Are you a religious person?
Am I religious? No, not at all.

Because obviously you use a lot of religious imagery in your songs going back to your Spacemen 3 days – things like ‘Walking with Jesus’, ‘Lord, Can You Hear Me’ and on this record ‘Lord, Let it Rain on Me’…
Kind of, but it’s not … it’s telling it how it is really. I love the language of it. If you’re saying ‘let it rain on me’ it’s kind of a dismissive line. It’s like ‘hey, that guy’s really resigned.’ If you say ‘Lord, let it rain on me’ – it’s like ‘man, let it come down’. It’s like ‘whatever you can throw I can deal with’.

It’s interesting that you would use so much imagery but still be a non-believer…
It’s the music I love. It’s like the language of blues and gospel music and it’s the whole root of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s always made sense. I can sing that language in song but I don’t talk like that. It’s like love and poetry or the way that words rhyme. It was my first introduction into a kind of language that really made sense to me. What’s the line that you say, ‘I don’t really believe but if God stepped out of a London taxi cab tomorrow I’d sure as hell get down on my knees...’

So why Amazing Grace as a title for the record?
I’ve reclaimed that as well. I think ‘Amazing Grace’ means a lot to a lot of people whether they know it or not. Obviously it’s like ecstasy – it’s a state you want to be in. Amazing grace is where you want to be and I love the idea that it’s so much a part of music. It was Elvis, it was Aretha Franklin, it was Blind Willie McTell. It’s kind of like where music started for me.

This album, as represented by songs like ‘This Little Life of Mine’ and ‘She Kissed Me’, is obviously a lot harder sounding than previous Spiritualized efforts.
It’s very, very influenced by the stuff we did with Spring Heel Jack (2002’s ‘Amassed’ LP) – which was all improvised jazz music. Obviously it’s not a jazz record but I really got into the way they recorded – the fact that it was all kind of spur of the moment and ‘this is what I want to play now’ feel to it. So the band were introduced to the songs on the day they were going to record them and we tried to capture the sound before they really learnt the songs.

Which is a complete turnaround from your last couple of highly arranged Spiritualized records.
Yeah, because it wasn’t like we were going to construct an album from the bass drum up. It was about getting an electric moment in the studio that is unique. And these songs will get better. The more we play them live they’ll get more electric and more realised and more dynamic but what we captured on this record was a unique moment in time before people could say ‘hey, I’ve always played this in the chorus’ or ‘hey, I know this song it starts with these three notes’.

Did you ever find yourself listening back, say two months later, and thinking ‘That’s half as good as it could be – I wish we could have another crack at it?’
No, ‘cos we’ll do that when we play it live. Whatever goes down on record it’s still 10% what it’s like to be in the room with the band playing. It’s so much more exciting and more dynamic and absolutely something else.

In terms of where Spiritualized were at you couldn’t have got much bigger – the last record Let it Come Down had 100 piece orchestras.
Yeah, but it wasn’t really a reaction to where we’d been before. I know that’s a really easy thing – I mean we made a 100 piece album but I don’t really see this as being that scaled down. There’s still 26 players on some of the tracks on this record. In England they’re saying that we’ve made a garage record and I certainly don’t see it as a garage record. It’s more grand than that, it’s too elegant to be a garage record.

But this record has got things like the Stooges sound through it. I’m talking piano and percussion…
Yeah, it’s that sleigh bell isn’t it? Or what were we saying, ‘it’s Hell’s Sleigh Bells’. It’s straight off Jerry Lee Lewis actually. You know the way Jerry Lee hits that single note and doesn’t ever leave it. So it’s Jerry Lee by way of the Stooges. Another spark for this record was the re-issue of the Rocket From the Tombs LP and that really threw this record into where it was going to go. That’s a band doing Stooges covers but it’s so electric, so absolutely on it. It kind of shows you how you can make it the most electric album and I didn’t even want to compete with that record because that is a garage record. But whether it be Rocket From the Tombs or Spring Heel Jack or the Stooges the idea was for it not to be laboured. Let’s put it down, start in October and finish by the end of the month and see what we’ve got.

