I’m not sure they ever reached a fourth chord: Spiritualized, at the Roundhouse, reviewed

Every so often, Jason Pierce drifts into focus. It happened at the end of the 1980s, when his then group Spacemen 3 (motto: ‘Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to’) suddenly and briefly went from being those weirdos from Rugby to one of the defining groups of English alternative rock thanks to their album Sound of Confusion (there’s a whole strain of American psychedelia that is explicitly indebted to their two-chord drone). It happened again a decade or so later, when Spiritualized’s album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space became a big hit, and a staple of Greatest Albums lists.

He’s in one of his partial-focus phases at the moment: he’s not going to be popping up on The One Show, but people are taking notice. The ninth Spiritualized album, Everything Was Beautiful, was greeted with more than usually enthusiastic notices. Early live reviews reported cries of love from the crowds, and before a note had been played here, there was the unmistakable mating cry of the middle-aged, male rock fanatic: ‘Oi! Jason, I love you!’ I’ll never quite understand the urge to shout love at people you have never met, and who don’t care, but it all adds to the gaiety of nations.

The main reason Pierce drifts in and out of focus is that he is a fixed point in a moving world: his musical palette – the Velvet Underground, girl groups, Krautrock, country rock, psychedelia – is so classicist that it almost comes with Doric columns and an endorsement from Prince Charles, and it never varies: the only thing that changes is how many bells and whistles he can afford to add (at this show, it was a six-piece gospel choir to augment him and the five members of his band).