Chris Mitchell
When bands release double live albums, it’s usually a cause for consternation rather than celebration. Notorious for being very much less than the sum of their parts, live albums tend to be the last refuge for heavy metal bands who ran out of ideas long ago and want to milk every last cent from their fifteen minutes.
Spiritualized, thankfully, have always steered away from anything to do with spandex and Satan. As such, their 140 minute document of a July night in 1997 at London’s Royal Albert Hall isn’t so much a retrospective of their back catalogue as a reinvention of it. But then, this shouldn’t be a surprise, because Spiritualized have always been violently unsentimental, both towards their own music and the whole legacy of pop. Ever since they emerged from the ashes of Spacemen 3, Spiritualized have plundered the sounds of Suicide and the Velvet Underground, John Coltrane and gospel choirs, Hammond-driven psychedelia and Phil Spector brass cacophonies with abandon, fusing music from opposite ends of the spectrum to create something that sounds timeless, classic and yet completely incomparable.
Spiritualized have always had a philosophy of more is better, drenching their listeners with exquisite sounds, combining virtually every instrument there is into one huge all-engulfing tapestry of beautiful noise. This wave of sound is deliberately meant to sweep the listener away from everything else, to be an all-consuming experience. But for a band that appears to rely on so much studio trickery, Spiritualized relish playing live, being able to completely control their audience’s environment. That this recorded concert was a special gig is emphasised by the presence of a full gospel choir who finish the night with a breath-taking rendition of “Oh Happy Day”, directly after emerging from the white noise meltdown of “Cop Shoot Cop”.
This album is perhaps not the best introduction to Spiritualized for the uninitiated (their last studio album “Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” is a better place to start), but for anyone who’s already familiar with the band, it’s a joyous and exultant capturing of the moment.
