IT’S the silver trainers that make Jason Pierce stand out from the crowd.
When we hook up, his footwear is the only clue to his penchant for donning full metallic astronaut suits while going by the name of J. Spaceman.
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I’m sitting with the softly-spoken Spiritualized mastermind in the deep recesses of a wood-panelled bar, not far from his home in London’s hip Spitalfields.
The 56-year-old is looking fit and well, in sharp contrast to the frail character I once encountered after his life-threatening bout of double pneumonia.
Next month sees the release of his band’s ninth studio album, Everything Was Beautiful, an eclectic tour de force bringing together gospel, blues, country and, as you do, a couple of expansive freak-outs underpinned by Krautrock beats.
It includes the steady-rolling Let It Bleed (For Iggy) which helps shed light on Pierce’s love of silvery attire.
He has dedicated the song to the incomparable Iggy Pop, an enduring source of inspiration.
“When I was a kid, Iggy’s music changed my world,” says Pierce. “Everything he did had this strange aura around it.” He remembers finding “a record by this beautiful man in silver pants” on sale at Boots in the days when the chemist sold LPs.
The 15-year-old Pierce snapped up the David Bowie-produced Raw Power by Iggy & The Stooges with its iconic cover image of rock’s most recognisable torso and those impossibly tight, low-slung shiny trousers.
He says: “I took the album home and it became my world for months. It was the only record I owned. I knew all the lyrics. I even knew the gaps between the songs and it felt like nobody else had that record.”
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Pierce adds: “I loved the fact that Iggy was my secret. I could say Iggy Pop to people and they thought I’d just invented the name.”
He goes as far as saying that Raw Power transformed “my whole idea of what I should be doing” and set him on the path to become a rock star himself.
All these years later, Let It Bleed (For Iggy) is his homage, borrowing lyrics from the Raw Power song Open Up And Bleed.
Just before the Covid pandemic derailed his and all our lives, Pierce went to a gig by his hero at London’s Barbican.
I was so moved by it,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d ever hear those songs live again. So when I was putting credits together (for Everything Was Beautiful), it felt like there should be a thank you to Iggy.”
Over the years, the two singular artists have met several times and now even share a technician.
When I was putting credits together (for Everything Was Beautiful), it felt like there should be a thank you to Iggy.
Jason Pierce
“When we found our sound man, I think he was doing Shirley Bassey and The Stooges — not together obviously!” laughs Pierce.
“I thought that somewhere between those two acts is my band and we’ve never looked back.”
In some ways, Everything Was Beautiful is a companion piece to 2018’s And Nothing Hurt.
Both were created from the same set of demos and “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” is a quote from another inspiration, Kurt Vonnegut’s compelling anti-war masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five.
As the appalling events unravel in Ukraine, that quote has deep resonance. Right now it feels as if nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.
Pierce says his original idea was a “grand gesture” containing all the tracks but he was advised against a double album by his American label chief, Matthew Johnson of Fat Possum.
Different vibes
“He cited the White Album (The Beatles) and Exile On Main Street (Rolling Stones) as being rediscovered later.
“But he’s not in the business of having things rediscovered. He’s in the business of selling records now.”
For Pierce, things worked out really well. By separating the albums, both have evolved into compelling standalone pieces with different vibes. Last time we spoke, in 2018, this self-confessed perfectionist talked of his struggles to get Spiritualized albums over the line, so two manageable projects have made life easier than one mammoth one.
“If I was working within this huge piece of work, I’d probably still be doing it,” he says. I find that very unhealthy . . . it’s just music for Christ’s sake!”
The arrival of lockdown in March 2020 took away a lot of the pressure. Pierce admits: “It is hard to talk about positives because they are tempered by fear of the pandemic.”
His daughter Poppy, who appears on the new album, works for the NHS on the frontline in the fight against Covid. But he says: “It felt as if the strange obsession I have with making music was suddenly allowed. There was no sense of, ‘What am I doing here?’
It felt as if the strange obsession I have with making music was suddenly allowed. There was no sense of, ‘What am I doing here?’
