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In a year that saw the biggest and best batch of headphone symphonies Britain has shipped since the '70s, Spiritualized's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space has risen to the top -- both literally and figuratively.
Last November, Spiritualized played the "highest show ever," performing in a sky pod two thirds of the way up Toronto's CN Tower. While Guinness is still deciding whether or not to recognize the feat in their Book of Records, another Spiritualized milestone is indisputable. NME, England's premiere music publication, recently voted Ladies and Gentlemen its album of the year û passing over the latest from Radiohead, Oasis and The Verve.
Spiritualized emerged from the wreckage of Spacemen 3, an English psychedelic band replete with all the touchstones of that genre, including hypnotic guitar drones and their own posturing mantra, "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to."
Lead singer and creative epicenter Jason Pierce piloted his side project out of the slowly descending Spacemen from 1989 to 1991, taking it further away from the old band's sound and image with each release.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the band's third full-length effort, is a harrowing, direct work about loss and heartache, about hiding the pain from yourself and from others. Granted, these are not new themes in music, but Jason Pierce's straightfoward lyrics and understated delivery make them somehow more real.
Pierce also gets props for veracity on the album's instrumentation. Instead of samples, synthesizers and searing guitar solos, Ladies and Gentlemen boasts complex arrangements that utilize guitars, but also rely heavily on acoustic instruments like harmonica, strings, horns, piano and even a full gospel choir.
JAMTV spoke with Jason on the afternoon before a show at Chicago's Metro. Chasing away the last tendrils of sleep with one thin French cigarette after another, he spoke in a roundabout way of his influences, future plans and theories as composer of what is arguably the quintessential headphone symphony album of the '90s.
JAMTV: Your gig at Toronto's CN tower was supposed to be one stop on a "Tall Buildings Tour" that didn't quite pan out. What happened?
Jason Pierce: The tall buildings thing was kind of an afterthought. The main thing I wanted to do was the highest show on Earth, which was the CN Tower. The rest was like, 'If we're going to play that, let's try and sort out some other places like the Sears Tower, the Space Needle in Seattle, the Twin Towers in New York. Most times, we had it all set up, then someone started to ring up and hassle the places to find out more information about it. I think they got scared off. They don't need that kind of publicity. It was too bad people made such a big deal of it.
The Toronto show was something else, though. I'd been trying to get it for nearly two years. I guess now, the one benefit of having more people know about our record is that more people in the record company start listening to our ideas. Most of our ideas over the last seven years have fallen on deaf ears.
What other ideas have you had?
We spent a lot of time with the Prague government trying to get a show in Wenceslas Square. We got permission to set up a whole show there with choirs and horn sections and strings and everything. For one reason or another, it didn't happen.
Now thatLadies And Gentlemen has been out nearly a year, how do you feel about it?
I haven't really got my mind on that record. It's finished, gone, sort of thing. We're working on playing the stuff live, and playing other stuff live, so I've been working on doing that instead of checking on the record's progress.
Do I still like it? Yeah, sure. I like all the records we put out. I don't release them until they're as good as they're ever going to get.
So is the next one going to be better?
Yeah, sure... well, it isn't going to go over the same ground. We've already covered that ground. I can make another 10 albums like the last one because I know how to make them. I could make them quicker than the last one, too, because I know how to rectify the mistakes we made and all that.
What mistakes?
We pursued the wrong people initially, so I used the time to travel around and meet people. I guess a lot of the money that went to travel should have paid for mixing.
Did you have a good time traveling, though?
I had a great time. I went to New York and met Dr. John. I met [Alex Chilton producer] Jim Dickinson in Memphis. I stayed with Paul Leary [who worked with Roky Erickson and Meat Puppets] for a while in Austin.
Are you an Alex Chilton fan?
Yeah! Last time I saw him he was doing some kind of lounge/jazz set. The time before that it was amazing. He had a baritone sax, which is probably my favorite live instrument. They were kicking, they sounded great.
Why is the baritone sax your favorite live instrument?
I love bass instruments. I've written a whole symphony for bass instruments for the next record. It's all bass, harmonica and other bass instruments.
Speaking of favorite instruments, how did you choose the instrumentation for this album? You've got harmonica, which is a pretty limited paletteà
I don't think that's limited at all. I think it's limited by people's imagination for it. My harmonica player, Sean, kind of comes from the Roky Erickson/Captain Beefheart school. I think most people come from the kind of 12-bar blues/club harmonica sort of school.
Well, we are in Chicago.
There you go. It's kind of limiting here, I guess.
In any case, you've got harmonica. You've got horns instead of synthesizers. You've got strings, and you've got a lot of gospel in there. Were those choices that you made before going into the studio?
Yes. I guess your limited palette is actually right. It's actually a very normal instrumental setup. It's quite a normal studio session, the type used in all of what I think are the best studio sessions -- like Elvis in Memphis or Sly Stone. It's quite a normal vocabulary of sound.
It's not like we were trying to lay theramins against glockenspiels against sub-bass noises or whatever. And I guess that's why I wanted to do it, to make something out of those sounds. To make something that sounded as original as the sessions I'd heard and liked in that way.
You mention Sly Stone. I've heard your record compared to Sly's Riot.
It was my comparison. It wasn't a means of saying that our album was like that. Like I said earlier, that was one of the albums I used... I wanted to make a record as unique as those records, using the instrumentation of those records. I wasn't trying to make a unique record along the lines of Brian Wilson or the Beatles or that kind of stuff. I was trying to use the normal instrumentation. I used Sly Stone because he used that kind of normal, basic group session type thing and made and album that was so unique.
"Cop Shoot Cop," to me, seems really indicative of that philosophy. When you listen to all the instruments separately, they all sound perfectly normal -- edgy, but harmless. Put together, there's this sort of mad, engaging chaos. It kind of reminds me of Charlie Mingus' Epitaph.
Yeah, it reminds me of Miles Davis in the '70s with Pangaea and the likes. Also, that and "No God Only Religion" remind me a lot of English drum 'n' bass -- but not that they use the formula for drum 'n' bass.
I think that [drum 'n' bass] was a big influence on the album, without taking the vocabulary, but trying to get the excitement of that music. Going out and hearing people playing drum 'n' bass in England is kind of like I'd imagine it was seeing an MC5 show in the '60s. Everybody involved -- not just the musicians, but the audience as well, feels the excitement.
Is Spiritualized more of a continuation of Spacemen 3 or a departure?
It's a continuation. The roots of what we do are in the stuff we did with Spacemen. Spiritualized was set up more to be a live band. With all the kind of experiments I was doing in the studio with Spacemen, the live show was very cabaret. It was just like going through the motions, doing the hardcore stuff 'cause that's what the fans seemed to get off on.
Do you still think that your music is music to take drugs to?
No. I guess you can, but it's not a prerequisite. I think that
tag for Spacemen 3 was more that we were 17 and we wanted to get
people to notice what we were doing. And I guess we were more
involved with [drugs] then. At that time, it was particularly
radical to say those kinds of things. It wasn't like the kind of
music industry now where everyone's prepared to talk about that as
much as they can. It's almost a macho thing now -- who takes the
most, who can do the most.