Jason Pierce, J Spaceman, Spiritualized, And Nothing Hurt new album

Jason Pierce, aka J Spaceman, has piloted band Spiritualized on a long flight but the trip may be over.

Jason Pierce as J Spaceman: ‘I don’t know if I’ve got the stamina for it any more.’

After he finished work on an album that took several years to write and arrange, while working alone on a laptop in an upstairs room in East London, Jason Pierce made what he thought was a straightforward request of the engineers responsible for its mastering: could he please have a copy on compact disc? To his surprise­, he learned that this had become an unusua­l query in an era where emailing music files had become the norm.

“When I mastered the record, I was the first person in 2½ years to ask for a CD,” he says. “They had to send out to get me one. It was kind of like time had changed or something. I felt like an HG Wells type of character — like the whole world had changed from when I first sat in that room.”

That image of a man out of time suits Pierce’s public persona, which has long been imbued with an aloof world-weariness. As singer, songwriter and sole constant member of British rock band Spiritualized — an act regarded as a moder­n leader in a musical subgenre known as space rock for its other-worldly qualit­ies — Pierce has been here before.

With Spiritualized, he cemented that high-flying feel not only in the music but also in at least other three ways, most notably in the title of the group’s third and best-known album, 1997’s Ladie­s and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space, his preference for wearing an astronaut suit in promotional images and music videos, and his stage name of J Spaceman.

The album Pierce recently completed, And Nothing Hurt, is the eighth Spiritualized collection — and perhaps its final full-length statement, according to several interviews the frontman has given in recent years leading up to its release. Not for a lack of ideas, mind you, but more for reasons associated with the physical and mental toll that the act of creation tends to take on the songwriter and arranger.

“Albums come with a great personal weight of expectation,” Pierce says by phone from Londo­n. “I feel a great responsibility to cover as much ground as I can and to pull in as much informati­on as I can. I never thought of an album as being three tracks and then a few ideas to hold it all together. I feel like it’s like a novel or something, and I feel that that’s what I was saying: I don’t know if I’ve got the stamina for it any more.”

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By combining elements of blues, gospel, soul, jazz and rock music, Spiritualized has charted a singular flight path since it began in 1990. In concert, it is known for reliably summoning walls of sound — occasionally with the backing of orchestras and choirs — that combine to offer the sort of full-body physical response that remains out of reach for most artists.

A familiar sight in such situations is a seated Pierce, inevitably wearing all-white clothing with dark sunglasses, playing electric guitar and singing his melancholic melodies while the sonic spaceship is cleared for takeoff.

“It feels really special to be able to do that,” he says of the band’s live reputation. “There are moments in there where it feels like somebody else has got their hand through the roof, and they’re stirring the sound — like it’s come out of the sky.”

Although the image of a slight, uniformed man sitting on a high chair while leading a rock band, choir and orchestra through its paces may be far from the thought of an extrava­gantly dressed character such as Keith Richards or Slash bent over their instrument, Pierce has a good reason to shrug off the cliche of the effortlessly cool guitarist prowling the stage, and it’s tied to that word mentioned earlier: stamina.

He nearly died in 2005 when he contracted pneumonia. His lungs filled with fluid, his heart stopped beating twice and his children visited his bedside for what was suspected to be a final goodbye — but he was the only one in his shared intensive care ward to walk away after the five other occupants didn’t make it.

J Spaceman: ‘(I) don’t want it to sound like I’m suffering for my art.’

Naturally enough, the album that followed in 2008 — Spiritualized’s sixth — was influenced by what he heard and pondered while in hospital, right down to the album title, a referenc­e to the accident and emergency departm­ent, Songs in A&E, a collection that he dedicated to the staff at the Royal London Hospita­l where he received treatment.

A healthy dose of decidedly unhealthy substance­s factors heavily here, too, dating back to Spacemen 3, a rock group Pierce formed in 1982 whose album titles include The Perfect Prescript­ion and Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. After falling out with its co-founder, Peter Kember, Pierce began the group that continues today with the assistance of a revolving cast of recording and touring music­ians — while reportedly declining offers of up to £2 million ($3.48m) to re-form Spacemen 3.

