The recordings that tore Spacemen 3 apart: “It became miserable”
Truly ahead of their time in their efforts to make shoegaze, space rock and post-rock a thing, Spacemen 3 are a criminally overlooked band in the grand scheme of things, and ought to be heralded just as much as many of their contemporaries in the same field.
It’s perhaps because the two co-founding members, Jason Pierce and Pete Kember, are better known for their efforts as the leader of Spiritualized and as Sonic Boom, respectively, these days, but Spacemen 3 was something that they established together as the blueprint for what they would each go on to do later in their careers.
The Warwickshire band tried endlessly hard to push boundaries with their sonic assaults, and their 1986 debut album Sound of Confusion was a great example of this, landing in the way they wanted it to. A chaotic, psychedelic trip of an album, it still sounds unlike anything else to this day, so considering its release at the end of a decade as pallid and sterile as the ‘80s was in terms of its glossy pop production, it would have frankly been mind-blowing to have heard at the time.
Their second album, The Perfect Prescription, proved to be a greater challenge for the band, with it landing outside the top ten in the UK album chart compared to its predecessor’s peak at number two, but it’s arguably an even more adventurous record that flirts with collapsing under the weight of its own ambitiousness. It was clear that they’d tried to pull out all the stops in the name of retaining artistic integrity, but it was clear they had to go a step further to achieve the same lofty heights as their debut.
However, sometimes that pressure can come at a cost for the artists, and it caused plenty of friction within the ranks of the band to the point that Playing With Fire, the band’s third album, ultimately drove the duo at the core of the band apart. Coupled with the band’s excessive and flagrant drug use spiralling out of control, it made for a tense atmosphere when the band departed for Cornwall and holed up in a cottage to record the album.
During an interview with Uncut in 2015, Pierce stated that he and Kember’s relationship was reaching the end of its tether, with him claiming that the environment in which they were working and living together wasn’t helping their situation. “We were sleeping on mattresses on the floor,” he claimed. “But it only works if everyone gets on, and it was getting to the point with Pete where we couldn’t be in the same room together.”
Speaking about the difficulties he had with Kember’s fierce temper, Pierce said that it deeply impacted the tone of the record they were working on, with the light-hearted and blissful euphoria of their droning compositions turning towards a much more dour and bitter state. “He got crueller, and it was very hard to deal with, especially as we were in such a close scene,” Pierce continued. “It became miserable, but making this music was never about misery.”
While Pierce made a concerted effort to block out all of Kember’s negativity, there were still disputes that plague him to this day relating to the songwriting credits, and the tensions seemed to be rearing their head in the ugliest of ways. However, he did note that these arguments helped him navigate all future breakdowns of band dynamics when he later formed Spiritualized.
“It wasn’t the beginning of the end,” Pierce continued, “it was the end.”
While the band would go on to release one further record together in 1991’s Recurring, it’s clear that the lack of acclaim received by the record, in spite of their continued innovation, was never going to be enough to repair the cracks in the relationship between the two key figures, and the fact that the album boasts two separate sides consisting of songs written by each respective half goes to show just how far things had broken down.