It’s a very political time but your songs tend to deal with the universal rather than political concerns – why’s that?
‘Cos it’s all relative. The idea is that the political things of now are world changing and are that important and they’re kind of not. And it’s an ungiven – you really don’t know – whereas the universals will always hit home. Otherwise you’re writing children’s songs like ‘Ring a-Ring a-Rosy’ or ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ that have political significance but nobody gives a shit about what kind of significance they have or what they were written about.

What is your take on the UK’s stand on the Iraq issue?
We gave a track ‘Hold On’ recently to the ‘War Child’ charity to raise money for the victims of the people we’re bombing which I thought was kind of absurd. But then when I got given the record I kind of thought there should be a ‘War Child’ child for victims of the record.

There’s a lot of resignation through the album especially in songs like ‘Hold On’.
Even though I’m singing songs like ‘hold on to the people you love’ I think the reason it resonates is because nobody does and you almost know by the time I finish singing the song I’m not going to do it either. Resignation might be the wrong word. It’s more the fallibility of being human. Everybody goes ‘this is how you would want to act’ and if everybody did hold on to the people they loved there’d be no need for the song; there’d be no need to say that.

©2003 Christopher Hollow

Jason Pierce, aka Jason Spaceman, has a notorious image. The type that if you were to meet him you’d expect to have to peel him off the floor. Scrape him from the sky. Be one step beyond. Back in the 80s he coined the term ‘taking drugs to make music to take drugs to’ and both his bands – Spaceman 3 and Spiritualized – have produced some magnificent lysergic drone pop.

But recently it hasn’t been all sunshine and lollipops. The last few years have seen Pierce sack three members of his band (they went onto form Lupine Howl). The love triad between Pierce, former bass player Kate Radley and Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft was for a long time titillating tabloid fodder. Then Pierce’s last record Let it Come Down experienced a savage backlash from the same media that lauded 1997’s Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space a masterpiece.

Is nowhere where you really want to be?
What a great first question. Best one yet. I’ve been doing this for what feels like nine hours and I’ve not had a question like that. It’s a double line. I think the answer’s yes.

Obviously on Let it Come Down you like to use double entendres?
Yeah, they’re good. It’s from people like Lee Hazlewood who’s lines I like. I just like language and the use of language. Once you’ve written a song it doesn’t really matter because everybody listens with their own subjective take, their own outlook, and what they’ve been through so it doesn’t matter, it’s gone. So I kind of look at making that record in that way.

Are you still carrying around a dictaphone to put melodies down at any time?
To write with, yeah. I’ve said it before that if you write on an instrument then you’re limited by your ability on that instrument – you write as good as you can play. If you’re working by singing melodies down you’re not really limited. If I can’t hit the note, which invariably I can’t, I still know what note I’m trying to hit.

Are you still taking drugs to make music to take drugs to?
I’ve had that question before. I think it’s a great line proved by the fact you quote it back to me now. At the time when we said that it was a way of getting people to notice where we were at and what we were up to musically. The only other band on the planet that was reasonably well known was the Butthole Surfers. So it was us saying, ‘this goes on, this is where we are at’. Everybody else, at that time, was almost saying, ‘this kind of music and this kind of lifestyle just doesn’t exist.’ I think there have been so many things that have changed since then. It worked at the time but to say that line now is kind of dumb. At the end of the day you realise it’s one of the great myths of rock n’ roll that you can do drugs and make great music. You can take drugs and make some poor music as well.

Narcotics are obviously a part of your schtick. How much is myth and how much is reality?
I’m just thinking of percentages. It’s a bit of one and a bit of the other. But I don’t write the mystique. Somebody else writes that.

The image is that if I was to meet you I’d have to peel you off the floor.
(Laughs) Depends on where you meet me, I guess. Come say hello at the show and peel me off the floor.