That fascination with intoxicants bled into Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space. Its sprawling final track, Cop Shoot Cop  … , begins­ with the line, “There’s a hole in my arm where all the money goes …”, a reference to a song by American country folk singer-­songwriter John Prine.

As a stand-alone artistic statement, that 70-minute album remains a triump­h. Its original artwork was designed to resemble pharmaceutical packaging, as if the music itself were the medicine.

That analogy was extended in 2010, when Ladies and Gentlemen … was repackaged as a box set limited to 1000 copies. Inside, each disc was sealed in blister packaging, mimicking a treatment­ regimen. “What is Spiritualized used for?” asked the liner notes. “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.”

Wound up in all of this is the sense that Pierce has been closer to his end than most of us, though since recovering more than a decade ago he has been reluctant to imbue his near-death experience with any great significance; more a casual footnote in his story than an exclamati­on point.

He rose from his hospital bed and resumed his life without any great epiphanies — though, perhaps inevitably, his musician’s mind did find inspiration in the polyrhythms of the beeping machine­ry that kept him alive.

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And so to And Nothing Hurt, nine songs the songwriter says come closer to capturing his personality than any album he has written before. Its moods range from calm and loving to fierce and propulsive: of the latter style, there are two upbeat tracks, On the Sunshine and The Morning­ After, which feature a rock band in full flight, even though each part was recorded and mixed separately.

What shines through the collection, though, is Pierce’s distinctive ear for arranging a constella­tion of additional instruments — chiefly horns and strings — atop simple songs that appear to begin with just a few guitar chords and a vocal melody. The sound is un­mistakably Spiritualized, and that’s by design, of course. “I know there are similarities in my songs; I’ve been accused of writing the same song for the last 35 years,” he notes with a smile.

Such reductive accusations miss the clever, creeping evolution at play across the band’s catalogue, from its 1992 debut, Lazer Guided Melodie­s, through to 2012’s Sweet Heart Sweet Light (written while Pierce was undergoing a six-month course of chemotherapy for a degenera­tive liver disease), and now to this collecti­on.

His long-running interest in religious languag­e is on display in opener A Perfect Miracle­, while an air of uncertainty permeates penultimate track The Prize (“And I don’t know if love’s the cure / And I don’t know if love’s so pure / And I don’t know if love’s the prize”). This is, after all, the same guy who wrote a crushing song named Broken Heart more than two decade­s ago, whose six aching minutes still stand as one of the most accurate aural representations of that particular feeling.

Yet while Pierce acknowledges that he tends to paint with similar palettes, And Nothing Hurt is a stirring achievement that stands alone as a masterly work. If it is to be his final record — with the caveat that it’s always a danger to put such finite terms on art — it’s one hell of a mark to leave on the canvas. When asked if he would be satisfied by all he has created under the Spirit­ualized name, he is momentarily caught off-guard. “Wow, that’s a question,” he says, ­exhaling. “I’m never satisfied. I feel like I’ve always­ set the bar as I high as I can go, then see if I can clear it — and then see how high I can put it the next time. [Albums] are like these little time capsules, with all this information, and they do this amazing thing for people; they slow and speed up their time.

“I genuinely believe that the music you listen to becomes part of your personality. It affects the way you engage with people; the way you walk. If you fall in love, you’ve got all those melodi­es that ever made sense at that moment in your head — not literally at the same time, but all of that information and all of that languag­e is part of that. You’ve got all these melodi­es and tunes and words going around, and they’re part of who you are.”

When Review connects with Pierce, it’s about seven weeks before the album — this particul­ar time capsule — will be transmitted out into the world of art and music to which the songwriter has devoted his life. At this moment he feels fantastic, as though a great weight has been lifted.

“I also don’t want it to sound like I’m suffering for my art, although there is this strange personal sort of obsessive behaviour that happens­ with it,” he says. “I guess it’s part of the process, you know? Somebody told me the other day that this album belongs to the univers­e now, and I kind of like that.”

Given the years of preoccupation over its creation, largely on his lonesome, the sense of relief is palpable. Pierce can rest easy for now, ahead of plans to tour the album; Australia appear­s to be on the cards, though he can’t say when. Once the applause subsides, the spaceman may well find himself alone in a room again, with making music on his mind.

And Nothing Hurt is due for release on September 7 via Bella Union/[PIAS].