Spiritualized
Live @ La Tracienda (La Trastienda)
Buenos Aires
29-Oct-08
Second row of tables - Far left
Edirol R-09 - 16 bit 44.1 kHz WAV
Church Audio Cardioid Recording Mics clipped to collar of shirt.
Left/Right channel swapped with Audacity (to match actual location of lapel mics)
Flac files created using MacFlac
I did have some clipping during very loud segments.
I tried to minimize this by placing my hands 3-4 inches in front of the mics.
This resulted in a slight muddying of the sound (only a few seconds--maybe 30 total).
Other than that mistake I think it's a great recording.
I included four pics from the show
Track list:
00-(preshow feedback)
01-Amazing Grace
02-You Lie You Cheat
04-Cheapster
05-Soul On Fire
06-Sweet Talk
07-Sitting On Fire
08-Walkin' With Jesus
09-Oh Baby
10-Rated X
11-Think I'm In Love
12-Good Dope, Good Fun
13-Death Take Your Fiddle
14-Life's A Problem
15-Ladies & Gentlemen
16-She Kissed Me
17-Come Together
18-Take Me To The Other Side
19-(clapping for encore)
20-Lord Can You Hear Me?
21-Oh Happy Day
Thanks to todehls
Wednesday 29 October 2008
Friday 10 October 2008
Spiritualized - Leeds Academy, England, UK - 10th October 2008 - setlist
Spiritualized
Leeds Academy
10th October 2008
Taper: R&R
Equipment: iRiver H340 (Rockboxed) -> Unknown Mic
Audacity (WAV 16/44) Normalize & Track Split -> dBpowerAMP -> (FLAC)
01 Intro
02 Amazing Grace
03 You Lie You Cheat
04 Shine A Light
05 Cheapster
06 Soul On Fire
07 Sweet Talk
08 Sitting On Fire
09 Walking With Jesus
10 Oh Baby
11 Rated X
12 I Think I'm In Love
13 Lay Back In The Sun
14 Death Take Your Fiddle
15 Life Is A Problem
16 Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
17 She Kissed Me (It Felt Like A Hit)
18 Come Together
19 Take Me To The Other Side
20
21 Lord Can You Hear Me
I wasn't going to tape this as my usual mic packed in a few days ago but I decided to take my gear, including an unbranded mic (probably the one that originally came with the iRiver) and tape it anyway. The quality's not too bad, a bit distorted during the loud parts where the mic's overloaded, but I'm glad I taped in the end because the band are putting on such incredible shows at the moment. Hopefully other sources may appear for this gig, and if anyone is able to improve the quality on this and put it back up then please do. The newly refurbished Academy only re-opened during the week and whilst the sound system's ok, it's nothing spectacular. Anyway, big thanks to all the guys who uploaded the recent SPZ shows, let's hope some more appear soon, especially from the UK.
Leeds Academy
10th October 2008
Taper: R&R
Equipment: iRiver H340 (Rockboxed) -> Unknown Mic
Audacity (WAV 16/44) Normalize & Track Split -> dBpowerAMP -> (FLAC)
01 Intro
02 Amazing Grace
03 You Lie You Cheat
04 Shine A Light
05 Cheapster
06 Soul On Fire
07 Sweet Talk
08 Sitting On Fire
09 Walking With Jesus
10 Oh Baby
11 Rated X
12 I Think I'm In Love
13 Lay Back In The Sun
14 Death Take Your Fiddle
15 Life Is A Problem
16 Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
17 She Kissed Me (It Felt Like A Hit)
18 Come Together
19 Take Me To The Other Side
20
21 Lord Can You Hear Me
I wasn't going to tape this as my usual mic packed in a few days ago but I decided to take my gear, including an unbranded mic (probably the one that originally came with the iRiver) and tape it anyway. The quality's not too bad, a bit distorted during the loud parts where the mic's overloaded, but I'm glad I taped in the end because the band are putting on such incredible shows at the moment. Hopefully other sources may appear for this gig, and if anyone is able to improve the quality on this and put it back up then please do. The newly refurbished Academy only re-opened during the week and whilst the sound system's ok, it's nothing spectacular. Anyway, big thanks to all the guys who uploaded the recent SPZ shows, let's hope some more appear soon, especially from the UK.
