SPIRITUALIZED
Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (1997)
The ambitious scope of Ladies And Gentlemen… took in everything from the blissed-out sweep of the title track to the 16-minute free jazz epic “Cop Shoot Cop”. Its success was perhaps all the more remarkable considering the number of stumbling blocks – both personal and professional – that Pierce encountered along the way…
The songs were written ahead of my split with Kate [Radley, who left Pierce for The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft]. I didn’t split up with Kate and then write “Broken Heart” – that would be quite a weird thing to do. Honestly, I’d been listening to lots of Patsy Cline and Jimmy Scott, songs full of absolutely heartbreaking things. Where do lines like “Little’s Js a fucking mess” and “There’s a hole in my arm where the money goes in” come from? All of that happened before the split. And “the hole in my arm” – that’s a John Prine line. Can you make the connection between that and heroin? Yeah, and one should.
We’d done an amazing tour through America and we’d started playing songs like “Cop Shoot Cop” and “Electricity”, so this was the first time we were playing songs live ahead of recording an album. Initially, we put down live takes, they’re not studio constructs. We ran into a problem with the Elvis Presley estate over the title track. I sang a close harmony of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” over the end of the song. The label pressed 50,000 copies before Elvis’ people came back and said, “Yeah, you can use it, but it has to become our song.” I asked if we could share the writing credits, but they were adamant that if that piece remained then it would be called “Only Fools Rush In” and credited to their songwriters. So I took it out. It was like a Spacemen 3 flashback.
The album came in foil blister packs. What were we saying with that packaging? Music does exactly what medicine does. How much did it cost? In the scheme of things, pennies. We were leaking money all the way through. I’ve still never seen a royalty from any of it. The only people who can make that foil were the people who actually do the foil on medicine packets, while the little red sticker that goes on there with the dosage amount had to be made by a chemist on the chemist’s machine. The records were put together by people wearing white gloves and hairnets. It’s great, isn’t it?
Yeah, I sacked the band [after a show in October at London’s Royal Albert Hall]. So much was made of me being difficult to work with, but the simple fact is this is the only time I’ve gotten rid of people. Their demands just became… kind of weird. Like no consecutive touring – if we went to America we had to come home for the same amount of time before we could go anywhere else. The more I couldn’t make it how they wanted it, the more they ignored me – I’d walk into the back of a bus and they’d get up and leave. I wasn’t delivering what they thought they could have from this. They didn’t like me spending money on packaging, and taking time making records. And they insisted on contracts, to put everything they wanted into writing. So I let them go. I used their contract as the means. I had my one clause in there which was that I could let them go. So as soon as the names went down, that was that. It was heartbreaking, it was a hard thing to do.
SPIRITUALIZED
Amazing Grace (2003)
Recorded in three weeks, Amazing Grace evokes the garage aesthetic of Nuggets, as well as strung-out ballads like “Lord Let It Rain On Me”…
I was working with Spring-Heeled Jack, recording a lot of free-form jazz. We weren’t writing songs as such, just experimenting with getting sound out of instruments. With Amazing Grace, I had this idea that I wanted to make a record where the musicians would only hear the song on the day of recording, so what we got was their immediate response to it. Then we’d try and make a record out of that. I really like that album, because it was so missed at the time. People were saying it’s a garage record, like The White Stripes, but it’s not. It’s simpler than Spacemen 3, but there’s something about the sound of the songs, they’ve got that sparkle in all Spiritualized records, something to do with the high frequencies, the air at the top of it. And it was good to make. But I’m still drawn back to the the same old, “Let’s try and mix it again…” I’d love to be able to make field recordings that capture a moment, but I still have to go through this process where I’ll try mixing it one way just to know that the way it’s been done is the right way. I don’t mind that. I find I have to work like this to be satisfied.
SPIRITUALIZED
Songs In A&E (2008)
Delayed by a lengthy illness, Songs In A&E is Pierce’s most conventional album. Extra-curricular work – a soundtrack for Harmony Korine, the orchestral Silent Sound installation and SpaceShipp, recorded with pianist Matthew Shipp – also appears to have got in the way…
Maybe, in an ideal world, you could have thrown it all into the album. But it’s quite good to cover things like SpaceShipp – just heavy drones – outside of an album. You can be more extreme. It’s the same with the Harmony soundtrack for Mister Lonely; it became more filmic because it wasn’t made in the context of a band. The songs on this LP were quite traditional for me, so I didn’t feel there was room for more abstract stuff. The thing about making records, it can’t be inconsequential, it can’t be like, “Here’s some sounds I’ve put together.” There has to be a thread.
Has my songwriting changed over the years? No, there’s still a particular kind of simplicity, but there’s a learning process going on. With Songs In A &E, I didn’t just want to use the tremolo that worked on that, or the fuzztone I know works for this. I wanted to look somewhere outside of it. Eventually all my records settle into a space, for good or bad, that’s my take on things. It’s my snobbery, that…