J Spaceman Talks About Acoustic Mainlines

here's a short interview with Jason about the Acoustic Mainline shows, here's the main bit:

So what are these shows all about, Mr Spaceman?

They’re special, smaller things. When you strip all the songs back to their bones it becomes just about the lyrics and my voice and if they don’t work then, they never will. I didn’t feel brave enough to do the songs on my own so I picked up this sort of accidental band. Now we’re a real band, I think we have something fresh. Spiritualizeds lives shows are full of electricity and LSD, whereas these are very fragile.

Who’s in your audience?

It’s a sort of split between people who’ve been there since Sapacemen3 days and there’s this other lot that have only recently found out about me. The audiences have been amazing. They feel it as much as we do. Someone mentioned me in the same breath as Brian Wilson recently and that was just completely bizarre. He’s such a big part of who I am.

How does stripping it all down affect the songs?

Some of the material works on a nostalgic level, some, with the more full on string arrangements work in other ways, as someone said to me, like Astral Weeks. It makes your brain do the work. Usually, acoustic shows are more folky, more story-songs, but these are something different. It is like church music.

What’s been your favourite show?

I think Edinburgh was the best show I’ve ever done- it was just beautiful. We played Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and people stood up to clap. Ten minutes later they were still clapping., The band were crying, I was crying, That was a really weird, snake-handling moment- everyone on their Saturday night drugs.

The band always look surprised by what’s going on.

They are, I think we all are! We take chances. I’m an alright electric guitar player, but I’m pretty amateur on the acoustic. None of us, apart from the string section, can really play, but we do try. I’ve got Doggen on Rhodes who’s usually a guitarist so we’re a bit tagged. But we’re ambitious.

What about your new album?

This year, I promise!