Wednesday 8 October 2008
Spiritualized - ABC Glasgow, Scotland, UK - Wednesday 8th October 2008 - ticket picture, setlist, pictures - tufty
tufty D50 > WAV > audacity > FLAC > you
01 Intro
02 Amazing Grace
03 You Lie You Cheat
04 Shine A Light
05 Cheapster
06 Soul On Fire
07 Sweet Talk
08 Sitting On Fire
09 Walking With Jesus
10 Oh Baby
11 Rated X
12 I Think I'm In Love
13 Lay Back In The Sun
14 Death Take Your Fiddle
15 Life Is A Problem
16 Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
17 She Kissed Me (It Felt Like A Hit)
18 Come Together
19 Take Me To The Other Side
20 crowd
21 Lord Can You Hear Me
above pic thanks to high-lonesome
Tuesday 23 September 2008
Saturday 20 September 2008
Spiritualized - Street Scene, San Diego, California, USA - 20th September 2008 - pictures
Spiritualized Saturday 20th September 2008 San Diego Street Scene - Day 2 San Diego, California
pictures from here
http://www.contactmusic.com/spiritualized/pictures/26f985b0/spiritualized_2087956
pictures from here
http://www.contactmusic.com/spiritualized/pictures/26f985b0/spiritualized_2087956
Friday 19 September 2008
Wednesday 17 September 2008
Spiritualized - Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles - 17th September 2008 - supported by Cat Power and Nick Cave
Supported by Cat Power and Nick Cave
Monday 15 September 2008
Sunday 14 September 2008
Tuesday 9 September 2008
Saturday 30 August 2008
Spiritualized - Connect Festival, Inveraray Spiritualized - Saturday 30th August 2008 - pictures setlist bootleg
sony ECM7189;sony MZ-R909(LP2 mode) > sony MZRH1 > usb > sonicstage > WAV > FLAC > you
01 You Lie You Cheat
02 Shine a Light
03 Cheapster
04 Soul on Fire
05 Sweet Talk
06 Sitting on Fire
07 Walking with Jesus
08 Lay Back in the Sun
09 She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)
10 Come Together
11 Take Me to the Other Side
- Recorded by Deadotter -
- Transferred by Tufty -
pictures from here
thanks to scarpadog for above pic
Sunday 27 July 2008
Spiritualized - Terminal 5, New York, NY - 27th July 2008 - setlist, bootleg, pictures
this pic thanks to Joseph Roth - more here
Spiritualized
Terminal 5
New York, NY
July 27, 2008
SP-CMC-2 -> SP-SPSB-1 -> Olympus LS-10 -> 24bit -> Adobe Soundbooth -> normalized -> 16bit -> cuts/fades -> flac
01. You Lie You Cheat
02. Shine a Light
03. Cheapster
04. Electricity
05. Soul on Fire
06. Sitting on Fire
07. Walking With Jesus
08. Oh Baby
09. Rated X
10. Lay Back in the Sun
11. Death Take Your Fiddle
12. She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)
13. Come Together
14. Take Me to the Other Side
15. feedback
16. Lord Can You Hear Me
Pretty typical 2008 set. This recording is clean with only a few spots of excessive crowd issues. Terminal 5 is one of my least favorite venues ever. Despite the cavernous room, this came out pretty good.
taper - perfectrx
above pic thanks to selftitledmag - more here
thanks to davedecay for the link
Saturday 26 July 2008
Spiritualized - 2008-07-26 - Music Hall, Brooklyn, NY - 26th July 2008 - setlist, bootleg
Spiritualized
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Brooklyn, NY
July 26, 2008
SP-CMC-2 -> SP-SPSB-1 -> Olympus LS-10 -> 24bit -> Adobe Soundbooth -> normalized -> 16bit -> cuts/fades -> flac
01. Intro
02. You Lie You Cheat
03. Shine a Light
04. Cheapster
05. Electricity
06. Soul on Fire
07. Sweet Talk
08. Sitting on Fire
09. Walking With Jesus
10. Oh Baby
11. Rated X
12. Lay Back in the Sun
13. Death Take Your Fiddle
14. She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)
15. Come Together
16. Take Me to the Other Side
17. Lord Can You Hear Me
A somewhat intimate show at the Music Hall. Of all the dates I attended on this tour, this was likely my favorite. That room is great. This recording is pretty loud. The Brooklyn crowd noise is minimal.
taper - perfectrx
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Brooklyn, NY
July 26, 2008
SP-CMC-2 -> SP-SPSB-1 -> Olympus LS-10 -> 24bit -> Adobe Soundbooth -> normalized -> 16bit -> cuts/fades -> flac
01. Intro
02. You Lie You Cheat
03. Shine a Light
04. Cheapster
05. Electricity
06. Soul on Fire
07. Sweet Talk
08. Sitting on Fire
09. Walking With Jesus
10. Oh Baby
11. Rated X
12. Lay Back in the Sun
13. Death Take Your Fiddle
14. She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)
15. Come Together
16. Take Me to the Other Side
17. Lord Can You Hear Me
A somewhat intimate show at the Music Hall. Of all the dates I attended on this tour, this was likely my favorite. That room is great. This recording is pretty loud. The Brooklyn crowd noise is minimal.
taper - perfectrx
Tuesday 22 July 2008
Sunday 20 July 2008
Spiritualized - Pitchfork Festival, Union Park, Chicago - Sunday 20th July 2008 - video interview with Jason, pictures
pics thanks to Elizabeth Weinberg from here
Friday 18 July 2008
Friday 4 July 2008
Sunday 29 June 2008
Spiritualized John Peel Tent Glastonbury Sunday 29th June 2008
Sunday 15 June 2008
Spiritualized Norwegian Wood Festival-Oslo-Norway-Sunday 15th June 2008
01 Intro + You Lie You Cheat
02 Shine A Light
03 Cheapster
04 Soul On Fire
05 Sweet Talk
06 Sitting On Fire
07 She Kissed Me
08 Come Together
09 Take Me To The Other Side
10 Cop Shoot Cop
11 Lord Can You Hear Me
both pics thanks to Jorn Gjersoe
Tuesday 10 June 2008
Spiritualized - 2008-06-10 - Optimus Festival, Portugal
Spiritualized
2008-06-10 Festival Optimus Oeiras Alive, Algés, Portugal
Source: TV broadcast recorded on VHS.
