The six-year gap between Sweet Heart Sweet Light and majestic new LP And Nothing Hurt is the longest of Spiritualized’s career. Jason Pierce tells John Earls: “I always seem to choose the dumbest route to finishing anything…”

INTERVIEW

It’d be easy to continue the myth of Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce as a tortured obsessive, forever tweaking his grandiose visions while living on a diet of opium consumed at a gargantuan mixing desk.

The reality is that, while Pierce confesses to suffering from a near-paralysing mix of self-doubt and uncompromising ambition, he’s also highly self-aware. And that makes him killingly funny, as he discusses just why it’s taken six years for Spiritualized to return with the beautiful and surprisingly optimistic And Nothing Hurt.

A sprinkling of the new record’s nine songs were written four years ago, but the recording took several false starts before Pierce realised the only option was to make the band’s eighth album in his East London bedroom. Which, given the epic scope of Spiritualized’s sound, was always going to drag things on a bit. Pierce had previously held ultimately fruitless discussions with John Cale and Tony Visconti about producing the album, then began sessions with noted freeform-jazz drummer Charles Hayward, “when I thought the album was going to sound like Sun Ra or Lee Perry – of very simple rock ’n’ roll songs, but spinning around your head in an extraordinary way. But it sounded like I was showing how clever I could be, and it wasn’t good.”

DOING IT ALL OVER AGAIN

Ever since his first band Spacemen 3’s chaotic demise in 1991, Jason Pierce has wearily dismissed the idea of them reforming, saying: “I find it odd when people ask me, ‘Why don’t you do the thing you did when you were 19?’. You’d never say that to a painter or an author.” But Pierce is more open to the idea of playing with former members of Spiritualized, feeling every incarnation of the band had its own unique chemistry.