A conversation with Jason Pierce from 1997

In which the Spiritualized guru tries to convince me that 'Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space'—a.k.a. the greatest heroin-heartbreak album of the 20th century—is really just a comedy record

Aug 22, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Between 1989 and 2008, I saw Neil Young perform nine times, in every possible setting and configuration: solo acoustic, with Crazy Horse, with Booker T. & the MGs, in small theatres, in hockey arenas, in outdoor amphitheaters, in baseball stadiums, in open festival fields. So I took a bit of a break from going to see him—one that ended up lasting 17 years. But given all the legends we’ve lost this year, I felt compelled to go see Neil again while he was still with us. That said, after taking in his two-hour performance with the Chrome Hearts at Budweiser Stage on Tuesday, that looming question of “could be this the last time I ever get to see this guy?” swiftly to back of mind—even as his 80th birthday approaches this November, Neil still sounds like he’s got a lot of gas left in the tank. You know you’re in for a good show when he opens with “Ambulance Blues”…

…and then goes right into “Cowgirl in the Sand.”

The rest of the setlist struck just the right balance of classics and obscurities. The latter category did include two songs from Greendale, but he also gifted us “New Mama,” so I call that a fair trade.

Over at Bandcamp Daily, I wrote about Water From Your Eyes’ new record, It’s a Beautiful Place, which I describe as “the sort of album made by some weirdo New York band who got scooped up by Elektra in 1996 during the dying days of the post-Nevermind signing frenzy and were promised complete creative freedom by the A&R guy who got laid off a week after the album came out.”
This week on Commotion, I produced this episode on the notorious legacy and uncertain future of Howard Stern as his SiriusXM contract comes up for renewal. Our cast of Baba Booeys includes comedian/podcaster Ashley Ray, writer Niko Stratis, and former Indie88 morning man (and Russian Futurists ringleader) Matt Hart.
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
Click here for the Apple Music version
- Mac DeMarco, “Home”: I admittedly fell off the Mac train sometime around This Old Dog, when the scales started to tip from slack to sleepy. But I’m back on board with Guitar (out today), which is mellow and minimalist to the point of provocation. With no frills, no intros, and no fucks given, the album is essentially 12 attempts to remake Lennon’s “I’m So Tired” as a McCartney I track, and “Home” is his most successful pass. Speaking of Mac, here’s a photo from 2009 when my band The Two Koreas opened for his old band Makeout Videotape at the Unfamiliar Records fifth-anniversary party and he decided right then and there to ditch the noisy indie-rock act and reinvent himself as the king of chill.
- Delicate Steve, “In the Morning”: On his new record Luke’s Garage (out today), the New Jersey guitar slinger effectively crafts the sort of jangly, homespun indie-pop confections that DeMarco was making over a decade ago, if DeMarco had his mouth covered in duct tape and was forced to communicate through morse-code solos.
- Steve Gunn, “Sunday”: Speaking of avant-rock guitar virtuosos named Steve with auteurist ambitions—Gunn’s new all-instrumental album is helpfully titled Music for Writers, as its meditative innervisions are designed to unobtrusively inspire acts of creative typing. While I have yet to put the album to its intended use, I will say this magnificent ambient-folk set piece certainly encourages extended periods of blissful, zoned-out procrastination.
- Scott Hardware, “Costume Off”: The first single from the Lisbon-via-Toronto indie-pop shapeshifter’s upcoming fourth album, Overpass (out Sept. 26), comes on like an early ‘80s new-waved power-pop FM-radio hit vacuum-sealed into DIY dimensions.
- Water From Your Eyes, “Blood on the Dollar”: As I wrote in the aforementioned Bandcamp Daily review of It’s a Beautiful Place, with this song, “a duo that once bemoaned the fact they couldn’t legally interpolate a Neil Young song opt to just write a beautifully bummed Neil Young song of their own.”

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized

The date: August 11, 1997

Publication: Chart magazine

Location: The old BMG offices at John Street and Queen Street West in downtown Toronto

Album being promoted: Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space

The context: Eight years ago, I wrote a feature for Pitchfork declaring 1997 to be the best year for British rock in my lifetime. And if I were to pick a single album to stand above all the classics released that year, it would be Spiritualized’s Ladies and gentleman we are floating in space, which I described in the aforelinked article thusly:

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl to the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, boy makes 70-minute free-jazz psych-rock epic with the London Community Gospel Choir, Balanescu Quartet, Dr. John, and the ghost of Elvis, complete with enough drug metaphors to make the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers seem subtle.

So, when Chart magazine offered me the opportunity to do an in-person interview with Jason Pierce during the Toronto stop of the Ladies and gentlemen tour, it was like a Make-a-Wish Foundation dream come true for a budding music journo still subsisting on flipped CD promos. My crusty old tape recording of our conversation is extremely hissy and Pierce isn’t the loudest talker, so getting a usable transcript of our interview to reprint here would require some professional audio-engineer forensic analysis. Instead, I present the resultant feature story, written when I was 22 years old—i.e., my peak indie-snob era, which means my gushing fanboy praise for Pierce is served with a side of anti-Spice Girls snark. (I still hold firm in the belief that the Spice Girls could never make a record as mind-blowing as Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space, however, I now concede that Spiritualized could never make a movie as fun as Spice World.) My story was featured on the cover, however, this being a Canadian alt-rock magazine in 1997, Spiritualized had to share the front-page real estate with Holly McNarland, who was positioned to look like the band’s lead singer.