Lineage: VHS (Master)>VHS Recorder Panasonic Hi-Fi Stereo NV F-55>Conceptronic Home Video Creator>Nero Vision>DVD
Video - MPEG-2 / 720x576 (PAL) / 4:3
Audio: 0xbd[0x80]:48000Hz 192 kb/s tot , stereo (2/0)
Setlist:
1. You Lie You Chat
2. Shine A Light
3. Cheapster
4. Soul On Fire
5. Sweet Talk
6. Sitting On Fire
7. She Kisses Me
8. Come Together
9. Take Me To The Other Side
Total Playing Time: 55' 32''
I need help with the setlist. The one above is from Benicassim, i believe the set is the same but need confirmation on this, Please!
Another Master of mine.
Enjoy, share, ABOVE ALL...DON'T SELL!!
Cheers
Z
2008-06-10 Festival Optimus Oeiras Alive, Algés, Portugal
Source: TV broadcast recorded on VHS.
Lineage: VHS (Master)>VHS Recorder Panasonic Hi-Fi Stereo NV F-55>Conceptronic Home Video Creator>Nero Vision>DVD
Video - MPEG-2 / 720x576 (PAL) / 4:3
Audio: 0xbd[0x80]:48000Hz 192 kb/s tot , stereo (2/0)
Setlist:
1. You Lie You Chat
2. Shine A Light
3. Cheapster
4. Soul On Fire
5. Sweet Talk
6. Sitting On Fire
7. She Kisses Me
8. Come Together
9. Take Me To The Other Side
Total Playing Time: 55' 32''
I need help with the setlist. The one above is from Benicassim, i believe the set is the same but need confirmation on this, Please!
Another Master of mine.
Enjoy, share, ABOVE ALL...DON'T SELL!!
Cheers
Z
Tuesday 27 May 2008
Monday 19 May 2008
Spiritualized Plug Sheffield - Monday 19th May 2008
You Lie You Cheat
Shine A Light
Lord, Let It Rain On Me
Cheapster
Soul On Fire
Let It Flow
Walkin With Jesus
Oh Baby
Sweet Talk
She Kissed Me
Rated X
Sitting On Fire
Take Your Time
Come Together
Take Me To The Otherside
Think I'm In Love
Lord, Can You Here Me.
I thought this was a great night, many highpoints , my personal favourite was let it flow which was sublime.
These are wave files so will take a little longer to download but not nearly as long as it took for me to upload them. :D
I kept you lie you cheat and shine a light as one track, as well as come together and take me too the otherside as thats how the band played it.
Hope you enjoy...
MrSWarning
Shine A Light
Lord, Let It Rain On Me
Cheapster
Soul On Fire
Let It Flow
Walkin With Jesus
Oh Baby
Sweet Talk
She Kissed Me
Rated X
Sitting On Fire
Take Your Time
Come Together
Take Me To The Otherside
Think I'm In Love
Lord, Can You Here Me.
I thought this was a great night, many highpoints , my personal favourite was let it flow which was sublime.
These are wave files so will take a little longer to download but not nearly as long as it took for me to upload them. :D
I kept you lie you cheat and shine a light as one track, as well as come together and take me too the otherside as thats how the band played it.
Hope you enjoy...
MrSWarning
Friday 16 May 2008
Spiritualized BBC Hub session 6 Music - May 16th 2008
Spiritualized
BBC Session ("Hub session" for George Lamb show)
BBC 6 Music Studios
London
U.K.
2008-05-16
Digital Satellite broadcast (live) 2008-05-16 MPEG1 layer 2 48kHz @ 160kbps:
BBC Radio 6 > DVB-S > Hauppauge Nova-S > DVBviewer > .ts > PVAStrumento > .mpa >
MpegSchnitt (to extract required audio).
1. Introduction / interview
2. Sweet Talk
3. Interview
4. Soul On Fire
5. Closing comments
Total Time : [13:34]
BBC Session ("Hub session" for George Lamb show)
BBC 6 Music Studios
London
U.K.
2008-05-16
Digital Satellite broadcast (live) 2008-05-16 MPEG1 layer 2 48kHz @ 160kbps:
BBC Radio 6 > DVB-S > Hauppauge Nova-S > DVBviewer > .ts > PVAStrumento > .mpa >
MpegSchnitt (to extract required audio).
1. Introduction / interview
2. Sweet Talk
3. Interview
4. Soul On Fire
5. Closing comments
Total Time : [13:34]
Tuesday 13 May 2008
Spiritualized BBC Studios Manchester UK - 13th May 2008
Spiritualized
13th May 2008
BBC Studios, Manchester, UK
Broadcast by BBC Radio 2 on 13th May 2008 for "Mark Radcliffe and Stuart
Maconie"
**[BBC Radio 2 is an FM and digital broadcaster. Bit rate on DAB radio is
160kbps, DVB-T and Digital Satellite 192kbps. This is the DVB-T. As this
is a lossy radio transmission at source it has not been bloated to flac,
following DIME guidelines.]**
DVB-T (192kbps / 48Khz) > Nebula DigiTV > Hard Disk MP2 > mp3DirectCut
Tracks
01 Chat
02 Sweet Talk
03 Chat
04 Soul On Fire
05 Chat II
06 Sitting On Fire
07 Chat III
thanks to paul b35
13th May 2008
BBC Studios, Manchester, UK
Broadcast by BBC Radio 2 on 13th May 2008 for "Mark Radcliffe and Stuart
Maconie"
**[BBC Radio 2 is an FM and digital broadcaster. Bit rate on DAB radio is
160kbps, DVB-T and Digital Satellite 192kbps. This is the DVB-T. As this
is a lossy radio transmission at source it has not been bloated to flac,
following DIME guidelines.]**
DVB-T (192kbps / 48Khz) > Nebula DigiTV > Hard Disk MP2 > mp3DirectCut
Tracks
01 Chat
02 Sweet Talk
03 Chat
04 Soul On Fire
05 Chat II
06 Sitting On Fire
07 Chat III
thanks to paul b35
Sunday 27 April 2008
Spiritualized - Coachella Festival, CA USA - April 27th 2008 - setlist video poster interview
Sunday 16 March 2008
Spiritualized The Observer Sunday 16th March 2008
Spirited away
Three years ago, Spiritualized's Jason Pierce lay so close to death that his girlfriend was offered grief counselling. Andy Capper hears about his near-miraculous comeback
Sunday March 16, 2008
The Observer
In June 2005, Jason Pierce was on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank, hammering out a D-chord over and over again, while Patti Smith and Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine played next to him. All three, like the crowd, were lost in the sound, enthralled by the beautiful, chaotic squall. These were high times, happy times. But just around the corner, the bad times were coming.
