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Spiritualized.
For the devout Spiritualized fan, it's not a difficult image to conjure: seven men on a stage, in the eye of a distorted, shimmering guitar storm, droning, wrenching, heaving like the very oceans of rock'n'roll. Slightly to the side of centre stage, the man whose imagination draws forth this cacophony, Jason Pierce, sits quite still, guitar on his lap, eyes opening only twice during the entire set.
The next day Pierce was on the phone from Melbourne and I wasn't sure what to expect: the drugged-up, heartbroken Pierce caricature or the heartbroken, drugged-up one. You could've knocked me down with a Tally-Ho when I was greeted by a gently spoken, thoughtful and passionate man with a bee in his bonnet about the music business and a quiet determination to make great records.
Almost twenty years on from Pierce's first album with Spacemen 3, and spurred on by his work with a group of jazz experimentalists on the second Spring Heeled Jack album, Pierce found a new way of looking at recording music that was as far removed as possible from the grandiose compositions that he perfected on 'Ladies And Gentlemen We're Floating In Space' and 'Let It Come Down'.
"It's about performance, really. A lot of rock'n'roll is this very well rehearsed talent, like watching somebody juggle. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what you're juggling, whether it's knives or fire or sticks, you're only fucking juggling. I wanted to make a record that was more in the spirit of spontaneous music, so we gave the band the songs on the morning of the day we were going to record them. We'd made two very beautifully constructed and produced albums and I wanted to make a record that had no production. I recorded it into a microphone in a day and that's what you're gonna get when you hear it. We didn't change the sound of my voice and we didn't change the sound of the guitar amps, and that's kind of what you get on 'Amazing Grace.'"
If most of us perceive Spiritualized as being Jason Pierce and his band, Pierce is quick to point out how integral each member of the group is to every song they record: "I don't instruct people. I get great performances from people by allowing them freedom. I don't get great performances by having people looking over their shoulders to make sure they're doing it right. You get session performances like that, you know? The thing that people always talk about in music but I don't think you hear too often is when they talk about soul in music. What you're actually delivering that song through is pieces of wood with metal strings stretched over them, or a length of metal tubes with a couple of mouths. It's not the easiest thing with which to express yourself, and I don't think people explore that expression enough."
For all this talk about the sound of Spiritualized, though, there's a romantic, druggy and often religious language that is just as defining as the band's fuzzed-up blues and vibrating ballads. As it turns out, this is where most of Pierce's songs begin.
"I love that kind of language you get in rock'n'roll. You can
say really dumb, quite trite things like 'Be my, be my little
baby now' or 'I can't stop loving you', but when you apply those
really simple words to music they become almost better than
the greatest poetry. You get a line like 'Nothing hurts like
the pain of someone you love' or 'Baby I can't say any more
than I know' and you kind of know just by saying the line what
kind of song it's gonna be. It's like She Kissed Me And It
Felt Like A Hit: it was only ever gonna sound like the song
that came out... I think that rock'n'roll is almost like a kind
of language, almost like when the Catholic Church rubs up against
local tradition, and you get things like New Orleans or African
kinds of music. Some of it is the language of rock'n'roll."
For Spiritualized, this language translates into some beautiful CD art and a string of increasingly ambitious and engaging film clips. It's understandable, then, that Pierce is confused by the code of mediocrity that pervades most of the music industry.
"Most promotional stuff for people's music costs five time more than the music. When you get people into marketing their music they do the exact opposite of what they always say they don't do with their music. If somebody came to you and said 'Will you make us a radio-friendly track?' everybody would say 'Hey, hang about, that's not where it's at!' But if people come and say 'Will you make an MTV-friendly video,' everybody goes 'Yeah, sure. Where do we sign?'
"Most people know that the charts only reflect the efficiency of the selling of that record in that week, but you're either making a great record or you're not. The major record labels are throwing records out like ballast, like their balloon's going down and they've got Hits Of The Seventies: here's another piece of shit to go and buy. I just want to turn that around and say that we're really proud of this and here it is, and look how beautiful it is."
Mission accomplished.
Mark Scruby
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'Amazing Grace' is out now through Shock.
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