SPIRITUALIZED
Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)
While promoting the final Spacemen 3 LP – 1990’s Recurring – Pierce unveils Spiritualized. Cue multi-layered vocals, string arrangements, Motorik grooves…
We recorded this for £3,000 at [Rugby studio] VHF on half-inch tape, on this little machine. Did it feel liberating to be on a new venture? Yeah, but scary, too. It was liberating not to be around Pete, to be honest. All of a sudden, we were in this situation where I could just push out in all directions, I could go as far as I wanted to go in the studio.
It was good to get back on the road and see if it worked. I went to see Van Morrison play Astral Weeks some weeks ago, and I’d forgotten how much that LP became an influence on Spiritualized. Not by stealing parts or getting somebody to play gut-string guitar, but just the sense of the interplay between three instruments… there’s a flute, a classical guitar and a violin, and it’s quite chaotic.When you’ve got people who can really play well, who are given their freedom, there’s a sense of “hey, this is good times”. We were big fans of the Velvets, and there’s this idea that great music comes from conflicts like Reed and Cale’s, which is bullshit. Great music comes from chasing it. We were trying to make this sound where God was on feedback behind the curtain… I think that’s what we set up.
SPIRITUALIZED
Pure Phase (1995)
Credited to Spiritualized Electric Mainline, this showcased the anaesthetised grandeur of Pierce’s songs and his extraordinary eye for production detail…
The “pure phase” became a sound within this record. The mix in one speaker is completely different to the mix in the other. I mixed it twice, and liked bits of both, but didn’t like them enough to say this is the finished record. So I tried to run them together. At the time there wasn’t a piece of kit that would do that. We found we could sample about 8 or 10 bars of music and run them left and right before the sync started to go out, before the drums started to sound like two drums. Then we’d cut the tape, and then we’d do it again. And again. We did the whole LP cutting it up into eight-bar sections. It made this extraordinary sound. The bass drum was no longer in the centre, it was moving in this slightly random way due to the way the two tapes were slightly out of sync. It’s weird because recently I found an original mix of “Take Good Care Of It”, with Rico Rodriguez. It’s kind of straight, without any of that phasing and soundscape to it, and it’s beautiful. I listened to it, thinking, ‘Why the hell did I do anything to that?’ But the work involved in doing something is almost more important than what you’re making.
SPIRITUALIZED
Let It Come Down (2001)
Taking 155 musicians to make and four years to mix. Only the birth of Pierce’s daughter, it seemed, would stop him…
155 session musicians? Too many, I think. There are rules for these things. Normally, you have a quartet or a 12-piece, but I just made up the numbers. How many French horns do you want? 11? Why not? 11, that’ll sound great. I was quite in control of it for a while. It was phenomenal. And then I had to mix it. Yeah, it took four years. I just got more and more… Well, I think I was already leaning into the mad wind. My car lived on Abbey Road studios car park until it went green with sap from the tree above it.
I wasn’t sleeping. I was taking a lot of barbiturates, anything to put me to sleep. My girlfriend was pregnant with my first child, and I kept falling out of bed every night, hurting myself, getting more and more fucked up. She said, “If you don’t fucking sort this out, I’m leaving you.” So the next day I went out and bought a mattress that would break my fall… My daughter was born at Abbey Road, and that was when I stopped work. That was my cut off. She’s the youngest ever visitor to that studio. But the record worked out. It’s a hard record to listen to. I still think “Out Of Sight” has got something that I couldn’t have gotten any other way than losing the plot with it. It was mixed twice. Or maybe three times…