Article continues
Two days after the show, Pierce - aka J Spaceman - called up his friend, musician John Coxon, to tell him some scary news. He had been feeling unwell for a while and unable to breathe properly, he said, but that day he'd grown much worse. He had just been to visit his GP who told him to get to the A&E department of the nearest hospital as soon as possible.
Coxon rushed out of his east London flat, near the home Pierce shared with his girlfriend and two children, to find the singer ashen-faced, sitting on the steps of the GP's surgery, bewildered and barely able to breathe.
Within hours, Pierce was hooked up to drips and a ventilator in the intensive care ward of the Royal London hospital. He had double pneumonia and was having to take a breath every second. The illness causes the lungs' alveoli to fill with fluid, preventing oxygen from reaching the blood.
As his girlfriend, film-maker Juliette Larthe, rushed back from America, the life support machines bleeped and buzzed around the Spaceman, sounding, as he later said, 'oddly beautiful, like music'. There was little beautiful about the situation for Pierce's family and close friends. On his son Hank's third birthday, Larthe was offered grief counselling and friends showed Pierce photographs of his children in an effort to raise him out of what seemed like a terminal decline. 'It was terrifying,' recalls Coxon, 'really touch and go. He could just about communicate with us by scrawling words on a piece of paper. At one point I just thought that this was it. I was pretty sure he was going to die. The problem was that the bug wasn't responding to antibiotics - it was getting worse and worse. We thought he was a goner.'
Today, sipping a pint of coke upstairs at the bar of the Royal Oak pub on east London's Columbia Road, the 42-year old Pierce looks like a combination of Keith Richards and Rupert Everett. His voice is soft, and, although famously evasive in interviews (he once spent hours with the NME arguing that the line 'love in the middle of the afternoon / Just me, my spike and my arm and my spoon' from the song 'I Think I'm in Love' isn't necessarily about drugs), he's relaxed, cracking jokes the whole time. He also says the word 'beautiful' a lot.
Friends talk of the Spaceman being happier and more relaxed after his brush with death, but when I ask if the experience changed him, he shrugs it off and grins: 'It'd be nice to say so. I mean... hmmm, I don't know.
'Being in intensive care was actually OK for me. You just have to surrender yourself to the doctor. It's hard to think about your own death so the concern is invested in the people around you, not your own kind of thing, 'cause you're lying there thinking, "This is all right. Well, not all right but... I've been here before."
'In intensive care wards there's five or six of you in the same room,' he continues, 'and everyone's got optics and life support machines and they're all bleeping at different times and different frequencies. The only things I can remember are the noises around me. The not-really-true memories, you forget all that kind of shit. One by one, everybody else in the room died and I remember thinking, "Well, somebody's got to get out of here alive."'
After a month, he hobbled out of hospital weighing six stone (which, considering he's 5ft 10 in his silver shoes, made him very thin indeed). Pierce 'did what any sane person would do' after nearly dying from double pneumonia - went out and 'tested his body to see if it still worked like it used to'. While his new year's resolution to start smoking again didn't work out quite as he envisaged, he's still prepared to give it another try.
Spiritualized might just be the most undervalued band of their generation and Pierce something of a lost rock messiah. 'He's not obsessed by celebrity culture,' says Alan McGee, the former Creation Records boss, 'but for me he's as important to British culture as Neil Young is to American culture.' Representing a younger generation, Jamie Reynolds from Klaxons says: 'I can't think of any other contemporary artist willing to bare their souls and blow my ears in such a subtle manner. He is a hero.'
Pierce recently remixed a track for Yoko Ono, 'Walking On Thin Ice', and she tells me 'nothing prepared me for what he did, which somehow managed to keep the power of the original but also radically altered the track. I feel that we are kindred spirits.'
Spiritualized were formed out of the ashes of Spacemen 3, the group Pierce started as a teenager in the mid-Eighties with his friend Pete Kember - aka Sonic Boom. The two had been born on the same day, 19 November 1965, in Rugby, Warwickshire, and shared a fascination with old jazz, psychedelia and Stooges records.
Their shows would consist of them playing in the dark, sat down on chairs with their backs to the audience while intense strobe lights caused less hardy members of the audience to faint.
With each record, Spacemen 3 developed their sound beyond simple garage rock drone and blended in free jazz, orchestral arrangements and spirituals. Sonic's work increasingly went towards the experimental but Pierce started emerging as the stronger songwriter of the two.