From the Nov. 1997 issue of Chart:

The skies are beginning to open onto the streets of downtown Toronto, but a little rain never hurt Jason "Spaceman" Pierce. While umbrellas start to sprout up everywhere and people scurry for cover, the Spiritualized guru stops in his tracks and lights the hundredth cigarette he’s had in the past hour (not an unreasonable estimate). He's 30 minutes late for a MuchMusic interview, and though the Much studios are no more than 10 feet away from the record label office he's been holed up in, Pierce is in no hurry. As he slowly jaywalks across John Street, he fails to notice the cars that miss him by inches; he's content to soak up the sensory overload of a busy city in rush hour while the rain soaks him. "Take your time," Pierce sang on Spiritualized's 1991 debut Lazer Guided Melodies, and six years later, he's still taking his own advice.

The Much interview with Sook-Yin Lee finally wraps up an hour later, and Pierce is feeling a little antsy. He's looking to score… some candy, that is. As we stand at the interview location—a demolished building site at the corner of John and Richmond—Pierce has his eyes on the Sugar Mountain candy store across the street. Pierce may be notorious for consuming more, ahem, potent substances, but you ain't seen nothing until you've witnessed him down a roll of Rockets.

However, before he can make his escape to the land of Bottle Caps and Fizz Wizz, Lee intervenes to hand him copies of her two records. Pierce gladly accepts, and as he examines the discs, Lee tells him that she is much happier with her second album than her first. "I believe in this one more," she says. The sentiment sounds perfectly normal coming from an exchange between two artists looking to perfect their respective crafts.

But Pierce is no ordinary artist. He may look the part of the stoned-out tortured genius—untucked button-down, comb-resistant hair, Converse All-Stars that look like they've been worn since 1986—but anyone who's ever heard a record by Spiritualized or Pierce's previous band, the seminal Spacemen 3, knows that, beyond the glazed eyes lies some grey matter set to explode at any moment. And it’s statements like that of Lee’s that bring Pierce’s brain to a serious boil.

"So much music is compromised," he tells me behind the wall of smoke he has created (it was just cigarettes, I swear) back in the record company's conference room. "I think a lot of bands put out records that they don't actually like, and you don't find out about that until they do the next release, when they say things like, ‘This is the album we always wanted to make! We can actually listen to these songs, and we sorted it out!’ A lot of bands do that! And it's kind of like, 'Well why did you release that last record? Why did you make us shell out 14 quid for it if it's just a kind of warm-up for something that you didn't quite get right?’

[Note: my interview with Pierce actually took place about an hour before the meeting with Lee described in the opening paragraphs, so the quote above was in no way related to his exchange with Lee. I was clumsily trying to connect a thematic thread from two separate discussions, but in hindsight, my framing here unfairly suggests a direct point/counterpoint relationship. My bad.]

"We allow ourselves the time to get it right," he continues. "I don't want to look back in 50 years' time and say, 'I didn't mix that right' or, 'If only I had the time to say what I really wanted to say…” We’re ambitious. We aim incredibly high and we don't release our records until they're finished, so there's no compromise.”

If there's a record released this year that aims higher than Spiritualized's Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space (Dedicated/BMG), then it's too far up for us to even bother looking. Everyone and their cousin seems to be releasing a "magnum opus" this year (Radiohead, Primal Scream, Yo La Tengo), but Spiritualized makes the competition look like a high school battle-of-the-bands. This is a record that separates music from the world of Top 40 singles and buzz clips and target demographics, and returns it to the realm of pure sound. It simply chills the heart to think that in some music stores, this sits in the Pop/Rock section inches away from the Spice Girls.

"A lot of music has to do with commerce," says Pierce with an appropriate amount of disgust. "It's to do with investment and return, and not to do with music. The charts just reflect the speed of record sales. We were number 4 on the charts [in Britain]. It doesn't mean we're the fourth best, it means our records sold fourth fastest that week.

"The record company doesn't understand [our music], and they never understood it. You know, I could sell 25,000 records out of the back of a car There's, like, 25,000 towns in the whole world. If you can't get one guy or one girl in each town to buy a single record, then you're struggling, mate.”

If record sales were determined by instances of jaw-dropping, then Pierce would be the world's busiest traveling salesman. There are simply no adequate words to describe the free-jazz eruptions on songs like "No God, Only Religion" and "All Of My Thoughts," or the swelling in your eyes experienced while absorbing the ultra-dramatic bittersweet symphony of "Broken Heart," or that feeling you get when Pierce sings four heart-crushing melodies simultaneously on the beautifully aching title track. It's records like these that make critics go ga-ga with hyphens and superlatives (in case you haven't noticed). But instead of reaching for a thesaurus, you're best off just screaming, "Holy fuck, Spaceman!" and let Pierce use the recording studio like an empty canvas.

