Spiritualized®

Spiritualized are an English space rock band formed in 1990 in Rugby, Warwickshire by Jason Pierce (who often goes by the alias J. Spaceman) after the demise of his previous outfit, space-rockers Spacemen 3. The membership of Spiritualized has changed from album to album, with Pierce?who writes, composes and sings all of the band's material?being the only constant member. Spiritualized has released six studio albums. The best known and most critically acclaimed of these was 1997's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which NME magazine made their Album of the Year.

Following a major breakdown in relations between Spacemen 3 co-frontmen Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, the group's bassist Will Carruthers, drummer Jonny Mattock, and guitarist Mark Refoy decided to form a splinter group, before persuading Pierce to join alongside local friend Steve Evans to create Spiritualized. The band took their name from an adaptation of the text on the back label of a bottle of Pernod. Due to formation from a majority of Spacemen 3 members, a technical clause meant that Spiritualized had to maintain the Spacemen 3 recording contract with Dedicated Records.
The first Spiritualized release, in 1990, was a cover of The Troggs' "Anyway That You Want Me"; the record heralded the official split of Spacemen 3 following contractual wrangles over the band's name and its use in Spiritualized-related promotional material (initial copies of "Anyway That You Want Me" came with a Spacemen 3 logo on the sleeve).
Evans was replaced on keyboards by Pierce's then-girlfriend Kate Radley for the follow-up single, "Run"/"I Want You". A number of singles followed, before the band, in early 1992, released their first LP Lazer Guided Melodies, which had been recorded in Rugby over the previous two years. A second album, Pure Phase, was released in 1995, and a third Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space emerged in 1997 to notable critical acclaim and commercial success.
The musical style of Spiritualized relies heavily on sustained 'pedal' notes and drones. Lazer Guided Melodies and Pure Phase incorporate elements of the shoegazing style, drones and tremolo. The landmark Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space saw the influence of African-American gospel and blues beginning to show, while "walls of sound" modelled after the production styles of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson also made their presence felt. Such influences dominated Spiritualized's next album, Let It Come Down which included over 120 musicians. Amazing Grace favoured a more stripped down sound with the gospel, blues, and soul influences even more dominant than before.
After several years of work and a serious illness on Pierce's part in July 2005 [1], the latest Spiritualized album, Songs in A&E was released on May 26, 2008 in the UK, and on May 27, 2008 in the US. The first single from the 18-track album was "Soul On Fire". The release was backed by an Electric Mainlines UK tour which began in May. [2] Pierce has also scored Harmony Korine's 2008 film Mister Lonely.
Pierce is quoted as saying in a 2008 interview that Spiritualized was scheduled to play the CERN collider. "They asked us to do it! We were gonna play in it before they'd thrown the switch. But it was a timing thing?their timings didn't coincide with ours."[3]