On their last album, Recurring (1991), Pierce and Kember each had one side of songs. The two, it was said, could no longer stand to be in the same room any more. To promote its release they conducted interviews separately. In one, Kember said: 'One of the main reasons the band split was because I felt Jason was aping everything I was doing. Any direction I made towards something different, he would just follow.'
Within months of the two going their own ways, Pierce had formed Spiritualized, who took their name from the label on a bottle of absinthe. His girlfriend, Kate Radley, joined on keyboards after the release of their first single, their ethereal, narcotically charged version of Chip Taylor's 'Any Way That You Want Me'. The track acted as the template for the Spiritualized sound; music that was based on simple rock'n'roll, blues and gospel, with layers of drones, horns, flutes, strings and heavy guitars, and improvisational jazz added to the mix.
Pierce's lyrics, meanwhile, explored the highest of highs and the subsequent crashing lows. Next to the paeans to heartbreak, longing and sadness were wry, dirty rock anthems that celebrated as getting as fucked up as you possibly could.
Both elements were present on Spiritualized's 1997 album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which won universal acclaim at the same time as Pierce was appearing in the tabloid gossip pages, after Radley had left him and married the Verve's singer Richard Ashcroft. While many reviewers suggested the album was about his relationship with Radley, Pierce has always brushed aside any suggestions that his life then was reflected in his music.
The idea that Spiritualized was Pierce's own grand, epic vision of life was cemented by the dismissal of three of the group's members in 1999 and only confirmed by the promo videos for 2001's epic Let it Come Down, which featured Pierce striding across Mount Etna dressed as an astronaut and in another, made by Juliette Larthe, suspended high above the ground by a helicopter.
Made at huge expense, Let it Come Down featured more than 100 musicians and was, claimed some critics, too ambitious for its own good. After a change of record company, Amazing Grace (2003), featured an outstretched arm on its cover that nodded to two of the group's lyrical obsessions: Jesus and dope. The -standout track, 'The Ballad of Richie Lee', was about the suicide of Pierce's friend, the lead singer of -Acetone, a US space-rock troupe. The most morbid, moving and ragged song that Pierce had recorded, it provided some indication at least of what was to follow on their next album, which was to end up being titled Songs in A&E
Recorded before Pierce was taken ill, the album's death- and life-obsessed subject matter make it touching and harrowing. New songs such as 'Death Take Your Fiddle' and, especially, 'Sitting on Fire' - which sounds as if Pierce recorded the vocal from his deathbed - are eerily prescient, while 'Don't Hold Me Close', a tender duet with film-maker Harmony Korine's wife, Rachel, recalls Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.
Happily, Pierce can still make belligerent music too. The opener, 'Sweet Talk Like an Angel', seems to be about Bush and Iraq: 'And you say where'd you stand on the war? / Well, you stand right where you stood before / As far from the bullets and bombs as they fall.' Throughout the album there are interludes of church chimes, otherworldly beeps and odd noises. In places it could be mistaken for an album of elevator music made for funeral homes and released on electronic label Warp. It is quite a trip.
'When I got out of hospital I thought I better go check when my album was out,' says Pierce. 'When I got into the studio it sounded like it was all written post-hospital. It was harrowing... emotional. It was really hard to have written something that seemed to have pre-empted events. It was impossible to finish.'
Was it hard to listen to?
'Well, yes. But it was also about a time that was gone, and I got to thinking that what's most important about any form of art, whether you're writing, painting or making music, is the physical process of doing it.
'Everybody thinks the finished product is the most important thing because that's the end result, the bit that everybody gets to see. But by the time the end result goes out, I'm finished with it, you know, I'm never going to listen to it again. But I had to somehow get it finished.'
Unfortunately, before Pierce would start to master the songs he found so hard to listen to, there was further dreadful news. His close friend, the actress Samantha Morton, suffered a stroke shortly after Jason had come out of hospital in July 2005. 'Jason and I have been mirroring each other,' Morton tells me. 'He was really sick and then I had a stroke at the beginning of last year. Jason and Juliette were looking after me and my daughter while I was rehabilitating and had to learn to walk again. Their friendship knows no bounds. He was the only person I knew who understood what that was like, being near to death. He's just an incredible person. He's very courageous, and he helped me get through it all.
While visiting Morton, Pierce noticed a screenplay at the foot of her hospital bed. It was by Harmony Korine, who had previously written and directed art-house favourites Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. The screenplay was for his new movie, Mister Lonely, in which Morton plays a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who is friends with a Michael Jackson impersonator. Both live in a weird commune in Scotland.
'While Sam was ill, I took the script while kind of gazing up towards the ceiling, hoping she wouldn't notice I'd taken it,' Pierce says. 'Then I wrote a piece of music about it, returned the script and waited to see what Harmony thought. I met him briefly before - he'd come to my birthday party - but I'd been too fucked to talk with him.'
Soon after writing the music, Pierce was one of a handful of artists booked to play a concert at the Barbican in April 2006 in tribute to the American musician and artist Daniel Johnston. Despite having been a performer since the mid-Eighties, Pierce was bereft of confidence after his near-death experience ('Don't get me wrong, I've never really been confident'), but Juliette Larthe convinced him to call up his friends at the London Community Gospel Choir and recruit a string section. Happily, the subsequent performance was a hit.
After the show, Korine approached Pierce and the two agreed to develop the music that Pierce had started for Mister Lonely, leading to a friendship that has helped Pierce regain his creativity. Korine told me: 'I have always loved the music that Jason Spaceman makes. The Spaceman 3 were one of my favourite bands growing up. I met him backstage at a show in London and we discussed him making music for the film. It was a great experience. Jason makes a special kind of narcotic gospel music that can fill you up inside.
