Songs in A&E

Songs in A&E is a beautiful, chilling record and it was very nearly the last thing J Spaceman would ever release. In 2005, with the writing and recording well underway, Spaceman was rushed to the Royal London Infirmary with double pneumonia. The sleeve of this reissue is a photograph taken as he lay in what his close friends and family feared at the time was his deathbed. “We thought he’d gone,” recalled band mate John Coxon at the time. The album is collection of graceful, country-influenced songs that muse on familiar themes of love, death, hope and hopelessness. The country element was informed by a small black 1928 Gibson acoustic he’d bought in Cincinnati while the band toured the Amazing Grace record. Spaceman called it “The Devil”. J Spaceman: “Mostly, when you buy a guitar, like most things, you don't really have any idea of whether it's good or not. And this shop had about eight of the same models for comparison, but this one was in a cage, to keep people away from it, like they knew it was kind of special. And it's beautiful. It just sings. And it kind of came with those songs, which is obviously a sort of romantic notion, but it really felt like it did. I'd never written on a guitar until this point and it seemed to come with all of this information.”