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Spiritualized were playing their only UK gig of 2018 at the Hammersmith Apollo and, lucky me, I'd been the grateful recipient of the generous birthday gift of a ticket to the show from my much loved friend Pam. Even better, she was accompanying me to the gig. There was no way it could be a bad night. It turned out to be a great one.
It was a nomimally sedentary event which would have horrified me back in my twenties but not now. Not if it's the right band. Spiritualized are the sort of band you're more than happy to sit down and watch. I read some attendees were unhappy about the constant flipping of the auditorium chairs as people popped out to the bars and bogs with increasing regularity but, hey, it may be a sit down affair but it's a rock'n'roll gig. It's not the theatre. Even when people got up to dance near the end it looked more like old footage of Woodstock than one of those dreadful 'An Audience With....' programmes in which self-conscious celebrities whooped and hollered in the aisles.
Not that there was any shortage of whooping-and-a-hollering in the room. From the very onset Spiritualized received a rapturous reception which is only to be expected if you kick your set off, following a very brief intro of Hold On from 2003's Amazing Grace, with the primal thrust of Come Together, the first of three tracks from the critically lauded masterpiece Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, now an astonishing twenty-one years old.
The set was bookended by two sets of, ostensibly, greatest hits with the meat in the sandwich being provided by their new album, And Nothing Hurt is their best for some time, played in its entirety. With seven members of the band, a ten piece gospel choir, and sizeable string and brass sections there were thirty people on stage from the very start to the very finish of the gig.
Sometimes the gospel choir dominated to the point we could almost be watching a tribute to the recently departed Aretha Franklin in a homely Tennessee Baptist church rather than a cavernous rock venue, other times you could revel in a ride back into rock'n'roll history as the band revelled in both reverently and irreverently ripping open the handbooks of both rock and drone, elsewhere there were plaintive keyboard refrains that felt almost as if they were going to usher in Pierce's old band mate Sonic Boom's more sprechgesang vocal stylings. At one point a key change was struck with such power that several members of the audience jumped from their seats with all the enthusiasm, and none of the choreography, of boy band members on a TV talent show. Westlife's boozy uncles!
The band have always honed their sound more than they've evolved it and, as such, that means that new and old songs meld together into a harmonious whole. A whole that is often greater than the sum of its parts. My friend Rob and I used to talk about 'sound' bands (bands that developed a specific sound like Loop) and 'song' bands (bands that wrote catchy tunes but had no over arching style (REM, Blur) but Spiritualized long ago ascended to the plane of bands, like My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain, who've got both the 'songs' and the 'sound'.
Stay With Me's like slipping into a big ol' bubblebath full of warm water, regret, and fond memories. So Long You Pretty Thing sounds like a close, and troubled, friend whispering dark secrets and bon mots into your ear after a late night of red wine and confessionals. Broken Heart is probably my favourite Spiritualized song of all and its lyrics of being "wasted all the time" and drinking someone off your mind hit home in just the way its author intended. Possibly because it was written, like all Spiritualized songs, from the heart. Often from a dark heart but a dark heart that's still not afraid to let love in. You have to risk being hurt sometimes.
Even when they cover the 18c hymn Oh Happy Day, rocking up the gospel arrangement that saw the Edwin Hawkins Singers turn it into a worldwide hit, it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb but slips into the set seamlessly, even proving to be something of a highlight. This avowed atheist was happy to wave his (metaphorical) arms in the air and sing along to a life affirming tale of having his sins washed away by Jesus and being taught how to watch, fight, and pray.
Spiritualized swing as much as they rock. The most instantly enjoyable track from And Nothing Hurt is The Morning After, a 7+ minute eulogy to teenage depression, suicide, and mental health problems that manages to make those things sound simultaneously serious and like the most fun anybody could ever have. As much as it balances those two seemingly disparate sentiments it also performs the old Spiritualized trick of managing to sound both incredibly simple and abnormally expansive at the same time.
I'm Your Man is almost textbook Spiritualized, guitar screeds wrap around sax squalls as Jason Pierce laconically emotes a tale of a "wasted, loaded, permanently folded" flawed lover who, given the chance, could be, maybe, "faithful, honest, and true". Here It Comes (The Road) Let's Go makes wonderful use of the choir and despite the incontestable power of their voices Jason doesn't get lost in the mix as he sits, Wizard of Oz like, in the right hand corner of the stage overseeing the whole spectacular. If you had no knowledge of Spiritualized before arriving at this gig it'd be hard for you to tell that Pierce was both band leader, songwriter, and orchestrator of the entire event. As Stevie Chick put it, in his Guardian review of this gig, "drone-rock's dark magus".
He may be skinny and unassuming, dressed casually in a white t-shirt and jeans (and, of course, shades indoors), but over nearly three decades, four if you include his years in Spaceman 3 - and you should, he's developed his own truly unique sound that despite often relying on what appear to be fairly standard rock'n'roll tropes (in Let's Dance he's "a lonely rock'n'roller, other times he prefers the adjective "lonesome" and love interest rarely has a name other than "baby" or maybe "darlin'"') avoid becoming cliched not because they're delivered tongue-in-cheek but because they're written with the exact opposite intentions. When Jason Pierce says "c'mon darling, let's dance" in Let's Dance you don't think it's a corny line. You think he wants to dance. Or 'dance'. Horizontally.
Sex, music, drugs, and God come together in an almighty quadrumvirate that seems to distil life down to its purest essences. In truth, despite the gospel stylings of the band and, of course, more naturally, the choir you could probably take God out of the equation. Spiritualized's God seems to be made up of love (or sex, the most obvious expression of love), music, and drugs. Possibly the three things that most fuck with the chemical balance of your mind. Three of the most powerful things most of us ever get to experience and three of the things that change us, affect us, in ways more quotidian pursuits will never be able to.
No I Think I'm In Love, no Medication, and no Run but Spiritualized's oeuvre is now veritable enough for them to be able to leave such songs out and still not disappoint. Life may sometimes feel like all the bad things are happening all the time but somehow Jason Pierce and his band manage, as if by some alchemical process, to make them sound like all the good things are happening all the time. Their themes of music, love, sex, drugs, and whatever your God may be don't come across so much as obsessions as salvations. Salvations that are just as useful to us in helping us cope with the modern world as they ever were in times gone by.
It was a fantastic gig, a wonderful gift from a valued friend, and our trip to, first, the Dove for a delicious pint of pale ale by the side of the river and, secondly, on to Sagar for an even more delicious dosa afterwards meant it all added up to a truly memorable evening. A memory as beautiful as the sight of the sun going down over the Arcadian idyll that was both the river Thames and the wrought-iron Hammersmith Bridge that greeted me as I arrived in W6.
"and all the angels singing just about got it right" - Soul on Fire, Spiritualized.
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