'His music for the movie is really ethereal and moody and works perfectly with the story. He would just go away and disappear and record stuff and then send it to us. He's a dreamer. He's a crazy bastard. I love him.'
After Pierce's performance at the Barbican, word spread about his renewed sense of purpose and the acoustic set metamorphosed into Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines. With a four-piece gospel choir and small string section, Pierce combined Spiritualized / Spacemen 3 songs with covers of songs by artists such as Johnston. The first Acoustic Mainlines show at the Royal Festival Hall in October 2006 remains one of the most moving, beautiful concerts I have ever seen. When the band played an acoustic version of 'Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space' with an extended ending which segued into Elvis's 'Can't Help Falling in Love', many of the audience were on their feet, their cheeks streaked with tears. Since then I've attended as many of the SAM shows as I possibly can, culminating in last year's beautiful Christmas show at Islington's Union Chapel, at which, with the venue bathed in candle light, the audience was transfixed.
Does Pierce ever feel choked by the music himself?
'Well, at the Edinburgh show last year - I keep going back to that one because it was a real high - when we played 'Ladies and Gentlemen' everybody in the audience stood up at the end wouldn't sit down - and this was in the middle of the show. I turned round to the choir and they were all crying, big tears rolling off their cheeks, so I started crying too.
'It's happened so many times on the tour, and I'm like, "Why is that?"'
Kevin Shields says: 'The reason why those shows were so powerful is because everything Jason does is 100 per cent real.'
And the importance of 'realness; in his art, caused Pierce to turn down a large undisclosed fee to reform Spacemen 3 to play festivals this year.
"Why would I do that?' he asks, looking baffled.
'I mean, I would have liked to go and watch the battle of Waterloo when it happened but that doesn't mean I'm going to go and sit in a field somewhere and watch people act it out.'
Pierce has since gone on to play Acoustic Mainlines shows all around the world, including Harlem's Apollo Theatre in November 2007, for which he recruited five gospel singers from Queen's to sing lines such as: 'The trouble with the straight and the narrow is it's so thin I keep sliding off to the side / And the devil makes good use of these hands of mine'.
'I always wanted to go to the Apollo. I guess I've got to get a new dream now,' Pierce says.
Pierce's rehabilitation quickly gathered pace and soon he was putting the finishing touches to Songs in A&E. The sleeve, which features photography by Anton Corbijn, utilises paraphernalia from the intensive care ward as quasi-Catholic symbolism.
'The decision to use the little plastic catheters that connect the IV drip to your vein was because they kind of looked like crosses. They go in here like that,' he says, pulling up his sleeve. 'They are so small and simple that people don't really place much importance on them. For some people, though, these small, simple things are the most important things in the world. They save lives.'
· Songs in A&E is released by Universal on 26 May. Mister Lonely is on UK release now
Three years ago, Spiritualized's Jason Pierce lay so close to death that his girlfriend was offered grief counselling. Andy Capper hears about his near-miraculous comeback
Sunday March 16, 2008
The Observer
In June 2005, Jason Pierce was on stage at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank, hammering out a D-chord over and over again, while Patti Smith and Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine played next to him. All three, like the crowd, were lost in the sound, enthralled by the beautiful, chaotic squall. These were high times, happy times. But just around the corner, the bad times were coming.
Article continues
Two days after the show, Pierce - aka J Spaceman - called up his friend, musician John Coxon, to tell him some scary news. He had been feeling unwell for a while and unable to breathe properly, he said, but that day he'd grown much worse. He had just been to visit his GP who told him to get to the A&E department of the nearest hospital as soon as possible.
Coxon rushed out of his east London flat, near the home Pierce shared with his girlfriend and two children, to find the singer ashen-faced, sitting on the steps of the GP's surgery, bewildered and barely able to breathe.
Within hours, Pierce was hooked up to drips and a ventilator in the intensive care ward of the Royal London hospital. He had double pneumonia and was having to take a breath every second. The illness causes the lungs' alveoli to fill with fluid, preventing oxygen from reaching the blood.
As his girlfriend, film-maker Juliette Larthe, rushed back from America, the life support machines bleeped and buzzed around the Spaceman, sounding, as he later said, 'oddly beautiful, like music'. There was little beautiful about the situation for Pierce's family and close friends. On his son Hank's third birthday, Larthe was offered grief counselling and friends showed Pierce photographs of his children in an effort to raise him out of what seemed like a terminal decline. 'It was terrifying,' recalls Coxon, 'really touch and go. He could just about communicate with us by scrawling words on a piece of paper. At one point I just thought that this was it. I was pretty sure he was going to die. The problem was that the bug wasn't responding to antibiotics - it was getting worse and worse. We thought he was a goner.'
Today, sipping a pint of coke upstairs at the bar of the Royal Oak pub on east London's Columbia Road, the 42-year old Pierce looks like a combination of Keith Richards and Rupert Everett. His voice is soft, and, although famously evasive in interviews (he once spent hours with the NME arguing that the line 'love in the middle of the afternoon / Just me, my spike and my arm and my spoon' from the song 'I Think I'm in Love' isn't necessarily about drugs), he's relaxed, cracking jokes the whole time. He also says the word 'beautiful' a lot.
