Photos by James Travis
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space was never meant for the studio. Spritualized’s 1997 opus is an album with more scope, ambition and magnificence than almost any album in the past twenty years, but the studio version that was released was only an approximation of what Spiritualized really intended the record to sound like, as proven by their performance of the album in its true entirety at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The fact that they extended 70 minutes of studio material into a 96 minute epic live performance is just the simplest way of explaining how the album was was proliferated for the stage.
At 8.30pm on the dot, the stage started to fill with the various musicians who took part in the evening. On stage the band formed a semi-circle, no single member taking centre-stage, each one with an equally important role in maintaining and energizing the music. Behind them were three groups of people, from stage left to right there was a gospel choir, a brass sextet and a string ensemble. In total 32 performers, those on stage left; the choir and J. Spaceman, were dressed in all white whilst the rest of the performers were dressed entirely in black, another simple yet effective way of adding a theatrical nature to the exhibition.
The eponymous opening track of the album capitalized upon the Royal Festival Hall’s state of the art sound system, exploiting its full potential as the strings, brass, voices along with the band themselves brought the song into glorious existence. Once this subsided the stage was drowned in darkness shortly followed by the build up into the rambunctious “Come Together,” which saw the audience fastened to their seats, eyes glued on the stage like a collective group of rabbits frozen in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler. Each song was embellished and transformed by the inclusion of the additional musicians, each group got their time to shine and together they took the performance somewhere far beyond the reaches of the average gig. The evening was so unique for a rock concert that after the ear-splitting crescendo that rounded off “Electricity”, which falls exactly in the middle of the album, I half expected that an interlude was about to be called. Fortunately this was not the case and Spiritualized marched onwards towards the resounding conclusion. Each song was transcendent and picking highlights is almost impossible from a gestalt performance such as this one, but the delicately elegant hymn of “Broken Heart” deserves to be mentioned, as it was the moment when the lump in my throat was most prominent. Spaceman’s crushing vocals cut a harsh tone against the soft and sweeping strings and grandiose horns, together describing the feeling and emotions of a broken heart with brutal accuracy.
Finally the album closer arrived and combined everything brilliant about the evening and the project into one 18-minute amalgamation that sustained the audience’s captivation throughout. At the conclusion the audience was on their feet in an instant giving the standing ovation that was so genuinely deserved, and that they probably would have given after each individual song had they not been so eager to hear the next one.
There was no need to provide an encore for on such a momentous evening, but Spiritualized obliged anyway, tacking on a spirited performance of “Out of Sight,” from Let It Come Down, to the delight of the capacity crowd.
The Royal Festival Hall was the perfect location for this performance–the audience seated while the band put on a show that was far cry from most live concerts wherein bands play a random assortment of songs from their back-catalogue one after another. Spiritualized’s portrayal of their work was much more than that; each song was dependent upon the preceding to set it up and then bled perfectly into the following one. The narrative of the album was kept sacred by the silence that was observed on-stage between each piece. On this night Spiritualized proved that it doesn’t take a multi-million pound stage or a technically brilliant light show to put on a life-changing show, all you have to do is focus on the songs and let the music itself be the spectacle.
