The Spiritualized song about “being close to death”
As long as we have feelings, we have something to write about. Yes, a lot of music highlights escapism or is laced with the absurd, but nobody will ever be able to turn away from sound that embodies a feeling they relate to. This could be related to love, happiness, sadness, sorrow and grief. Spiritualized embodies this brilliantly, as their 2008 song ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’ perfectly personifies feelings of being close to death, fearing it while simultaneously confronting it.
There is a reason why we rely on music so much. Life can often be lonely, not necessarily physically, as you may go out with friends and family a lot and see people every day on the way to work, but a feeling of loneliness can prevail when you hold something back, regardless of who is around you. There is a lot we don’t talk about, much to our detriment, and one of those things is an undeniable fear of death.
Its guarantee is what makes it scary. We live to be happy, to meet people who make our lives richer, but there is always inevitability knocking on the door. Hopefully, it’s decades away, but there is no guarantee, which is frightening. We don’t often vocalise this fear. You will rarely be in the pub with your friends, and when they ask how your week has been, you say, “Not great, see, I’m terrified of dying”. This is where music comes in.
For as long as we have feelings, we have something to write about, and given that universal fear of death looms heavy on unwanted horizons, people have written about it. While we experience some of our feelings internally, in pure isolation, music creates a separate world that runs parallel to ours. This world is one where those feelings are spoken about openly; not only that, but they are talked about in a beautiful way that makes them less scary and daunting.
Spiritualized do this in their song ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’. Jason Pierce spent a period in intensive care as a result of a bout of double pneumonia; however, despite those circumstances, this song and the entire album entitled Songs in A&E were written beforehand. That period might not have inspired the creation of the songs, but it meant Pierce could oversee them with an increased heir of understanding and clarity.
“When I returned to them over a year later, I was trying to capture that low-level atmosphere you find in hospitals,” he said. “You get this sense that if people were given a chance, they’d all run around with their arms in the air, screaming: ‘We’re in trouble!’ But there is a lid on it; the atmosphere is held down by the fact that everything is supposed to be calm and clean.”
That sense of potential chaos is one of the inspirations behind this particular track, as a lot of the people in the hospital might be worried about the worst happening, and Spiritualized try to confront those fears of death. “’Death Take Your Fiddle’ is about being close to death in the same way that ‘Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’ was about floating in space. If you understand life isn’t worth living unless you are close to death, it makes sense of life. And the closer you get to it, the more you realise that.”
Spiritualized occupy the world between sound and reality, where the feelings we keep buried within ourselves are vocalised artistically. ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’ is a haunting song with death at its centre, but it works in a way that highlights the necessity of art as a whole.