Friends talk of the Spaceman being happier and more relaxed after his brush with death, but when I ask if the experience changed him, he shrugs it off and grins: 'It'd be nice to say so. I mean... hmmm, I don't know.
'Being in intensive care was actually OK for me. You just have to surrender yourself to the doctor. It's hard to think about your own death so the concern is invested in the people around you, not your own kind of thing, 'cause you're lying there thinking, "This is all right. Well, not all right but... I've been here before."
'In intensive care wards there's five or six of you in the same room,' he continues, 'and everyone's got optics and life support machines and they're all bleeping at different times and different frequencies. The only things I can remember are the noises around me. The not-really-true memories, you forget all that kind of shit. One by one, everybody else in the room died and I remember thinking, "Well, somebody's got to get out of here alive."'
After a month, he hobbled out of hospital weighing six stone (which, considering he's 5ft 10 in his silver shoes, made him very thin indeed). Pierce 'did what any sane person would do' after nearly dying from double pneumonia - went out and 'tested his body to see if it still worked like it used to'. While his new year's resolution to start smoking again didn't work out quite as he envisaged, he's still prepared to give it another try.
Spiritualized might just be the most undervalued band of their generation and Pierce something of a lost rock messiah. 'He's not obsessed by celebrity culture,' says Alan McGee, the former Creation Records boss, 'but for me he's as important to British culture as Neil Young is to American culture.' Representing a younger generation, Jamie Reynolds from Klaxons says: 'I can't think of any other contemporary artist willing to bare their souls and blow my ears in such a subtle manner. He is a hero.'
Pierce recently remixed a track for Yoko Ono, 'Walking On Thin Ice', and she tells me 'nothing prepared me for what he did, which somehow managed to keep the power of the original but also radically altered the track. I feel that we are kindred spirits.'
Spiritualized were formed out of the ashes of Spacemen 3, the group Pierce started as a teenager in the mid-Eighties with his friend Pete Kember - aka Sonic Boom. The two had been born on the same day, 19 November 1965, in Rugby, Warwickshire, and shared a fascination with old jazz, psychedelia and Stooges records.
Their shows would consist of them playing in the dark, sat down on chairs with their backs to the audience while intense strobe lights caused less hardy members of the audience to faint.
With each record, Spacemen 3 developed their sound beyond simple garage rock drone and blended in free jazz, orchestral arrangements and spirituals. Sonic's work increasingly went towards the experimental but Pierce started emerging as the stronger songwriter of the two.
On their last album, Recurring (1991), Pierce and Kember each had one side of songs. The two, it was said, could no longer stand to be in the same room any more. To promote its release they conducted interviews separately. In one, Kember said: 'One of the main reasons the band split was because I felt Jason was aping everything I was doing. Any direction I made towards something different, he would just follow.'
Within months of the two going their own ways, Pierce had formed Spiritualized, who took their name from the label on a bottle of absinthe. His girlfriend, Kate Radley, joined on keyboards after the release of their first single, their ethereal, narcotically charged version of Chip Taylor's 'Any Way That You Want Me'. The track acted as the template for the Spiritualized sound; music that was based on simple rock'n'roll, blues and gospel, with layers of drones, horns, flutes, strings and heavy guitars, and improvisational jazz added to the mix.
Pierce's lyrics, meanwhile, explored the highest of highs and the subsequent crashing lows. Next to the paeans to heartbreak, longing and sadness were wry, dirty rock anthems that celebrated as getting as fucked up as you possibly could.
Both elements were present on Spiritualized's 1997 album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which won universal acclaim at the same time as Pierce was appearing in the tabloid gossip pages, after Radley had left him and married the Verve's singer Richard Ashcroft. While many reviewers suggested the album was about his relationship with Radley, Pierce has always brushed aside any suggestions that his life then was reflected in his music.
The idea that Spiritualized was Pierce's own grand, epic vision of life was cemented by the dismissal of three of the group's members in 1999 and only confirmed by the promo videos for 2001's epic Let it Come Down, which featured Pierce striding across Mount Etna dressed as an astronaut and in another, made by Juliette Larthe, suspended high above the ground by a helicopter.
Made at huge expense, Let it Come Down featured more than 100 musicians and was, claimed some critics, too ambitious for its own good. After a change of record company, Amazing Grace (2003), featured an outstretched arm on its cover that nodded to two of the group's lyrical obsessions: Jesus and dope. The -standout track, 'The Ballad of Richie Lee', was about the suicide of Pierce's friend, the lead singer of -Acetone, a US space-rock troupe. The most morbid, moving and ragged song that Pierce had recorded, it provided some indication at least of what was to follow on their next album, which was to end up being titled Songs in A&E
Recorded before Pierce was taken ill, the album's death- and life-obsessed subject matter make it touching and harrowing. New songs such as 'Death Take Your Fiddle' and, especially, 'Sitting on Fire' - which sounds as if Pierce recorded the vocal from his deathbed - are eerily prescient, while 'Don't Hold Me Close', a tender duet with film-maker Harmony Korine's wife, Rachel, recalls Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.
Happily, Pierce can still make belligerent music too. The opener, 'Sweet Talk Like an Angel', seems to be about Bush and Iraq: 'And you say where'd you stand on the war? / Well, you stand right where you stood before / As far from the bullets and bombs as they fall.' Throughout the album there are interludes of church chimes, otherworldly beeps and odd noises. In places it could be mistaken for an album of elevator music made for funeral homes and released on electronic label Warp. It is quite a trip.
