Gig review: Spiritualized

IT’S almost 15 years since Jason Pierce made the unlikely jump to the mainstream with his symphonic, psychedelic alter ego Spiritualized, releasing the album Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. For those who experienced some of the torpid sets his band delivered in those days, doubtless owing to Pierce’s drug intake at the time, this was the set you missed out on all those years ago.

Pierce was detached from the audience and shying away from it, seated at a piano and facing along the line of the stagefront, not quite willing to face his band. It was an elemental performance, unworried about showmanship but utterly in the moment, propelled by the apocalyptic volume. There were strong overtones of his 1980s venture Spacemen 3, not least in that band’s Take Me to the Other Side, its guitars slicing into the nerves and its seemingly never-ending finale marked by one audience member standing on a pew to shriek and punch his fist in the air.

Through the more reserved but no less nakedly emotional gospel blues of I Am What I Am, Shine a Light and the finale of Oh Happy Day, there were plenty of similar eyes-closed, palms-raised-to-the-heavens expressions of bliss. Like the white lights blazing from the stage and the monochrome backing projections, this was a show built on honed sonic purity and rare clarity of vision.