SPIRITUALIZED first punctured popular consciousness with their 1997 opus Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space, a foil-wrapped psychedelic rock trip laced with traces of gospel and blues which hit number four on the album chart, earned rave reviews from then all-powerful music weeklies NME and Melody Maker and found the Jason Pierce-led group infiltrating the Top 40 with Electricity, I Think I’m In Love and Come Together.
However, just a couple of years earlier, the band’s slightly less grandiose but perhaps even more sonically ambitious 1995 record, Pure Phase, was roundly ignored by critics who failed to appreciate its downbeat, droney alternative to the quickly escalating Britpop knees-up.
The follow-up to 1992’s debut Lazer Guided Melodies, Pure Phase took its title from the record’s distinctive ‘phased’ sound, which Pierce created by meticulously combining two separate mixes of each song and allowing them to drift just slightly out of sync.
“I always had this feeling that [Pure Phase] was missed, slightly,” says Pierce, who made his name in narcotics-obsessed 1980s garage rockers Spacemen 3 (when he was known as ‘J Spaceman’, a nickname which endures to this day) prior to forging his own path with Spiritualized.
“Of all the records, it felt like it was the one that slipped through the net, but it’s still one of my favourites. I kind of think it’s just as unique and as special as Ladies and Gentlemen, but Ladies and Gentlemen got all the press and good fortune that music relies on for success.
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Pure Phase is still one of my favourites. I kind of think it’s just as unique and as special as Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
— Jason Pierce
“You know, it’s all it’s always spoken about, that it’s all talent or genius or ability - but a huge percentage is fortune. You know, does it fit into whatever else is going on? Do the ‘right’ people find it at the right time? And I felt Pure Phase slipped through that.
“I remember a one-out-of-10 review from the NME or something. It was kind of weird. You know, you put all this work in and then it sort of hits the wall and is just kind of dismissed immediately. That’s always sat ill with me.
“And it’s not that I expected the opposite, with everybody saying ‘you’re genius, this is a great piece of work’, but to have it flatly ignored was kind of strange at the time.
“I’m not really the kind of person who knows what else is going on around me, musically, but it obviously was not something that fitted in with whatever was going on at the time - three minute pop songs done in a certain style.
“But that doesn’t mean that it failed. It didn’t stop the process. I just got on with the next thing, and the next thing happened to be Ladies and Gentlemen.”
Pure Phase has also become a firm fan favourite over the ensuing decades, with a deluxe 2021 re-issue ensuring that the double album was widely available on LP and CD across the world for the first time since the 90s.
Second time around, the record got the critical response it deserved, and Spiritualized will shortly be hitting the road to perform Pure Phase in full for the first time ever to mark its 30th birthday (which arrives next Tuesday), starting with a pair of Irish dates in Belfast and Dublin.
Having successfully brought Ladies and Gentleman to the stage in a similar manner with a well-received tour a few years ago, Pierce is confident that he and his bandmates will be able to do similar justice to Pure Phase - a record Spiritualized (who had ‘rebranded’ as Spiritualized Electric Mainline for its release) did not feel capable of playing in full back in 1995.
“The live shows we went out and played on the back of that album were kind of amazing,” he recalls of the original Pure Phase tour, which found the band cherry-picking the tunes they felt comfortable recreating live.
“They kind of shimmered with the same kind of sound as as the record. So it’s going to be kind of nice to revisit that, but with all the extra information that we’ve gained in the meantime.
“Back then, we couldn’t play over half of that record in any kind of in any kind of substantial way. But hopefully now we can get inside of it and make it as as emotionally moving live as it is on record.”
Having now released nine studio albums with Spiritualized, most recently 2022’s crafted-in-lockdown set Everything Was Beautiful, Pierce has always, in the main, been more focused on creating and playing new music than engaging in what he mockingly refers to as “battle re-enactments” of the musical past.
However, since 2021, the ongoing Spaceman Reissue Program has seen him collaborating with Fat Possum Records to re-release the Spiritualized back catalogue in deluxe remastered form, helping to bring the group’s earliest and often overlooked recordings to new listeners.
Celebratory full album performances of Ladies and Gentlemen in 2009 and 2016 found Spiritualized breaking new ground in concert even as they revisited their musical past - a feat the band hope to repeat as they take Pure Phase out on the road for its 30th birthday.
“[A lot of] Ladies and Gentlemen was kind of out of our reach to play live when it was released, but then years later we found that there were ways of doing it,” explains Pierce of the full album shows, which found them enlisting extra help to recreate the epic sound of the recorded version.
“We got all the extra musicians who were out of our budget back in 1997 - you know, we couldn’t just say, ‘let’s get a 10 piece vocal choir, and let’s go out with strings'. We weren’t living in that world.
“So, I think it’s within our reach now to play these songs and to get the help we need to find a way of getting inside of them and performing them.
“I could go out and play with a five or six piece band and do the shows [the way] we did 30 years ago. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re kind of trying to capture the sort of symphonic quality of the piece, that ‘soundtrackyness’.
“So it doesn’t feel like I’m going over any old ground, if that makes sense.”
On the subject of kicking the tour off in Belfast, the Spiritualized leader reveals he has fond memories of the band receiving a raucous reception here back in the day.
“Belfast is the first place we ever did an encore,” recalls Pierce of a previous visit to the city.
“We’d put all the gear away but people seriously did not leave. So we had to take everything out again and play some more.
“I mean, the encore must have been 30 or 40 minutes after the last song, but we felt compelled - these people were just not going to let us get away without it.
“It was extraordinary.”
Let’s hope that’s one bit of ‘old ground’ they do get to revisit next month.
Spiritualized, March 19, Telegraph Building, Belfast / March 20, National Stadium, Dublin. Tickets via spiritualized.com.