What did you think of the Lupine Howl album?
I’ve not heard it. I didn’t listen to it because I knew I’d be asked that question. Avoiding having an opinion, I guess.

You took some pot shots from those guys? (Sean singer/bassist Cook, guitarist Mike Mooney and drummer Damon Reece) as part of their press campaign.
I thought it was a shame that their press campaign was ‘we’ve got an album out and here’s the story and the story has nothing to do with how great the album is’. That’s the first time that anybody in England had found out about them leaving the band. It wasn’t like there was a story and then they put the album out. They made the story a part of their album and that was a shame. People think because you make music with people that it’s absolutely magic, it’s great and really special. The music we made was good but people constantly say are you in touch with those guys and where are they at now? It’s like saying are you in touch with the people you used to work with at your last job or went to school with? People move on that’s how life is.

But you’re a music fan and you know if someone talks to Roger McGuinn and he slags off Gene Clark then it shatters you’re image of the Byrds having respect for each other...
When people mouth off like that they know it’s going to be written down and reported. It’s knocks the mystique and knocks the integrity of it. That’s just how people are. You get someone who was close to Captain Beefheart who says, ‘he didn’t write nearly none of that … I did’. It knocks where he’s at. You believe what you want to believe but the true belief comes from the music. Who cares if Captain Beefheart sat down and wrote all those parts, individually for all those people? Who cares if he’s just saying that? The music speaks volumes. It’s speaks way more than any of the bullshit stories. I said when I was a kid that you don’t need to know what Iggy Pop was up to, where he was at or what he was doing on the street or whatever because the music speaks volumes. Jerry Lee doesn’t need to be called ‘the Killer’. His music is killer. And that’s where it’s at.

Spiritualized is renown for its live grandeur – what can we expect with a more stripped down version of the band?
It’s not stripped down. Everybody keeps saying that. It’s as overblown as its ever going to be so it doesn’t matter how many people are on stage.

How did you find working with classical musicians on the record? Because in rock circles they’re always painted as people who can’t improvise. Did you find that?
No, not at all. Most classical musicians will be peeled off the floor way after you’re peeled off the floor. It’s just not part of classical musician mythology. But it’s the same in life. In the mile radius from where I’m sitting now there’s people getting way more wasted than anybody you’d read about in your rock biographies. Everybody does the same kind of thing it’s just part of the mythology of rock n’ roll. It’s kind of dumb to say it now.

Was it difficult having your love life as a media event a couple of years ago? We were all keeping up with it like a soap opera.
(Laughs) Well, I didn’t read it. I don’t subscribe. Quite often the first story people hear is the one they accept and I don’t have much time for people who read the tabloids and say, ‘this is true’. I spent a lot of time saying, ‘ah, no it’s not quite as simple as that’.

It’s been written up that it had a huge effect on the writing of Let it Come Down?
You don’t write songs like the way people imagine you write songs from the absolute depths of emotions. It’s all absolute bullshit that people in the western world who write songs are seen as prophets or messiahs and they’ve got God-given talent that allows them to do something that ordinary people can’t do. Anybody can do it. It’s born of experience but there’s an editing process. You don’t just put pen to paper and it flows like you’ve got voodoo in your hand. It’s so much more objective than that. All the lines like ‘music floats through the air and I’m just a conduit’ and ‘this is from the heart’ are all bullshit lines that aren’t real. (William) Faulkner didn’t put pen to paper and come out with a classic 400 pages later. You look at the way words fit together and how best you can say lines. The idea that I’m penning something so intimate that it’s like a diary is kind of dumb. I’m not writing about stuff I don’t know about but I’m opening up a diary for people.

How much do you delve into the Spaceman 3 catalogue in the live show?
We’ve been doing ‘Take Me to the Other Side’, ‘Lord Can You Hear Me’ and ‘Walking with Jesus’. There’s some delving there.

What’s your current relationship like with Sonic Boom?
There is none.

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©2003, 2002 Christopher Hollow