J Spaceman & John Coxon (from Spiritualized)

In 2015, at the Barbican Gallery in London, J Spaceman, John Coxon, and friends performed a live soundtrack to the photographer William Eggleston’s film “Stranded in Canton”.

They’d been invited to put the soundtrack/happening together by the artist Doug Aitken as part of his Station To Station festival. He saw the parallels in Spaceman and Eggleston’s work; highs and lows; darkness and light; sin and sorrow. The simple details of life elevated into powerful reflections on the wildness of existence where the mundane becomes sublime.

The movie was made in 1974 and shows Eggleston’s friends carousing, playing music and firing pistols into the night sky. It is raw, greasy, Quaalude-y and hot. Memphis in the 70s seems like a lot of fun if you had the stomach and access to bail money.

Shot on the first commercially available video camera, the Sony Portapak, Eggleston put a 16mm Leica lens on the front it and an infrared picture tube on the back of it to allow him to shoot in low lighting. The chaotic, wobbly filming style expertly framed by a master. “Hogarth on Beale Street” as writer Richard Williams describes it on the album’s liner notes.

“With Memphis, I grew up with and I fell in love with that whole part of the world and the music that came from there,” explains Spaceman. “Memphis is infused with this magic, then this dreadful poverty as well. There’s a strangeness to it. It’s a place where I never felt comfortable.

“When I was making Ladies and Gentlemen, I went out and did some work with Jim Dickinson because, much as I wanted to have him help me with my record, I just wanted to go and meet the man. He was always a bit like Dr. John, a walking encyclopedia with knowledge of all the music of that area, all the blues musicians and all the stuff that doesn’t get written about.

“So, the Eggleston film is a spying hole into that world. Jim Dickinson even plays in the movie, Furry Lewis plays in the movie too, but there’s also an unhinged craziness. It feels dangerous.”

Spaceman wrote the music with his friend John Coxon, who has worked on every Spiritualized record since the mid ‘90s*.* Guitarist Tony Doggen Foster, also of Spiritualized, and percussionist Rupert Clervaux helped out too.

Coxon says: “It was quite a difficult thing to do because it’s an American film. Obviously, we’re fascinated with American music, but you don’t want sort of cod Americana from England, but I think we got the balance right.

“We came up with themes for different parts of the film, based around basic sort of rock and roll riffs. And we expanded them by maybe adding a little soft counter melody to it.

“We didn’t want to just do a freeform thing. Jason always wants the best of all worlds, so you want the best of all the energy of improvising things and then the beauty of great compositions. You want everything. It was just a question of getting the balance right.”

Spaceman continues: “There was a fashion at the time where people were putting on gigs with movies without the sound, for bands to jam over and I hate the idea of jamming. We wanted to do something that was more structured, songs that sat alongside the film but loose enough to allow for improvisation. It kind of worked straight away. And the spoken word parts of the film almost became like vocals to the music.”

The tone they came up with mirrors the ragged nature of the film perfectly.  Riffs written under flickering light bulbs, hypnotic tremolo, boozy romances, some bar room boogie, the blues, and hoping the bottle won’t let you down tonight.

The characters of “Stranded in Canton” dance around the music, living their best Memphis lives by any means necessary.

“With the film, and the culture of music and art of Memphis, there’s a sense of escape and release” says Coxon. “There’s a history of interesting things coming out of places which are kind of apparently cultural deserts because there’s a human instinct to make something cultural to stick people together. It’s very strong, isn’t it? And I think the less there is, the more you must make your own. I think that’s why punk came out of the kind of suburban London in the ‘70s. Because there was fuck all.

“Eggleston came from from a wealthy background, but he was also escaping the pre-ordained destiny of his life and then you have people escaping the segregation that was there and all coming together. You feel it in this film.”

After sitting on the shelf for almost 10 years, Fat Possum will release the recordings of the Barbican show on October 18. There will also be shows in the UK and the US. Eggleston’s son Winston personally invited them to come play it in Memphis.

“I suggested releasing this back when we did the show,” says Spaceman, “but it just didn’t bite. I hadn’t thought about the recordings for years but, quite by accident, I heard one of the tracks again and thought that people should hear it. This time around people seem to catch it and go, ‘Yeah this is really something else’.”

ANDY CAPPER JUNE 2024