"I'm not really into seeking out the cool studios where people have worked," he says, surprisingly, "because I don't think you can get anything out of going into a studio. You ain't going to get a record that's as good as Al Green's by using the studio he used.

“The purpose of a studio is to make something that captures part of the live show, rather than just a record of a performance. You know, our records aren't made like, 'This is what Spiritualized sounded like on a particular day two years ago.’ I think they capture a lot more than that. There's stuff from Lazer Guided Melodies where I hear so many backing vocals and harmonics and harmonies that I know were recorded, and I think that's why it works live as well: I know the individual parts that are being played, but the sum total of that is way more expansive than just the five or six of us on stage."

As per design, Ladies and gentlemen... obliterates the standards set by the previous Laser Guided Melodies and Pure Phase (1995), with Pierce deliberately removing "all of the stuff I thought was 'instant Spiritualized,’ like drones, phasers, tremolos, all that kind of stuff. I got concerned that we were writing stuff that, if there was a Spiritualized blueprint, then we were using it. So I tried to get as far away from that with the making of this record."

But just as we'll never be able to look at Michael Jackson in quite the same way ever again, Pierce's legacy will forever be linked to the needle and spoon. Not since the Stones released Sticky Fingers in 1971 has a record been mined for smack references, but where the Stones used clever euphemisms like "Brown Sugar" (for heroin) or "Dead Flowers" (for crushed poppies, i.e., heroin), Pierce makes no attempts at subtlety. On "Home Of The Brave" he sings about having his "breakfast right off of the mirror" (and he ain't talking about Corn Flakes); "I Think I'm In Love" finds him alone "with a spike in my arm and my spoon." And while Ladies and gentlemen.... does not always sound like the Spiritualized we know and love, it sure as hell looks like it: the record is packaged like a prescription pill, complete with "instructions" on how to take the Spiritualized "tablets." So much for breaking associations...

"But it says within the packaging that it's music for the treatment for the heart and soul," Pierce responds. "It's not about abusing pharmaceutical drugs. It's done with a lot more humour than that."

So then Ladies and gentlemen... is a comedy record.

"I think there's a lot of humour there," he says, amazed that anyone could view the record any differently. "The first year of making this record was probably the best year of my life, I had a fantastic time. And yeah, I think people have got it wrong—there's a lot of humour in there. Even within things like 'Broken Heart,’ I really wanted to use the English language in a way that nobody could say, 'That could have been written better! I found the writing of that song was like a mixture of pride and humour. It was written in that way. It was written like a Tammy Wynette song from way back. Like, I knew when I had written that song that it was going to hit people the way it was going to hit them."

"Broken Heart" aside, perhaps no song on the record has been misconstrued as much as the eight-minute centrepiece "I Think I'm In Love," which, on the surface, sounds like the angel and devil on Pierce's shoulders duking it out in a vicious battle for control of his ego. "I think I can be your man," proclaims the devil in the final round. "You probably just think you can," is the angel's retort. Ouch.

"That's just 18 lines of sarcasm," says Pierce of the song. "Everyone is trying to attribute it to me. I get so many people asking me about it, like, 'Are you really that hard on yourself? Do you really feel like that?' And no, I feel great. Everybody knows that guy going out to the club, a kind of average guy putting on his nice clothes, going out on a Saturday night, and he's like, 'Hey ladies!' The song is kind of a piss-take on that kind of thing."

But in spite of all the evidence he supplies to the contrary, Ladies and Gentlemen... seems destined to go down as Pierce's autobiography. Some people just don't want to believe him—nothing destroys your fantasy of a veteran nihilist than a little sunshine. Many a Spiritualized fan has dreamed of getting fucked up with the Spaceman, and the tales of his chemical intake are passed on to new generations of psych-rock fans like junkie folklore. But if it was up to Pierce, they would leave the mythology to storybooks and let the music stand on its own.

"I like music, I don't like the stories behind it,” he says. “I don't need to know how many quaaludes Iggy was taking or the stories of excess you hear about The Who and The Rolling Stones, because you hear that in their music. I think some bands try too hard to put across that as a means to get press, but you don't hear that in their music. Some people go, 'Hey, we're the greatest band in the world,’ that kind of thing. And it's like, 'Well, if you want to be the greatest band in the world, you can be it. Who cares!' We're not even in that game. Put us up against the history of music. That's what we try to do."

ENCORES

Perhaps the proudest moment of my career took place at the end of this interview, when, upon getting the signal from his publicist that it was time to wrap up and head over to MuchMusic, Pierce turned to me and said “take your time—we’ll keep MuchMusic waiting.”
The conversation above was actually one of two interviews I did with Pierce in 1997. Just three months after this meeting, I found myself sitting in the same BMG board room with Pierce to talk about Spiritualized’s historic gig the night before at the CN Tower. (Look out for that interview in a future edition of stübermania.) Here he is speaking to Sook-Yin Lee just before he performed “the highest show on Earth”: