A new body of work

JASON Pierce is exhausted.

The Spiritualized singer is back from a UK tour and has spent the morning giving interviews. He needs a lie-down.

“I got up early because I had to speak to some journalists from Australia,” he says. “The record label has filled my day up without telling me. I’ve been talking to people from Ireland all afternoon. I’d love to go to bed.”

This is more than post-concert weariness. Pierce is recovering from illness. In 2005 he contracted pneumonia and nearly died. Eighteen months ago, he was diagnosed with liver disease. “After the pneumonia, I was disappointingly the same person,” he says. “You are expecting this big moral change, a taking stock of the world around you. I felt exactly the same, which is to say, driven by my music.”

His brush with mortality inspired the 2007 album Songs in A + E (several tracks were written from his sick bed). Spiritualized’s latest long-player Sweet Heart Sweet Light was largely assembled as he underwent treatment for his liver condition. In the epic tradition of the band’s best work, it combines psychedelic rock, gospel and soul, post-club melancholy and druggy abandon.

“The course of drugs you have to take is pretty gruesome,” says Pierce. “It’s a proper, injectable, chemo-type of thing. You have to take 14 pills a day. It essentially removes a year from your life.”

With the clock counting down on his health, he raced to compile the bare bones of Sweet Heart Sweet Light in a studio in Wales. Once that was done, he tinkered with the music at his leisure at home in London.

“I don’t like making albums anyway. I thought, ‘well it’s not going to be any more difficult to make if I’m doing this treatment.’ I put together the framework of the record. After that, I knew I could complete it as I was undergoing the therapy,” he says.

The irony of his predicament was not lost on him. As Spiritualized’s woozy, disembodied music suggests, Pierce knows a thing or three about chemical stimulation. Here he was, making another record on drugs. Only this time he was consuming enough prescription pharmaceuticals to knock out a bull elephant.

“I’ve filled myself with drugs and drink all my life. And now I’m stone-cold sober except for these horrible chemo drugs. It’s a weird situation, really,” he says.

Did past excesses contribute to his poor health? “It’s a little bit of both. I had liver disease and didn’t know it. Any drinking I did compounded the problem. I didn’t have to do the treatment right away. My logic was that if I didn’t do it now, it would only get worse. One of the motivations for the treatment was that when it’s over I can have another drink,” he says.

Pierce was born in Rugby, England in 1965. His first band, Spacemen 3, dealt in elaborate psychedelia rock and were heavily influenced by The Stooges and Velvet Underground. In 1989, Pierce had a falling out with his bandmate, Pete Kember, and left to form a new group, Spiritualized.

In 1992, Spiritualized put out their debut album, Lazer Guided Melodies. It was praised for its otherworldliness and sold better than Pierce had expected (one song was used in a Toffee Crisp commercial). With 1995’s Pure Phase (released under the alias Spiritualized Electric Mainline) the outfit copper-fastened their standing among critics. Two years later, Pierce released his masterpiece, the gospel-influenced Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. As the tenth anniversary of Ladies and Gentleman came around, Pierce was invited to perform the record in its entirety. He could have made a fortune. But Pierce hates looking backward. In the end, there were only six Ladies and Gentleman shows.

“I loved playing those gigs. They were so full of euphoria,” he says. “At the same time, a little voice in the back of my head was saying ‘you were never meant to be part of the catering industry.’ I was delivering exactly what the audience expected, in the same running order every night. People already knew how these songs would make them feel.”

He worried that he’d fallen victim to the nostalgia ‘disease’ afflicting much of the music industry. In his book Retromania, the writer Simon Reynolds says pop’s obsession with its recent past is destructive. Pierce agrees.

“People are saying those were the classic moments. That the great days are all behind us. Bands are reuniting to play their most successful albums. And I don’t want it to end like that.

“Music is the greatest thing in my life. I’m not going to sit here and say Sweet Heart Sweet Light is better or worse than Ladies and Gentlemen. It doesn’t work like that. But I wanted to keep evolving, rather than looking back to old times,” he says.

Spiritualized’s music is intense and grandiose. Not surprisingly, people read all sorts of meanings into Pierce’s lyrics. He wishes it were otherwise.

“The thing with songs is that they are never about specifics,” he says. “There’s a new track, called Too Late. The other day, a journalist asked if the lyrics meant I’d given up on love. The point with lyrics is that they aren’t about how you feel all of the time.

“You are putting down details of small parts of your life. It’s hard to know what a lot of songs mean. They take in more than singular events. I don’t tell stories. They are never about one particular thing.”

Pierce has been criticised for taking too long over albums. Sweet Heart Sweet Light arrives after a five-year gap — a lifetime in music.

“Novelists are never told that,” he says. “I don’t hold with this dogma that, for rock’n’roll to be great, you have to go into the studio and put it down and make magic in the moment — mistakes and all. I think it’s okay to proceed slowly, to correct things. I like the idea of music that takes time to find its space. If you put down some songs acoustically with a band, you can change the arrangements, push it in different places — see where the tolerances are. That’s what I did on the new record. I can’t tell whether it’s good or not. I’m too close to it now. That’s for others to judge.”

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is out now.