It says something about Spiritualized’s latest album, Everything Was Beautiful, that even with nine musicians onstage, their live incarnation very much performs a bare-bones version of its contents. Frontman Jason Pierce more-or-less set out his musical stall in the late 80s, while in his previous band Spacemen 3 – its pitch is in an area bound on one side by garage rock and droning psychedelia and on the other by gospel and blues – and has essentially spent the intervening 35 years either augmenting it or stripping it down. With its cast of 30 musicians, its strings, brass and “chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry”, Everything Was Beautiful falls into the augmenting category, alongside 2001’s Let It Come Down and the most celebrated Spiritualized album of all, 1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.
Pierce’s single-minded approach to music has survived umpteen lineup changes and a couple of brushes with death, and is the stuff of which rabid cult followings are made: the venue isn’t packed, but the audience are seasoned. Pierce has barely taken his seat at the right of the stage before a bellowed proclamation of undying love rings out from the stalls – “Jason I fackin’ love you!” – and the first time a song implodes into a wall of improvised noise, the wall of improvised noise gets a round of applause, as if it’s a greatest hit.
