KEY POINTS:
Gospel rocker Jason Pierce has swapped the trippy spaciness of his former albums for a more traditional singer-songwriter format. He talks to Scott Kara
Jason Pierce lucked on a 1920s Gibson guitar in a shop in Cincinnati a few years back. It sounded like nothing he had heard before.
"It was in a cage, it was immaculate, and it had survived 80 years," remembers the band leader of psychedelic gospel rockers Spiritualized. "It's just got this dark tone to it."
It was this guitar - similar to the one Delta bluesman Robert Johnson can be seen holding in those famous photos of him in his 1930s heyday - that had more to do with the outcome of Spiritualized's sixth album, Songs In A&E, than the near-death experience Pierce went through in 2005 when he contracted pneumonia, went into respiratory failure, and ended up in intensive care.
For the first time he found himself writing songs on an acoustic guitar and the album took on a more traditional singer/songwriter form than the sonic druggy haze of his previous band Spaceman 3 and the traditionally grand, yet trippy, sound of Spiritualized.
"It was almost like they weren't my songs. I don't play guitar recreationally, but everytime I picked it up one of these songs came out."
And besides, says Pierce, who used to be known as Jason Spaceman during his drug-fuelled eighties days in Spaceman 3, most of the songs on the latest album were written before he was rushed to A&E.
Songs In A&E may not be as unique as Spiritualized's 1992 debut Lazer Guided Melodies, the first album following the split of Spaceman 3, or as important as the trippy, gospel-inspired Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating In Space from 1997, but it's still a hell of an emotional ride.
The way joy rubs alongside sadness, and the mix of deliverance and dependence takes you to the place he was at in hospital.
On Death Take Your Fiddle a respirator heaves in the background; Soul On Fire is one of Pierce's stirring gospel moments with strings, acoustic guitar, and the great line, "I got a hurricane inside my veins and I wanna stay forever"; and on the beautiful Baby I'm Just A Fool he sounds fragile until it escalates into a wild instrumental assault.
So how is he feeling these days? Did that brush with death change him at all?
"Probably," he laughs quietly. "It's hard to recognise the change because I live inside of me so I don't recognise the change. You'd have to speak to people I know. But, I'm good and the band sounds amazing," he says, diverting the questioning.
Pierce, his five-piece band (who have played on the last three Spiritualized albums) and two gospel singers play a show at the Powerstation on January 13 - the first time they have played here.
The set list will take in the whole Spiritualized canon but, says Pierce, they don't play songs like the whimsical Shine A Light off Lazer Guided Melodies how they used to: "It's different. Songs In A&E has kind of infected the old songs in that they've become more like songs."
It's a long way from the early days of Spaceman 3 where he and band mate Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) struggled to find people who were into their strange sonic sound, which owed as much to the Stooges and Velvet Underground as it did to the freaky jazz of Sun Ra and the warped synth punk of Suicide.
"We did [gig] posters that said Stooges, Stones, Velvets figuring those three words alone would bring interested people. But we played to one person that night," laughs Pierce.
"But it meant everything to us and we loved it."
Then there's the gospel influence. "It just went in there with everything else, with the Stooges, MC5, Sun Ra, and that opened up that whole free jazz thing."
Though Pierce is constantly collaborating, mostly in the free jazz field, he is not the most prolific of musicians. Spiritualized has released only six albums since forming in 1990.
"I'm slow and methodical," he admits. "But I also think music is too important just to throw the ideas out because great records are like time machines, you can lose yourself in your favourite record for the rest of your life. And it's important to get them right because once you let them go they are no longer about me. They take over other people's lives. You know, nobody listens to Ray Charles singing I Can't Stop Loving You and wonders who it is Ray can't stop loving, because you relate it to your own life.
"The most important thing about Spaceman 3 and now Spiritualized, is I always try to push it out each time, build on what I know, and not replicate what I've done before because it doesn't work.
"It'd great if you could take all the best bits from all your previous albums and put them together and make a better album but it doesn't work like that because the great bits of music hang between the notes.
"They're hanging there like ghosts, and that's what you go after, those really elusive bits - and when you hit them, that's the real magic."
LOWDOWN
Who: Jason Pierce, leader of Spiritualized
What: Sonic gospel rock to make you float in space
Where & when: Powerstation, Auckland, January 13
Latest album: Songs In A&E, out now
Classic albums: Lazer Guided Melodies (1992); Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (1997); Let It Come Down (2001)