'When I got out of hospital I thought I better go check when my album was out,' says Pierce. 'When I got into the studio it sounded like it was all written post-hospital. It was harrowing... emotional. It was really hard to have written something that seemed to have pre-empted events. It was impossible to finish.'
Was it hard to listen to?
'Well, yes. But it was also about a time that was gone, and I got to thinking that what's most important about any form of art, whether you're writing, painting or making music, is the physical process of doing it.
'Everybody thinks the finished product is the most important thing because that's the end result, the bit that everybody gets to see. But by the time the end result goes out, I'm finished with it, you know, I'm never going to listen to it again. But I had to somehow get it finished.'
Unfortunately, before Pierce would start to master the songs he found so hard to listen to, there was further dreadful news. His close friend, the actress Samantha Morton, suffered a stroke shortly after Jason had come out of hospital in July 2005. 'Jason and I have been mirroring each other,' Morton tells me. 'He was really sick and then I had a stroke at the beginning of last year. Jason and Juliette were looking after me and my daughter while I was rehabilitating and had to learn to walk again. Their friendship knows no bounds. He was the only person I knew who understood what that was like, being near to death. He's just an incredible person. He's very courageous, and he helped me get through it all.
While visiting Morton, Pierce noticed a screenplay at the foot of her hospital bed. It was by Harmony Korine, who had previously written and directed art-house favourites Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. The screenplay was for his new movie, Mister Lonely, in which Morton plays a Marilyn Monroe impersonator who is friends with a Michael Jackson impersonator. Both live in a weird commune in Scotland.
'While Sam was ill, I took the script while kind of gazing up towards the ceiling, hoping she wouldn't notice I'd taken it,' Pierce says. 'Then I wrote a piece of music about it, returned the script and waited to see what Harmony thought. I met him briefly before - he'd come to my birthday party - but I'd been too fucked to talk with him.'
Soon after writing the music, Pierce was one of a handful of artists booked to play a concert at the Barbican in April 2006 in tribute to the American musician and artist Daniel Johnston. Despite having been a performer since the mid-Eighties, Pierce was bereft of confidence after his near-death experience ('Don't get me wrong, I've never really been confident'), but Juliette Larthe convinced him to call up his friends at the London Community Gospel Choir and recruit a string section. Happily, the subsequent performance was a hit.
After the show, Korine approached Pierce and the two agreed to develop the music that Pierce had started for Mister Lonely, leading to a friendship that has helped Pierce regain his creativity. Korine told me: 'I have always loved the music that Jason Spaceman makes. The Spaceman 3 were one of my favourite bands growing up. I met him backstage at a show in London and we discussed him making music for the film. It was a great experience. Jason makes a special kind of narcotic gospel music that can fill you up inside.
'His music for the movie is really ethereal and moody and works perfectly with the story. He would just go away and disappear and record stuff and then send it to us. He's a dreamer. He's a crazy bastard. I love him.'
After Pierce's performance at the Barbican, word spread about his renewed sense of purpose and the acoustic set metamorphosed into Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines. With a four-piece gospel choir and small string section, Pierce combined Spiritualized / Spacemen 3 songs with covers of songs by artists such as Johnston. The first Acoustic Mainlines show at the Royal Festival Hall in October 2006 remains one of the most moving, beautiful concerts I have ever seen. When the band played an acoustic version of 'Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space' with an extended ending which segued into Elvis's 'Can't Help Falling in Love', many of the audience were on their feet, their cheeks streaked with tears. Since then I've attended as many of the SAM shows as I possibly can, culminating in last year's beautiful Christmas show at Islington's Union Chapel, at which, with the venue bathed in candle light, the audience was transfixed.
Does Pierce ever feel choked by the music himself?
'Well, at the Edinburgh show last year - I keep going back to that one because it was a real high - when we played 'Ladies and Gentlemen' everybody in the audience stood up at the end wouldn't sit down - and this was in the middle of the show. I turned round to the choir and they were all crying, big tears rolling off their cheeks, so I started crying too.
'It's happened so many times on the tour, and I'm like, "Why is that?"'
Kevin Shields says: 'The reason why those shows were so powerful is because everything Jason does is 100 per cent real.'
And the importance of 'realness; in his art, caused Pierce to turn down a large undisclosed fee to reform Spacemen 3 to play festivals this year.
"Why would I do that?' he asks, looking baffled.
'I mean, I would have liked to go and watch the battle of Waterloo when it happened but that doesn't mean I'm going to go and sit in a field somewhere and watch people act it out.'
Pierce has since gone on to play Acoustic Mainlines shows all around the world, including Harlem's Apollo Theatre in November 2007, for which he recruited five gospel singers from Queen's to sing lines such as: 'The trouble with the straight and the narrow is it's so thin I keep sliding off to the side / And the devil makes good use of these hands of mine'.
'I always wanted to go to the Apollo. I guess I've got to get a new dream now,' Pierce says.
Pierce's rehabilitation quickly gathered pace and soon he was putting the finishing touches to Songs in A&E. The sleeve, which features photography by Anton Corbijn, utilises paraphernalia from the intensive care ward as quasi-Catholic symbolism.
'The decision to use the little plastic catheters that connect the IV drip to your vein was because they kind of looked like crosses. They go in here like that,' he says, pulling up his sleeve. 'They are so small and simple that people don't really place much importance on them. For some people, though, these small, simple things are the most important things in the world. They save lives.'
· Songs in A&E is released by Universal on 26 May. Mister Lonely is on UK release now
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