The history of so-called alternative music is littered with so-called important bands – names kids would drop in the time-honoured tradition of cooler-than-thou; bands that never sold out and never sold much at all. Jason Pierce and Pete Kember’s Spacemen 3 were the name on every tripped out scenester’s lips in the late 80s despite never troubling the mainstream, so with Spectrum making a welcome visit this month (see Gig Previews) we thought it was time to preach the sermon of Spacemen 3 and their Bonsai family tree of Spectrum and Spiritualized.
SPACEMEN 3 – ‘REVOLUTION’
“For all the fucked up children of the world… we give to you… Spacemen 3.” Taking the didactic manifesto of the MC5 and reducing it to a single droned chord, moved just two frets along every eighth note and back againin a perfect realisation of minimalism, polemic and sheer sonic assault, this is what finally put the band on the map after a few years in the indie hinterland. While bands like Sonic Youth were already treading a similar musical path around New York, this was certainly a kick up the arse for Rugby, Warwickshire.
SPACEMEN 3 – ‘HYPNOTISED’
By the time of their fourth and final album ‘Recurring’, all was not well in the band camp. The two sides of the album were effectively recorded as solo works, with just one track, a Mudhoney cover, featuring both Pierce and Kember. This sprawling epic, from Jason’s section, is a clear and tantalising precursor to the hypnotic keyboard tremolo of Spiritualized, and an obvious realisation of their adage ‘taking drugs to make music to take drugs to’.
SPACEMEN 3 – ‘LORD CAN YOU HEAR ME?’
Oddly, considering their less than Sunday Best advocacies over the years, much of Kember and Pierce’s work both together and apart shares a common thread of gospel music. Perhaps one man’s psychedelic self-medication is another’s unwavering belief in an unlikely deity. But cod-psychology aside, this is an unfussy and irreverence-avoiding piece of hypnotic beauty, with a simple arrangement and pleading vocal that would only raise the most uncharitable eyebrow were it to fetch up on Songs of Praise.
SPIRITUALIZED – ‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE’
Conspicuously absent from last month’s Valentines compilations, this is nonetheless one of the most beautiful songs ever written – featuring and presumably about band keyboardist Kate Radley, who ended up leaving Pierce for that lanky goon Richard Ashcroft. With its frank and desperate admission ‘all I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away’, repeated over a simple looped chord descent and ground control radio comms, it was the perfect opener and title track to an absolutely essential album.
SPIRITUALIZED – ‘IF I WERE WITH HER NOW’
The second song on the ‘Lazer Guided Melodies’ record, this was a perfect embodiment of the band’s formative releases. With its backwards-echoey vocals, single chord repetition and single floor tom percussion build into keyboard and sax crescendo, it still reminds us of staring, saucer-eyed, at the unfurling visuals behind the band on various stages. Luckily sitting down on the sticky floor was encouraged at gigs – mosh pits were always a bugger for skinning up in.
SPECTRUM – ‘HOW YOU SATISFY ME’
Pete Kember, or Sonic Boom as his mum almost certainly doesn’t call him, was somewhat cast aside when the rest of Spacemen 3 splintered into Spiritualized, but he dusted himself off and got back to the business of making proper druggy music. After an album as Sonic Boom called ‘Spectrum’, he released his first album as Spectrum, ‘Soul Kiss (Glide Divine)’ in 1992. This single from it is markedly different from Pierce’s post-S3 work, being perhaps more song-based than Spiritualized’s ethereal builds, yet the common threads of psychedelic rock repetition and acid-drenched everything remain.