Jason Pierce
“For once the world sat back and waited for me to finish something to my satisfaction. I know I shouldn’t think of my work as the most important thing, but it is what I love doing most. Lockdown took all the guilt away.
“My dumb one-liner was, ‘At least I don’t have to worry about not being invited to the party any more’.”
Though he grew up in the Midlands town of Rugby, the capital has long been Pierce’s home. Suddenly, the hustle and bustle of city life was replaced by what he calls “tranquillity and solitude” and he found himself liking it.
Already a restless soul who likes a stroll around the streets of London, it felt like a return to pre-industrialised times.
“It was remarkable standing next to St Paul’s Cathedral and hearing nothing but bird song,” he says.
“The sky was the same as the one Constable painted, no chem trails, no air traffic, and the Thames was like glass.”
Deeply moving
Followers of Spiritualized will know that one of Pierce’s abiding themes is the Earth’s place in the boundless universe. The band’s most celebrated album is 1997’s sublime Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space which deals with love and loss but finds solace in the gravity-free isolation of the great beyond.
The new album begins with Pierce’s daughter (described in the credits as P. Spaceman) intoning its title accompanied by the transmission signal from Apollo 11 before we hear the immense Always Together With You.
The song mentions rocket ships and galaxies and talk of it brings this response from Pierce. He says: “The Apollo 11 moment helped give it the perspective of someone looking down at Earth. Suddenly the whole album became like an observation, as if it’s in orbit and has a Man Who Fell To Earth or ‘ground control to Major Tom’ feel.”
To get Everything Was Beautiful over the line, Pierce recorded in 11 studios and played an incredible 16 different instruments. “I wasn’t in a search of a studio Mecca,” he explains. “It was convenience, finding a place that had the pedal steel I needed or the singers or the drummer.”
With the album in the bag, Pierce feels “liberated”. He describes the highly charged emotions that came with the end of lockdown and the prospect of getting back on the road with Spiritualized.
“When I met up with my band again after nearly three years and played with them, I was literally in tears,” he says.
When I met up with my band again after nearly three years and played with them, I was literally in tears.
Jason Pierce
“We recorded a song for a radio station recently, creating this amazing sound which is uniquely ours. I found that deeply moving. I truly realised that you don’t miss things until they’re gone.”
Next, we take a deeper dive into some of the new album’s other tracks, starting with the country twang of Crazy (not to be confused with the Willie Nelson classic performed by Patsy Cline).
It’s a form of music that has long appealed to Pierce, who expresses his love of singers like Cline and Tammy Wynette.
He says: “Country was great before it became really slick and lost its way in the production. If you’re talking about song writing, it’s in its own world. It’s genius.”
Another track, The Mainline Song, includes a sample of one of those endless freight trains traversing the US. It is to railroads what Kraftwerk’s Autobahn is to motorways.
Pierce is infatuated by the romanticism of American travel songs, set in open country with big skies and distant horizons, and suggests that English bands can never achieve the same effect if they write about “the express to Birmingham New Street”.
Yearning nature
He is addicted to making recordings of all kinds of found sounds on his phone, even “extractor fans”.
He snatched the train noise when he was travelling out of Los Angeles and gates came down on a Route 66 crossing.
“You have to wait for 20 minutes for the train to go past,” he says. The Mainline Song is also inspired by the shocking murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the subsequent riots.
“I hate to think of it as a political song but it was amazing that despite all the fear of the pandemic, people still stood up and said, ‘No!’ That was really f***ing important. It changed my instrumental into something extraordinary.”
Of all the instruments employed on Everything Was Beautiful, perhaps the most unusual are the small bells Pierce retrieved from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry before it closed down.
This is the place where the Liberty Bell, that powerful symbol of American independence, was crafted. Pierce says: “Back in Georgian England, when they moved all the disgusting industries out of London, this one remained on Whitechapel High Street. It survived from the 15th Century until four years ago but they’re putting flats on the site now.”
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Finally, bearing in mind the overwhelming gospel-infused Always Together With You, I ask Pierce if he thinks of his music as joyous despite the yearning nature of his lyrics.
He considers the question for a while and replies: “Yeah, I do. That song is infused with a kind of beauty. It’s got hope.”
