“Kitchen sink ecstasy” is an offhand impression I scribbled in pencil. It’s meant to imply the deliriously cluttered cacophony that explodes like fireworks in the music of Spiritualized. I don’t know what makes me say it out loud, especially so early in the interview, but it’s OK. Jason “Spaceman” Pierce seems to like it.
“Oh, there’s everything,” he says when asked to itemise the sonic ingredients in the English band’s latest trip-o-phonic album epic, Everything Was Beautiful.
“I love it when you put things that don’t sit so well next to each other, like the high tones of glockenspiels and bells against tubas and French horns. Not trying to be clever,” he adds. “Just playing the same notes.”
Jason Pierce plays 16 instruments. Credit:Sarah Piantadosi
Cleverness is a siren to be resisted on this great thundering ocean of rock’n’roll invention. Simplicity is the key, albeit in layers that push and multiply and escalate ever higher until your heart nearly bursts. Pierce alone plays 16 instruments, apparently, though he laughs softly when asked what role proficiency plays in their application.
Everything was Beautiful is Spiritualized’s ninth studio album.
“I think it’s just exciting to play music,” he says. “You put a guitar around your neck and you hit a chord, and it’s the most thrilling sound in the world, and you want to hit it again. That’s the way we put our band together.”
“Band” is a fairly loose description of the concept Pierce launched out of Warwickshire in 1990, en route to scoring one of the decade’s defining psychedelic rock records, Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space.
On the morphing line-up’s previous visits to Australia, Spiritualized has numbered in scores of choristers and classical and jazz musicians scaling heights of grandeur despite, as some of them have been known to grumble, very little in the way of detailed notation.
New titles this time include The A Song (Laid in Your Arms) and Best Thing You Never Hard (The D Song). They often spiral to maximum intensity on simple, repeated phrases.
“Gonna be a long ride down/ The best thing you never had,” or “Lay it down, lay it down/ Lay it down and let it bleed” or, on the uber-climactic finale, “I’m coming home again.”
“It fascinates me that rock’n’ roll music is so simplistic,” Pierce says.
“You can say things like, ‘I will always love you’ or ‘Be my baby’ or ‘Love, love me do’. Anybody who’s got a very rudimentary grasp of the language and a few chord shapes should be able to write these things all the time.
“But great songs are extremely rare. They’re elusive because it’s the intent behind it, the force and the seeking; the whatever-it-is that makes it special … I just think it’s so important to try to get it right.”
Pierce is one passionate and focused spaceman. COVID lockdown “felt like something I’d been preparing for all my life,” he says.
He was acutely aware of the unfolding horror, having been through bilateral pneumonia himself, and now with a daughter working with London’s homeless population.
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But “even with soundproof rooms, most musicians still find they do their best takes late into the night when the rest of the world is calm”.
“It’s almost like you need space to make music. You need this calm, so you can get on with the job of making noise. And I had 24 hours a day of that.”
He had empty streets to wander, too, headphones swimming in the conundrums of mixing hugely expansive recordings down to maximum impact.
In the end, he settled on a probably pioneering method of weaving two master mixes together for extra oomph. “It reminded me of those old-fashioned amps where you can push an ‘excitement’ button or ‘loudness’ or whatever. You couldn’t really tell what it was doing but it’s doing something, and it’s quite nice to push the button.”
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The piece de resistance is the album cover which, in its physical incarnation, is an elaborate fold-out pharmaceutical package with foil lining and braille messages. The medication imagery is a throwback to the cover of Ladies and Gentlemen, 25 years ago.
“Because it was so beautiful,” he says of the artwork, “but also, we talked about soma and Brave New World and music as a balm, I guess … music as the best medication. It all seemed to fit.“
Everything Was Beautiful has come into its own on stages across the US and Britain in recent months, Pierce says. “There’s a lot more up rock’n’ roll. It’s the same band but it’s something different. It’s a whole different trip and that’s kind of nice. A smaller ensemble. Kitchen sink ecstasy.”
Spiritualized play the Big Top Luna Park as part of Vivid on June 16, and MAC2, Hobart, as part of Dark Mofo June 17.
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