A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“I will love you till I die, and I will love you all the time. So please put your sweet hand in mine, and float in space and drift in time.”

Two nights ago, my friend Mel the yoga instructor dropped by the apartment. She was picking GG up for dinner-and-a-movie (the lesbian flick) and asked what my plans were. I told her that I was seeing Spiritualized at Radio City Music Hall with my friend Paul. Unfamiliar with their music, she asked to hear something, and, after a minute of listening said, “Does it get any better than this?” She didn’t mean it in a nice way.

The reason I’d been so excited was the band (really one guy, Jason Pierce aka Jay Spaceman) had announced that he was going to perform the his 1997 masterpiece, “Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space” for one final time, the way he’d always heard it in his head: 30-plus musicians in total—a gospel choir, strings, and a full horn section. The twin lure was that he’d pledged that he would never play it again…ever. I was swooning and immediately set about getting tickets.

Anyone who knows me (except, apparently, Mel who enjoys more earthy pursuits) has heard me speak about the particular piece of music with the upmost reverence. I have listened to it so many times, I often feel like I live inside its cacophonous chambers. As if I am walking around my home, only it has 100 rooms, yet I know where everything is and what its purpose is for being there. Even blindfolded.

Vocals layer upon each other, guitars, keyboards, synthesizers, horns all blend into one another other to create a hymnal cassoulet of sound. If Brian Wilson was British, and was blessed with today’s technology, he would have approached recording in this manner. (His maudlin masterpiece Pet Sounds, is another obsession of mine.)

Musically, it’s amazing, but lyrically it’s beyond, considering the circumstances under which it was recorded. Pierce had been involved in a long-term relationship with bass player Kate Radley  who began carrying on an affair with and eventually secretly married the Verve’s lead singer Richard Ashcroft, which is the cultural equivalent of you marrying a karaoke machine from Sears.

Can you imagine? In one fell swoop, she came home and told her man that a) she was leaving him; b) it was a lovely wedding—too bad he’d missed it; and c) she had chosen a junkie plagiarist for whom he was a near doppelgänger.

Heartbroken, Pierce retreated to his wherever one would retreat to in England and, isolated and alone, sculpted this masterpiece of longing, despair and anger, coupled with such an overwhelming mordant sadness that—and I’m gonna get killed for admitting this—I was a little emotional the other night watching it performed live. (At one point, a small Thai(ish) woman next to me leaned over and, with tears in her eyes, said, “His wife was such a fucking asshole.” We both cracked up laughing at that.)

From beginning to end, the record bravely lays open Pierce’s wounds without a thought of how anyone outside of his field of vision would react. Lyrics like, “What am I supposed to do, when all my thoughts are of you?” coupled with pleas for her to change her mind, to come home, back to the band, back to him, and back to their lives together. The relationship never had a chance to unspool gracefully. And you can almost picture him on those interminable nights, recording rueful lines like, “Now I’m wasted all the time” as asides, buried under the swirling soundscapes.

I say “bravely” because, if you’ve ever been dumped—and who hasn’t, except for Olga Kurylenko?—you always want the other party to think you’re better off. Or at least as well off. What LAGWAFIS says is, “God help me, I am so fucked without you.”

Seeing it live for the first time, I was completely unprepared for the sonic assault, and as a former heavy metal kid my ears occasionally ring like church bells or, more happily, an ice cream truck. At this concert, my eyeballs were throbbing.

Within ten minutes of the show’s beginning, as the band was barreling through “Come Together” I was covering my mouth in astonishment. I’ve seen a gazillion-billion live concerts, but I’d never heard that kind of clarity mixed with brute force; because while some of the songs can be described as lilting and gentle, others are nine-minute feedback laden drones. The music equivalent of howling in pain. Impossibly loud, indescribably loud, yet the level of musicianship was fantastic. You could hear every instrument playing its own part. I mean, literally. The acoustics were hubba-hubba. And I was left pretty breathless. And, shockingly, mute.

The choir was incredible and powerful, often echoing his statements dozens of times while the strings and horns added a frenzy that rattled my senses. Looking at photos on the web, you can see much of the crowd with its eyes closed, feeling the music, as much as watching it performed.

Two hours later the crowd, stunned by what they’d witnessed, leapt to their feet to applaud him, while he—dressed in his uniform of white pants, white t-shirt and white shoes—sheepishly waved and ambled off stage.

Paul and I walked downtown afterward, neither of us talking much, both of us a little overwhelmed by it. I just kept repeating how intense it was. And thanking God that we weren’t tripping. (I say that, even though the number of times Paul and I have tripped is one, and that was years ago in Amsterdam, for a bachelor party that the groom actually backed out of. Story for another day.)

No wonder Spaceman’s retiring “Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space.” The performance nearly killed me, heaven knows what it would do to him if he had to keep opening and cauterizing his wounds.

Sorry you missed it.