Jason Pierce's latest album is a massive departure for Spiritualized, and he is on a mission to reclaim the language of rock and roll, he tells Laurence Mackin.
J. Spaceman is a lot more grounded than one might think. Born Jason Pierce, he has acquired an image as a drug-addled artist, struggling with his inner-creative demons, like a latter day Thomas de Quincey.
On the evidence here, this couldn't be further from the truth. Seated in a dressing room in Dublin's Vicar Street, several hours before their first Dublin show since October 2001, Pierce is soft-spoken and careful with his words, his answers punctuated with long thoughtful pauses. He responds to questions in the manner of a man long-accustomed to answering inane queries - not with annoyance and ennui, but in a gentle tone, as if he has explained these self-evident truths a thousand times before, but is willing to do so again. At any point, I half expect him to reach over and say earnestly, "Don't worry, you'll learn".
It is difficult to imagine this Jason Pierce is the same one that spawned a debauched image in the music press, and if the tales of rampant substance abuse in times past are even half true, there is no indication of it here: age has not withered him, and nor has heroin.
Pierce's latest album, Amazing Grace, is a massive departure for his band, Spiritualized. Gone are the massive swelling orchestrals, which saw 100 musicians on all but two of the tracks on their last studio album, Let It Come Down. In comes a radical approach to making music, an attempt to record as close as possible to a purely live sound, to harness the energy of a group of musicians locked in a room together and starved of rehearsal and preparation. Stripped down and dirty is the plat du jour of the music industry and, given the less-than-splendid reviews the lush extravagance of Let It Come Down received, it would appear that the good ship Spiritualized decided to change tack and sail with the winds of the day. Not so, says Captain Pierce.
"It wasn't reactionary to the last album at all. It wasn't like, we thought, 'We've gone as big and as grand and as beautiful as we can, lets react to that'. We came at this record with all the knowledge of what it was like to make the last record; it wasn't like we forgot what we know. The circumstances that led to this record pushed it into a completely different area. It was so influenced by making Amassed with Spring Heel Jack [a jazz/electronic group for which Pierce played guitar in 2001\], with . . . Han Bennink, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Paul Rutherford - these giants of European jazz [Some of whom played on Let It Come Down\]. The way that music just poured out of these guys, it was all about immediacy, it was all about spontaneity, it was so punk, so much more punk without even trying.
"Spring Heel Jack put microphones right where the action was, so they record all the squeaks of the valves, fingers holding instruments, they recorded the air around the instrument, [in effect\] recording the physicality of what its like to make music, to tear music out in that way. This is what we went after, and the only way to do that, when you've got very standard kind of rock 'n' roll songs, was to introduce the songs to the band on the day we were going to record them and capture the songs before [the band\] actually learnt how to play them. That way, nobody was saying 'the chorus is coming up, I know what I'm gonna do'.
"Everybody was thinking, 'Shit, there's a change there, I better react to it, I better respond to it'.
"When we did the playbacks, people weren't listening to it going, 'Is that good enough, are we rehearsed well enough, is it in time or in tune?' Everyone was listening back saying, 'Is that us playing?' That sent the excitement levels through us and the electricity, and we knew we'd got it."
But does this recording method work, would it not be better just to record a gig live? "It's difficult, because I don't think you can capture live on record. A record is a construct by its nature. Jim Dickinson [a legendary Memphis producer\] talked about music being about pushing air around, and to hear that line from him was so important to how I viewed music. You can't capture that outside of the four walls you're actually in. What we got on that record . . . it's certainly got energy, this kind of physicality of playing music, like it's not easy, but it sounds effortless. But it's not a 10th of what it's going to be like within these four walls tonight with this band pushing the air around."
The result was an album's worth of material in just three weeks. Each song was heard by the band members in the morning for the first time and put down by the evening. Although Pierce was willing to adopt a radical shift in approach for this album, he wasn't about to let go completely. While recording the last album, he wanted to write the string sections himself, but he doesn't read formal sheet music. Instead, he sang the notes into a Dictaphone and transcribed them, note for note, using a piano. This would suggest a perfectionist, someone wanting to completely control every aspect of his art. Again, Pierce politely disagrees.
"This band is red hot, absolutely on fire. I don't like to control people by saying, 'Come on, let's play that again, and we'll get it right'. I don't tell anybody what to do. I obsess about things after the event, so I go into mixes with the kind of stuff that needs a lot of work, and I still did that with this record. From October to January, it was me obsessing over it going, 'Is that the right way to start, is the fade right, should that track sit after that track?'."
Although he may obsess after the event, forcing a group of musicians to perform tracks they have never before heard in a single day means taking an enormous risk for the sake of ideals. No amount of mixing can rescue a really bad recording.
"Given the nature of how we were putting this record down, the songs were never going to be developed, they were going to be that moment in time, that was they point of it. In a way [the album\] is the starting point, and now we know the songs, were playing them live, so now its going to go way, way removed from what appeared on that record.
"Somebody the other day was saying we should record it again in two years time and see just how different it could be. I love the idea of this fan: you want us to play the same record again and just record it differently, and you're going to buy it? How cool are you people?"
Although the album is unashamedly rock and roll, the trademarks of Spiritualized are all there, including the gospel music influences and lyrics that are almost uncomfortably honest and simple. The title track, Amazing Grace, is inspired by "Matthew Shipp's version with William Parker, a duet. Musically, it was probably the starting point [for the album\] because we said, 'Let's have a go at doing Amazing Grace, let's do a jazz standard', and it fractured into . . . four of the \ core elements.
"The songs were most influenced by a brief conversation I had with Dr John soon after the last album. He was saying that you should just write it down how it is and tell people straight, tell them were you stand. It was this kind of odd line that doesn't mean anything, but it means everything, and I just thought, 'Yeah, I'll just put it down straight'."
Despite the numerous gospel music-inspired tracks, Pierce doesn't strike you as, well, the most ardent Christian. But he is on a mission, although whether it's a mission from God is debatable.
"I'm reclaiming the language . . . I want a bit of amazing grace without having to go to church to get it. I think the only difference between gospel music and pop music is you change the word Jesus to baby. The passion and fervour that most people sing to Jesus or sing to the Lord is so much more than what people sing about their loved ones, and I love that in the music. I love the language of American gospel music."
Pierce talks a lot about musicas language and, given the immediacy of his lyrics, it is obvious that this aspect of Spiritualized is crucial to him. "The good thing about the poetry of rock and roll, the poetry of music is that it is actually really poor. I like that you can actually sing quite trite lines, but when you put it to music, it becomes magic. You can sing lines like, 'I can't stop loving you, I've made up my mind', and it's so not poetic, but you put it to music, and it's like it's supercharged, it has got this energy that was never there. Although I love the language, I don't think any of it reads well as poetry when you try to make it in to some sort of high art.
"I hate this kind of intellectualising of things, like maybe you're not bright enough to understand the concept of this, or maybe you need a bit more of an education in terms of music before you're going to reach these dizzy heights. It's primal, you either feel it or you're not going to get it. Sometimes you can hear a piece of music that doesn't touch you, and 10 years later, you can hear it and it can absolutely floor you . . . I love that."
On this album, "the songs are about and state very, very simple things. Like, 'Nothing hurts you like the pain of someone you love', or 'Death cannot part us if life already has'. They are all very simple, things."
Like Dr John says? Exactly, he grins, "tell it how it is".
Amazing Grace is out now on Sanctuary Records
