An interview with Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce: “What we were doing… was morally and legally wrong”
UNCUT MAGAZINE - August 2009
by Michael Bonner
“I like to do one thing a day,” says Jason Pierce. “You know, go to the bank or something. And today I’m doing two things.” Later, he’ll be heading off to record a duet with Mark Lanegan. But for now, ahead of Spiritualized’s slot at this year’s Latitude Festival, Pierce is here to talk through his back catalogue, from the galactic drones of Spacemen 3 to Spiritualized’s symphonic highs. “This is like a drowning experience,” he says. “The whole of your life flashing before your eyes…”
SPACEMEN 3
The Perfect Prescription (1987)
Art school friends Jason Pierce and Pete Kember form Spacemen 3 in
their native Rugby, Warwickshire in 1982. They follow up drone-heavy
debut Sound Of Confusion (1986) with this one, softer and more textured…
I’d left home as soon as I could, so I’d got a house at the bottom end
of the town which I shared with Natty [Booker], our first drummer. I
think Rosco [Sterling Roswell, bass] was living there. It was an open
door house, anybody could come and go. Pete lived with his folks in a
big house in a village outside of town. We came to a guy called Paul
Atkins who ran a kind of semi-professional studio off an industrial
estate at the bottom of town – he had a sampler, which I think was quite
rare at the time. He had an 8-track recorder, but he wanted a 16-track
recorder. So we said we’d buy him a 16-track for unlimited studio time,
which worked out amazing for us, but not for him – we were young, we had
unlimited time! We moved my house and our whole scene down to the
studio and spent hours getting deeper and deeper into making this
record. Were Pete and I competitive as songwriters? No, not at all. He’d
always claim he wrote a lot of the songs before he met me, but when I
met him he had a guitar with two strings on it and he couldn’t play it. I
taught him rudimentary barre chords. We had an agreement early on that
there was never any “this is my song, this is your song”, which made
what happened later [Pierce and Kember argued over writing credits,
which contributed to the band’s breakup] all the more shocking. I guess
everything that we were doing was against everything I’d been brought up
to believe you should do. The whole drugs scene, what we were doing
with our lives… it was what we wanted to do, but it was morally and
legally wrong.
SPACEMEN 3
Playing With Fire (1989)
A pinnacle of late-’80s space-rock, drifting between dreamy
psychedelia, minimalist gospel and heavy-duty feedback. But Pierce and
Kember’s relationship deteriorated badly during the recording…
We started recording in Cornwall. It was quite a funky little house in
the middle of nowhere. Kind of hippie, log burners… I’d never been
anywhere like that. I’m from the town. Also, to be honest, I’d never
really travelled, we never had money when we were kids. In Cornwall, we
were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. But it only works if everyone
gets on, and it was getting to the point with Pete where we couldn’t be
in the same room together.
He got crueller, and it was very hard to deal with, especially as we
were in such a close scene. I’d started going out with Kate [Radley,
future Spiritualized keyboardist], and Pete was so childish – “You can’t
do that.” It became miserable, but making this music was never about
misery – there’s a beautiful sorrow, a beautiful longing about the
music. Even in the more heavy-duty drones there was a kind of epiphany.
How did I respond to Pete? I shut down and got on with it as best I
could. As happened later in the line-ups of Spiritualized when things
got bad, I think if you give people time, they realise their mistakes.
The thing that upset me the most was when Pete wanted to change the
songwriting credits. I remember having a meeting to sort out the credits
for Playing With Fire, which I thought was the end – it wasn’t the
beginning of the end, it was the end.
“How Does It Feel?” was originally called “Repeater”, which is the sound
a Vox Starstreamer makes: you hit the guitar and that’s what comes out
of it, it plays itself. Pete put down this long repeater thing and then I
constructed a melody over the top, and his claim was that it was his
song, because he’d put down the original track. I joked that if you
owned the tape, you owned the first part, so you could make this claim
that I own the silence that the Starstreamer is going on to. I mean, you
can’t make songs with people who are putting flags in them – saying,
that’s my bit, that was my melody. We wrote songs together – no, we
wrote songs and then we shared the credit. It doesn’t matter whose song
it was, or who did the greater or the lesser part of it, it was just
that was what you did. Done.
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.
SPIRITUALIZEDPure 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…
SPIRITUALIZED
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