30 years after its release, Spiritualized are finally giving Pure Phase the recognition it deserves. “I’ve always felt that it was missed at the time, the reviews were appalling,” explains frontman Jason Pierce. Now three decades on, the band will be playing the album in full with a series of gigs – so just how did we get here? Ahead of the tour, Jason Pierce spoke to Jay Mitchell and tells the story of what he thinks is the bands most underappreciated album.
“30 years, it’s a long time,” laughs Pierce. Spiritualized are no strangers to playing albums in full with them previously touring their hit album Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space but now it’s time for Pure Phase to take centre stage. “The idea dates back to the Ladies And Gentlemen shows. We did them and I guess the idea (for other albums) was around then. So, it felt like next year gave us a proper excuse to do it and do it properly.”
For the Ladies And Gentleman shows the band used a choir and strings to turn it into a huge spectacle and this time it’s no different. “That set of Ladies and Gentlemen shows were sort of epic in its grandeur. It felt like this (Pure Phase shows) would be even be an exercise in cost cutting, that would be a nice thing, but it kind of doesn’t work out like that.” Explaining further he adds, “There’s a lot of instruments in there. As soon as we started putting this together, we realised that, you play the song ‘Medication’ for example and a horn section comes through in the second verse, you can’t just suddenly go – ‘oh we’ll just use one player.’”
“In fact, it’s exactly the same as the Ladies And Gentlemen shows. It kind of spirals and I’m quite happy to let it spiral until somebody else tries to hold it back and says, ‘we’ve got to get this under control’. So, at the moment it’s wildly out of control.” There isn’t the worry of failure with a show of this size for Pierce either, “I think it’s better to fail with something being wildly out of control than it is to kind of be conservative and well, it’s just a better form of failure isn’t it? I always think that if people can say, ‘of course they fucking failed look at what they tried to do’ it’s better than them just saying ‘well that didn’t work did it?”
After 30 years there’s also an opportunity to dust off some songs that haven’t been played in years and a few that have never been played. “I think there is this huge thrill to it. We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t feel we were able to do it. I always felt, without sounding pompous, that those albums worked as their whole rather than as a collection of songs. The songs all lean on each other and I want to use the word symphony, but I’m not going to. It feels like they sit in that kind of form that there’s a thread that really does work. So, to be able to finally do that justice seems like an amazing thing.”
“There’s a lot of studio in those early records, and particularly with Pure Phase. I mean, it’s made from two separate mixes, one in either speaker which gives the whole sense of phase, which is why nothing’s locked in.” The idea of two mixes wasn’t something that was planned, but something that happened to just click. “It was I’d like to say slightly accidental, I certainly hadn’t heard of anybody doing it before.”
“I did one mix that I kind of half liked and then made a lot of changes, re-sang some of the lyrics, redid some backing vocals. I don’t know which side of the mix, but there are new additions that only appear on one side of the record. But it was more a case of just liking parts of both and then saying, ‘well, let’s use both let’s just try’. Then it was spending hours piecing those together and once we’d started, there was no going back because it really was something else and also not repeatable. I always thought, ‘well I’ve found my kind of trick in life, this is what I’ll do’. And then it just never worked again. It just worked with that particular set of songs.”
At the time of its release the album was not a hit, but Pierce thought otherwise “I always felt something would change with that, it deserved to be revisited. The music press at the time really drove sales, but it wasn’t the sales that we’re important it’s getting people to hear it.” Even with the album being overlooked Pierce remained a believer in what he and the band had created, having previously said it’s his favourite of the album he’s created I wanted to know if this was still the case. “I think so, yeah, partly because it was dismissed. I don’t sit and listen to them, to be honest but I likened it years ago to driving through rain at full speed. I think I even did that driving down to somewhere like Cornwall years ago and through the rain. That (Pure Phase) seemed to be one of the only things in the car and it kind of all made sense.”
With this set of shows originally just being announced for the UK, Spiritualized have recently been announced for Barcelona’s Primavera Sound for 2025. “It’s just a good festival, but importantly we can play Pure Phase there. I don’t want to make this a case of ‘okay, we’ll just go out and play this’, Pure Phase is a show and like I said before, it’s not just a set of songs. Prima have allowed us the space and time to be able to do that show.”
The band seem to be consistently on the road playing and Pierce says that “It’s the some of why we are doing this Pure Phase tour. We enjoy playing and it got harder to get shows after lockdown. We just felt like we’re so good at this. Then we thought we should just find another way of playing shows, so these shows work for that.”
As a band who are always on tour, they’ve played a huge number of shows with various bands and perhaps surprisingly last year with Queens of the Stone Age. “Josh (Homme) is a big fan and he invited us,” says Pierce. “They looked after us and the shows were great. You know, it wasn’t like we were sort of alien to it, we do a lot of shows in America. It was really just kindness on his (Josh) part, it was a genuine sentiment that they invited us out to play those shows. They were surprisingly, well, maybe not so surprisingly but they were quite amazing.”
Spiritualized head on tour in March 2025 for a Pure Phase 30th Anniversary Tour with dates:
Saturday 22nd March 2025 – Glasgow – Theatre Royal
Monday 24th March 2025 – Manchester – O2 Apollo
Wednesday 26th March 2025 – London – Barbican
Thursday 27th March 2025 – London – Barbican
Saturday 29th March 2025 – Bristol – Beacon
Purchase tickets HERE
