Comeback from the dead

Jason Pierce has been technically dead twice since he was last seen on stage. Back on the tour circuit, he explains to Dave Simpson why drugs were only obliquely responsible

Friday November 17, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Just over a year ago, Spiritualized frontman Jason Pierce was performing in London with Patti Smith when he began to feel ill. At first he thought nothing of it. "I was wasted, but I feel wasted quite often," he observes - but soon realised this was different. As he found himself struggling to breathe, he was rushed to the accident and emergency department of Whitechapel hospital.

Pierce was diagnosed with double pneumonia. Both his lungs had filled with liquid. During the course of his illness, his weight plunged to seven stone and, technically, he died twice.

"I was breathing a breath a second [four times the normal rate] for four or five days," Pierce says. "But it's amazing how much your body will hang on to life."

Twelve months on, Pierce - also known as J Spaceman - is recovered enough to clutch a pint of lager in a Liverpool hotel bar. Only his shades and bright silver trainers distinguish him from the gaggle of afternoon drinkers. Despite his reputation as a drugged-up, spaced-out cosmic explorer, he turns out to be a grounded thirtysomething with a dry sense of humour, who does the Guardian crossword. He can see the irony in his bands Spiritualized and his previous band, Spacemen 3, having written so many songs about life, death, and matters medical: Spiritualized's 1997 breakthrough album Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space was memorably packaged as a prescription pill blister pack; Spacemen 3 once called an album The Perfect Prescription.

"I would have thought of that myself," he says, matter-of-factly. "Although you could argue that it was drug related ... you could argue that everything in my life is drug related." Whatever does that mean?

"Everything you do leads you into another area," he explains. "In a broader sense. Everything I did when I was 16 impacts on where I am now - I don't mean everything in my life is to do with the ingestion of a particular drug."

That seems to suggest his image is exaggerated, or that Pierce was wild once, but not now. "I think I'm as wild now as I was then," he teases. "I was pretty slow then."

Today, he plays down the brush with death, which has never been made public ("It's not the sort of thing you 'announce'"). However, he seems more forthcoming than in the past. He vividly remembers waking up in intensive care. The first thing that shocked him was that wards are shared. "It's not like in the movies," he says, where there's one person on their own with machines and doctors all around them. Pierce was in with six other people, each with their own heart monitor, beeping away, an experience he found "really beautiful".

"Everyone's heart machines are going at a different rate," he smiles, "you've got all these weird polyrhythms." He knows it sounds stupid, but there he was, on the brink of death, "listening to this music".

When the other five people in the ward died around him he thought, amazingly, "Your odds are looking good now J, because someone's got to get out of here."

It was touch and go. His girlfriend was given bereavement counselling. His children were brought in to see him for the last time. "I was thinking, 'Oh man, don't bring the kids in. Look at the state of me.' Not 'Is it that time already?'"

Twice, he was revived after his heart stopped beating, but the man who once recorded Take Me To The Other Side doesn't remember what it was like to be, on the opther side. There were no blinding white lights, heavenly visitors or out of body experiences. "I was very ill," he says, more quietly. "It feels weird talking about it because my experience is so different from my girlfriend's, or my mum's. They really did suffer. I was just there ..." he smiles, "listening to the music."

He remembers more about the recovery, when he was confronted by a pale apparition at the end of the bed: Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie, taking advantage of visiting times. "I remember him saying 'I knew you'd fuckin' make it, your handshake was too strong,'" smiles Pierce. But Gillespie was "a good man to see. Your nearest and dearest find it harder to cope. You need strong people who can say 'This is not a disaster'."

The perfect prescription that saved Pierce's life was a simple antibiotic. Although some in that situation might have suspected another, heavenly hand, at work Pierce is having none of it. So what about all those hymnal, religiously-tinged songs in his canon, from Walkin' With Jesus to Lord Can You Hear Me?

"It's just language," he explains, "like Be Bop A Lula." Although he adds that "even Godless people turn to God in utter desperation, so that song's a cry for help".

For all the transcendental imagery in his music, Pierce insists he is a fan of science. But he admits that lately there have been so many weird twists in his life that he is at least starting to suspect it might all be some gigantic cosmic prank.

He's in Liverpool for Silent Sound, a performance/art installation by artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard for which he was asked to provide the score, his first classical composition (a serenely beautiful melody which, because he doesn't read or write music, was hummed down the phone and transcribed, a three-hour "operation"). The show partly recreates a 1865 seance carried out by Victorian spiritualists the Davenports. The previous night, he had been onstage again with Patti Smith, but he didn't flinch about returning. "It's difficult not to fall in love with Patti Smith," he says. "She can make the dumbest jokes with the audience and have them laughing, then she's into the most intense moment."

Pierce's task now is to reconnect with his own music. He's currently in the midst of a one-off acoustic-based tour which will showcase tracks from an album due in early 2007, which Pierce typically describes as "the work of the devil, with a little guidance from me". Recording was interrupted when Pierce got ill, and he says the finished record will reflect his encounter with mortality: "it's about reaffirmation of life."

His experience does not otherwise seems to have altered his view of the world. "I'm still the lazy person I always was; maybe I should get ill again," he ponders. He hasn't owned a house for years and is currently living with friends, and he still won't think about his long-term financial security - Spiritualized runs at a "massive loss: I'd rather have 20 flugelhorns onstage than money in the bank."

Pierce has a reputation as a dictatorial hirer-and-firer but he insists that working with him is "as relaxed as this - all I ask is people turn up to the shows on time and make some noise." He seems genuinely upset and bewildered at the "long line of people who don't want anything else to do with me", principally former bandmates, whom he suggests saw Spiritiualized as their passport to fame.

"It's like they feel I haven't delivered," he ponders. "I think they expected to be playing stadiums by now but that's not what it's about."

So what is it about? "The most important thing in music is the physically doing it," he suggests, "making changes there and then. If there's one thing that has changed [since getting ill] it's that I'm no longer as precious about everything, obsessively rewriting and chipping away. You have to let things go, and move on to something else."

But there's one thing he isn't ready to abandon just yet. Conspiratorially, he says a Canadian scientist has invented a machine that uses magnetic waves to recreate the near death experience of "looking down over your body. I never had that," he grins, obviously enormously disappointed. "So I love that idea that you can just plug something in and think 'Can we do that again?'"