you change the running order, you have to listen to the whole thing again.”

There’s another wistful moment when, later, conversation turns to Spacemen 3, whose songs still pitch up in Spiritualized set-lists. “I think that hitting one note aggressively and consistently until it has a huge and greater meaning that you could ever hope it to have is really important,” says Pierce. “I still write songs with two chords. And not only that, they’re the fucking two chords I’ve always written songs with.” Suddenly, his tone turns melancholic. “Sometimes I feel like, ‘God, if I’d only pushed myself...’” Equally suddenly, he snaps out of it. “But I don’t have any problem with putting so much value on these simple things.”

It’s a point Pierce makes more decisively when talking about his two big musical touchstones: The Stooges and The Cramps. “Those records are still astonishing,” he enthuses. “Some records just don’t make any sense, and then two years later they make all kinds of sense. Sometimes they won’t ever make sense: those ones are not for you. [Making records] is this deeply selfish pursuit. It’s not like, ‘Any requests? Any way that you’d like it to go?’ It has to be, ‘This is what excites me, this is where I stand, and here it is - if you don’t get it, I don’t care. How can I care? And if you do like it... that’s really beautiful.’”

He means all this. When I ask a rambling question about Spiritualized’s brush with the big-time 10 years ago, Pierce cuts in. “‘Where did it all go wrong?’ Is this that question, phrased differently?” And he laughs a hearty, who-cares laugh.

Epilogue: Jason transcends time.

Glastonbury The Movie got a box-set DVD release last year. It’s still pretty boring, but it has value now as a record of rock music’s sorry state circa 1993. Most of the music footage today seems dated and ridiculous. Spiritualized are the exception: they sound vital and utterly out of their time. They still do today. You suspect they always will.

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