Spiritualized

Songs in A&E is a beautiful, chilling record and it was very nearly the last thing J Spaceman would ever release.  

In 2005, with the writing and recording well underway, Spaceman was rushed to the Royal London Infirmary with double pneumonia. The sleeve of this reissue is a photograph taken as he lay in what his close friends and family feared at the time was his deathbed. “We thought he’d gone,” recalled band mate John Coxon at the time. 

The album is collection of graceful, country-influenced songs that muse on familiar themes of love, death, hope and hopelessness. The country element was informed by a small black 1928 Gibson acoustic he’d bought in Cincinnati while the band toured the Amazing Grace record. Spaceman called it “The Devil”.  

J Spaceman: “Mostly, when you buy a guitar, like most things, you don't really have any idea of whether it's good or not. And this shop had about eight of the same models for comparison, but this one was in a cage, to keep people away from it, like they knew it was kind of special. And it's beautiful. It just sings. And it kind of came with those songs, which is obviously a sort of romantic notion, but it really felt like it did. I'd never written on a guitar until this point and it seemed to come with all of this information.” 

After the songs poured out of the guitar, he recorded most of what you hear in Nottingham. And while Spiritualized devotees will be used to listening to the beautiful darkness of his words, the fact that he wrote these things before he got sick only serve to make them more impactful. 

Take for instance Death, Take Your Fiddle, his play on Townes Van Zandt’s Waiting Around to Die. It’s a song built around a loop of stilted breathing through a ventilator. 

“I think I’ll drink myself into a coma and I’ll take any pill that I can find / cos morphine, codeine, whiskey they won’t alter / the way I feel now death is not around.” 

They’re the words of a protagonist not so much waiting around to die as one who’s disappointed that he didn’t. A bluesman so saddened and beaten down by the struggles of his life that he misses the moments where mortality hung in the balance. The cold victory of death eluded him this time but he’ll keep trying. 

The recovery process for Spaceman was hard. Weighing just 85 pounds at 5’ 10”, he had to find the physical and creative strength to finish the record, and this came not only in the form of friends and family, but also by working on other projects, most notably his collaboration with Harmony Korine (he wrote soundtrack music for his Mister Lonely film). His eventual return to the stage come later when he played with Spiritualized guitarist Tony Foster at a Daniel Johnston tribute show in London, the two performing a cover of Johnston’s Funeral Home. 

“I was under weight and fragile and this was a gentle way of getting back on stage. It wasn’t my show for a start, and it was a small band, just myself on acoustic and Tony on Fender Rhodes but it turned out to be really beautiful. Originally it was just going to be the two of us, but we ended up getting the strings and the girls' choir and because it worked, it led to other things.” 

What followed was a string of Acoustic Mainline shows which opened with a song from A&E called Sitting on Fire. The album version is one of the most intimate vocal performances he’s ever delivered. It’s another plea to be released: “Set me free / ‘Cos I do believe / It’ll burn up in me / For the rest of my life”. But if you seek them out, there are bootleg versions of this online from the Acoustic Mainline shows where the voice is different. It’s somebody who’s not well, but they’re recovering. They’re keeping on going. 

These shows and the life lived before and after hospitalization all informed the final record. It sounds like dying and coming back to life; from the bleakest despair to the highest beauty on songs like Soul On Fire and the opiated ballads of Waves Crash In and Don’t Hold Me Close (where the backing vocals come from Harmony’s wife Rachel Korine). There are also garage songs like I Gotta Fire and You Lie You Cheat; super ragged, like a howling 70s Iggy. 

“I remember saying at the time, “ he concludes, “that I felt like people who have these kinds of experiences become more charitable. They change or whatever. But I think I came back partly to the same disappointing person I was before. And sometimes I still feel the same. But a lot of people worked really hard to get me out of there and I also realized just how lucky I was.” 

The final song on Songs In A&E is a lullaby called Goodnight, Goodnight. It’s a song of comfort and hope but it ends up with a line from a song by Daniel Johnston that Jason performed the time he first got back on stage. “Funeral home.... Funeral Home.... Funeral Home.” 

Andy Capper, 2024